Towards a New Honors Manifesto: Re-evaluating values, attitudes, and themes in Dutch higher education

Abstract

Honors education in the Netherlands is continuously evolving. While core ideas and values remain in place-for example around the importance of student-centered learning, societal engagement and coaching didactics-, specific implementations, discourses, and approaches change over time. It seems helpful for that reason to occasionally re-evaluate the shared principles around honors. It helps to position honors thematically, pedagogically, and strategically within an ever-changing Dutch higher education sector. It also helps to strengthen bonds and collaborations between honors programs across institutions and educational settings. Finally, it helps to create a shared understanding between educators, students, and management about the “how” and “why” of honors education, nationally but perhaps also internationally. An effective way to summarize a changing set of common principles and values is through the writing of a manifesto. In the Netherlands, a first honors manifesto was written at the end of the Dutch honors stimulating programme, the ‘Sirius Program’, in 2014 (Janssen et al, 2014). The manifesto consisted out of seven “indicators” that were considered to contribute strongly to the identities of honors programs across the Netherlands at that moment. Since then, these indicators have served as a reference point for staff and students across the Dutch educational sector. Now, ten years later, the time seems right to review and recalibrate that manifesto. Shifts in educational discourses, strategic priorities of institutions, and changes in demands from both teachers and students, have highlighted the need to critically re-evaluate and further develop the manifesto.