Educational Culture

The WdKA’s educational culture is defined by the following 15 fundamental principles; all the WdKA’s students, tutors, and staff members are expected to fully adhere to these principles and contribute to this culture.

FUNDAMENTAL PRINCIPLES

1. The WdKA offers challenging educational programmes. Students learn every day, and they are well aware of this. Their education programme always continues to surprise them; their tutors and facilities offer them interesting and exciting educational activities and help them to achieve unexpected and meaningful insights.

2. Both tutors and students are partners in learning. The WdKA is a learning community. Although all individual students and staff members have their own perspective and their own role, we must all learn from each other and challenge each other to set new goals, to solve problems, to experiment, and to inspire each other.

3. Students bear responsibility for what they (wish to) learn and plan their own academic progress in accordance with the development of their own ambitions. We assume that all of our students bring with them a degree of prior knowledge and experiences, and that these provide a valuable foundation for their further academic development. They also bring with them their ambition and curiosity, which provide the stimulus for asking questions that will be addressed in the education programme. Study guidance coaches also help the students in this respect.

4. Tutors and instructors are professionals with their own professional autonomy and their own responsibilities. Together, they work as a team. Depending on their students’ academic needs and development, tutors choose the teaching method and work planning most suitable to guide the students in their development. Rather than being custodians of specific academic subjects, tutors share their knowledge with each other in order to better guide and supervise their students. Tutors work together in teams; they formulate their own planning and enjoy a great deal of autonomy in their contact time with students, in the coordination within the team of tutors, and in making the best use of each tutor’s expertise.

5. Each tutor has planned the transfer of knowledge for every meeting with students and knows what the students have learned from the tutor at the end of the meeting. In order to present the subject matter in an integrated fashion, the education programmes are structured in projects. Education is all about acquiring knowledge, skills, and attitudes (competencies).

6. The course curricula and evaluations are clearly linked to the contents of the BoKS (Body of Knowledge and Skills) as described in the programme curriculum. The BoKS describes the core of the practical knowledge and skills which a student learns within a project. The first responsibility of tutors and instructors is to make sure that these skills and knowledge are comprehensively addressed and are connected to the student’s concept development.

7. Rather than a scheduling system, the academy works with an online planning and reservations system. The Stations are optimally designed to facilitate the students’ learning process in project-oriented teaching formats; they consist of clusters of workshops and studios where instructors and tutors can work with students.

8. Evaluating means coaching and providing insight. Evaluations focus positively on the student’s abilities, and on understanding each student’s work within the perspective of their own ambitions. An evaluation should never be perceived as a punishment for an unsatisfactory performance. Feedback and feedforward are an integral part of the evaluation and are essential to the learning process.

9. No two students are the same. Tutors help students develop their talents, focusing on the formulation of a professional role suitable to the student. Tutors are always seeking out a student’s talents, taking into account differences in each student’s learning style and individual character. The assessment system is also designed with this in mind, with diagnostic and selective assessments as well as competency assessments.

10. The efforts of the facility services and management are focused on a proper and efficient functioning of the education programmes. Tutors and students are already busy enough with teaching and learning. Policy, advising and communication must always contribute to fostering an optimal learning environment.

11. The efforts of all the academy’s staff members are focused on proactively supporting the educational process. The organisation of an institution for higher education requires a complex administrative and logistical support structure, which ideally should work almost invisibly to ensure an optimal functioning of the educational process. The academy is a fantastic working environment, and all staff members should feel honoured to be able to contribute to creating and maintaining a challenging academy culture.

12. The academy is an international knowledge centre for contemporary creative practices. The increasingly international orientation of the professional practice for which we are preparing our students means that English is regularly used as a working language within the academy. The academy is pleased to welcome foreign students.

13. Media focus is a clearly recognisable component of the programme curriculum of all of the WdKA’s bachelor and master programmes. Communication technology, visual representation techniques and important innovations in society at large all play a major role in defining the media literacy of professionals in the creative industries.

14. The WdKA student a passionate creator with an original way of thinking, a goal-oriented attitude and a keen understanding of their intended market. The social-economic context of the professional practice largely determines the nature of professional networks, business models, relevant vocabularies and appropriate professional attitudes within the creative industries. Our education programmes constantly emphasise the need for an entrepreneurial attitude in the design process, the planning, the feasibility study and the presentation.

15. There is only one Willem de Kooning Academy. One single community of students, tutors, staff members and administrators, in which everyone is focused on challenging, stimulating and guiding the creative raw talent of our students toward the professional formation of critical and enthusiastic creator.