Teaching at the IMC Weekend School: ‘A wonderful form of tailored education’
When TIAS professor Marc Vermeulen tells anecdotes about his youngest ‘students’, he laughs often and cheerfully. ‘These children are so spontaneous, so eager, and so straight from the shoulder.’ And, in the educational sociologist’s experience, that works. “These lessons may just given them that extra nudge.”
‘You need to be able to handle an unexpected situation, but I would certainly recommend it to colleagues,’ says Marc Vermeulen about his volunteer work. He teaches at the IMC Weekend School, where he started as a volunteer supervising excursions: to a hospital, a court of law, a museum. Vermeulen: ‘That law court opened on a Sunday especially for the children. Really great!’ This year, Vermeulen taught his Entrepreneurship Masterclass for the third time. The course is basically the same as at TIAS Business School:
'They work in groups to come up with their own business idea, write a business plan, and pitch it in front of a jury of real entrepreneurs.’
What kind of business ideas do the children come up with? ‘Hamburg joints, jewelry webshops, gaming companies. It is really very diverse.’ Sometimes the ideas are a little over the top. This year, a group of boys was enthusiastically setting up a firearms retailer. Vermeulen intervened, of course: ‘It has to be legal and they understood that very well.’ Vermeulen: ‘They want to make a lot of money, but they also have an eye for the social aspect. No child labor, that is often mentioned in the plan. Or for every ten coats sold, the eleventh goes to a homeless person, free of charge, that sort of thing.’
Nudge
The young children’s spontaneity and eagerness to learn makes the volunteer work very special, Vermeulen says. But also their backgrounds. There are refugee children and many children with a migration background: Turkish, Moroccan, Eastern-European, African. ‘The only migrant children that I do not see are those of knowledge migrants. They go to an international school.’ There can also be an alarming aspect to those diverse backgrounds: ‘A Somali boy suddenly failed to turn up. Later we heard he had disappeared, nobody knows where.’
Inquisitive children with highly educated parents usually find their own way to university, says Vermeulen, for example, through the lectures of Tilburg University Junior. For ‘his’ Weekend School children, that is not an obvious route. Vermeulen: ‘So it's nice that they are also very proud to be able to tell that they are going to university. And more importantly: ‘compensation education’, as it is called in my field, has proven to be effective.'
'It just gives children an extra nudge: knowledge and contacts, social and cultural capital, are useful in our society.'
The professor always tries to give positive feedback to the children and to take into account their short tension span. ‘If your approach is not quite right for the group, you will immediately feel the consequences in the form of disruption in class. You also get feedback from the class teachers about what can be improved. Disconcerting, but also very instructive.’
Civic education
This year, Vermeulen is also teaching classes about being a Dutch citizen, a form of civic education. Even more unpredictable, Vermeulen grins. For example, he asked the children to come up with an alternative to a controversial panel on the Golden Coach from the colonial era, showing black people kneeling and offering gifts to white people. ‘I started with a short instruction with pictures of Princes’ Day. When I showed a picture of the Dutch Royal Family, things took an unexpected turn, as a boy full of bravado shouted: ‘What suckers!’’ Vermeulen: ‘Not very polite, of course, and I also told him so. But a pupil from a Moroccan background was profoundly shocked: if someone makes a statement like that in Morocco, people can call the police. Then suddenly we were talking about freedom of speech in the Netherlands. That it includes being allowed to talk critically about the Royal Family, the government or anyone else. Unexpectedly, the discussion was exactly about the things that citizenship lessons should be about.’
Another unexpected response was the proposal by one group of children to paint the golden M of McDonald’s on the panel. Why pay for a costly renovation yourself if you can find a sponsor? Vermeulen: ‘Would the idea have occurred to you? A hoot, isn’t it? And it naturally fueled the discussion on cultural heritage.’
Often Vermeulen has not even finished his opening sentence before hands shoot into the air. ‘At their own school, teachers need to pay a lot of attention to basic subjects like arithmetic and language. For enthusiastic children, there is hardly any opportunity to satisfy their curiosity. Thus, the Weekend School is a bonus, a form of ‘tailored education’ that everybody’s always talking about.’
IMC Weekend School Tilburg
The IMC Weekend School Tilburg has existed since 2006. Inquisitive children from groups 7 and 8 and the first years of secondary education (aged 10-14) are taught every Sunday and go on excursions that introduce them to many professional fields in order to broaden their horizons. In Tilburg, there are 140 children from ‘black’ schools in the neighborhoods of Stokhasselt, Quirijnstok, Heikant, and the Kruiden estate. Tilburg University supports the initiative by providing accommodation on campus. Many volunteers provide the lessons and supervise the children.
Date of publication: 18 February 2020