Staff exchange at CHN

PUBLISHED: 12/04/2005

The world keeps getting smaller and smaller, and while it does that, people become more aquainted with each other than ever before. We see each other not as the stranger from the other land but as the person who can add value to our live, living and educations.
The CHN offers a wide variety of exchange possibilities for students to keep a good connection with the neighboring sites and other Universtities but what is not so often done is the exchange of staff.
Considering this and the fact that there are still staff members willing to do this, Ronald Noppers, tutor at the CHN decided to switch places with Norwegian fellow scholar Trond Hammervoll and his family.

As part of the CHN Retail Business School, Ronald is the communication partner of approximately 20 contacts througout America, Scandinavia and a few other places in Europe, which allowed this new development to start.

Originating from Harstad, Norway, Trond and his family have accepted the offer to spend the following three
months in the house of Ronald while Ronald will remain in his.
“The contact was established quite some time ago but recently the Høgskolen i Harstad has selected your University for the exchange due to our knowledge and use of the PBL system. Slowly but gradually this University has been trying to turn to this method of teaching and no longer the blackboard method.” Trond explains.

A few visits by a comitee from this University has allowed them to taste what PBL is like and they were enthusiastic enough to enter it slowly into the 2nd year. Now they are willing to take it on full and this is where Ronald and Trond step in.

Teaching has always been part of Ronald’s career and being a ‘professional’ on PBL, he will be guiding the
students into the magical world which we call Problem Based Learning. He will be a trainer for the first year
students so they can prepare themselves for PBL in the second year and he will be giving training for the tutors.

As a wise man once said:“The aim of education should be to teach us rather how to think, than what to
think - rather to improve our minds, so as to enable us to think for ourselves, than to load the memory with
thoughts of other men.” Comparing this saying to the PBL system, it fits. Students are attracted to the chance of thinking for themselves, forming their own opinions and feeling they should improve themselves, rather than improving others.

One of the wishes and expectations of Trond is to get to know the styles of PBL, to understand what and how it works but next to school his ideas about his stay are also interesting.

Learning from the experiences here this daring Norwegian family will face all the differences in the Netherlands. Together with his wife Siw and his two children Julia and Magnus, he will try to gain the needed knowlegde and they see this also as an opportunity for letting their children experience a little
bit, what it is to travel and to live abroad.

“I love football and one of the firs things we did here in Holland was go outside and play ball. The weather was lovely, as opposed to Norway where it is winter now.”

So far, they haven’t felt much difference between the Norwegian people and the Dutch, they seem alike in most ways but one thing which was obvious from the beginnin was the country. “Everything here is so flat, we love riding the bike and this weekend we did. It was wonderful.”

The area where they are from is filled with mountains, forests, very different from Friesland but they feel
that they will be very content staying here. The expectations of Ronald are to reach as many teachers as possible and to help them develop the enthusiasm to use this teaching system. Right now it is applied only a little at a time but he hopes that his influence can help their further development and an increase of the use.
Of course for Ronald this is also a change. “We had hoped to stay a longer period of time than three months but this was not the case. I will not just be teaching at the school but we will also try to enjoy as much of the culture, the country and the language as we can. I had hoped to see the dark winter and the light summers.”

Even though the countries are not so different,merely in geography, the impact this exchange will have is
larger than we can probably comprehend. The CHN is sharing its knowledge with partners throughout
the world and is gaining knowledge from it as well. It is never late to learn new possibilities.