Eduardo Mendes wins Henk Dekker award 2021
On 14 December Dr. Eduardo Mendes received the Henk Dekker Award 2021. During an introduction by Vice Rector Magnificus and Vice President Education, Prof. dr. Rob Mudde, explaining the award recognizes and rewards exceptional education innovation within the Dutch LDE universities, Dr. Mendes was introduced as one of 6 finalists. He was nominated for his efforts in creating and conceptualizing the Honours Awareness & Culture Specialization and art-embedded learning methodologies for STEM curricula. The award specifies Eduardo’s efforts as “stressing the role and impact of art to develop leadership and responsibility in engineering”.
Though Prof. Mudde explained it was a tough decision, Dr. Mendes and Dr. Carlijn Bergwerff from the University of Leiden, were announced to be the winners of this annual award.
Dr. Mendes feels honored by the recognition and would like to thank everyone involved during these past years for their support, engagement and courage to have embarked on this adventure. He hopes the award will further help to create a sustainable structure for the program and open new doors for comparable innovation within education.
He would like to extend special thanks to all those who joined this adventure, starting with his ‘partner in crime’, Marlijn Helder, who, from the very beginning, helped him realise and develop the aforementioned educational programs and currently acts as coordinator for the specialization, the teachers involved in these courses, Filippo Santoni de Sio, Trijsje Fransen, Bauke Steenhuisen, Birgit de Bruin (TU Delft) and Eric Kluitenberg and Arthur Elsenaar (Koninklijke Academie van Beeldende Kunsten - KABK), Raymond Browne, Director X TU Delft and Study Climate program, as well as the two artists that were fundamental in the creation of the very first course, Art, Empathy and Ethics: Frank Auperlé and Thijs Bierteker.
The Leiden-Delft-Erasmus Center for Education and Learning (CEL) has launched the Henk Dekker Award. The Henk Dekker Award is a prize that will be awarded annually at the Annual Meeting of CEL to the best education innovator. For his outstanding leadership and all his efforts making CEL the succesful Centre it is nowadays Professor Henk Dekker was awarded the first Henk Dekker award by Anka Mulder in 2017.
