Comenius Teaching Fellowship grant for IDE lecturers

News - 06 May 2020 - Communication

Stefan Persaud and Bas Flipsen have received a Comenius Teaching Fellowship grant for the development of a set of methods and tools for coaches to improve performance of multi-diverse teams in university courses.

Bas Flipsen: “With this project, we want to improve how we coach our student teams when they have to work together intensively over longer periods of time. We’re noticing that when coaching student collectives towards being well-functional teams, group dynamic plays an important role. Especially within a diverse student population where 30% or more of the students have an international background, and 50% of them have a different educational background than Industrial Design Engineering at TU Delft.”

“It all starts with students trusting each other and recognising each other’s different skills. But this often leads to friction and problems within the teams. Our goal is to have all students experience a healthy team environment, where mutual differences and problems are discussed, acknowledged and solved.”

Stefan and Bas are convinced of the necessity of this research: “In the last couple of years, we have noticed that the varying educational, multicultural and knowledge backgrounds can lead to complications in several different teams. Examples are confusion in communication, frustration and even some personal clashes. With this research, we aim to deliver concrete methods and tools, ready for use by our fellow-lecturers.”