Saturday the 27th of February ‘Leidsch Dagblad’ published an interview with Marc van den Muijzenberg about The Mobile Educator. This new initiative wants to focus its attention on Syrian refugees with an educational background, who have been professionals in Syria and who deserve a change in The Netherlands. The Mobile Educator wants to show Syrian teachers some basic principles of the Dutch education system and to bring them one step closer to the Dutch labor market.
Marc van den Muijzenberg has a lot of experience with training professionals in countries where democracy is weak, he often finds the provision of education in those countries to be done by national government. The idea of The Mobile Educator is not to preach Dutch education, but to let it function as an example what teachers could achieve when they are free to develop their own teaching projects. “We will not tell the Syrian teachers – who come to our training – how to create teaching projects, but we rather support them to develop their own” (Van den Muijzenberg).
The idea for The Mobile Educator emerged last December and has been operationalised together with ICLON, Leiden University. The first training will start next week and if you are interested to read more about this topic please go to www.mobile-educator.org or go directly to the interview in ‘Leidsch Dagblad’.