21st century skills – Tutors in the Wild
Under this rubric we want to report on our tutors’ international and intercultural experience. Leiden University strives to enable students to develop so called “21st century skills” which are defined as “the ability to work in teams, international and intercultural skills, entrepreneurship and leadership qualities and digital competences”.
Most of the tutors have acquired these skills during their fieldwork for their Bachelors, masters, PhDs or post-doc projects. But HOW did they do that, you ask? Well, in this rubric they share their experiences and reflect on the challenges that the COVID-19 crisis is putting on their research and teaching at the moment.
In this edition of “21st century skills, Tutors in the Wild”, you’ll read the story of Looi van Kessel.
Research in the middle of nowhere and juicy letters
During my PhD I’ve spent six months in the United States doing research at Dartmouth College and the University of Texas at Austin. The first four months of this time abroad were spent at Dartmouth—an Ivy League school in the middle of nowhere, New Hampshire. I went there to study with a professor who is an expert in American Studies and American Literature. Since the school is located in a remote part of New England with little distraction nearby (the biggest nearby city, Boston, is about three hours by car), I had ample opportunity to talk with the academic community at Dartmouth, which helped me tremendously in putting together some pieces of the puzzle that was my dissertation. The last two months of my time in the US I lived in Austin, Texas to do some archival research at the Harry Ransom Center of UT. The Harry Ransom Center is an astonishing rare book and manuscript library (they own a Gutenberg Bible as well as the archives of Gabriel García Márquez!) that also houses the personal papers of James Purdy, the subject of my dissertation. So for two months I could browse through his letters (and boy! some of those were quite juicy), and look at manuscript versions of novels that I was analyzing for my research.
Trump, Black Lives Matter and the spirit of people rallying
I had the fortune, or perhaps misfortune, to arrive in the US in October 2016. That’s right, just before the presidential elections that saw Donald Trump claim victory. On the night of the elections I attended an election viewing party in Boston organized by the Young Democrats of Massachusetts. When I got there, the atmosphere was filled with such jubilant energy; everybody felt that they were part of such an important moment in history because we were witness to the first woman to be elected to the office of President of the United States of America. Needless to say, the night took quite an abrupt turn and I remember spending the evening having to comfort all those young hopefuls who saw their vision of their country shatter. But I also remember the tremendous resilience and sense of community that spread over the country in the months after the election. Across the country I witnessed Women’s Marches, marches organized by Black Lives Matter, marches to protect the so-called Dreamers from being deported from the US. If anything, it’s this spirit of people rallying together to protect those in the community that need it most that I will remember most fondly, and which has also transformed my own life as an academic and an activist upon returning home.
21st century skills; the deep end of the pool
What I learned from my time in the US is that it is so important to participate in local community building and social life. It is very easy and comfortable for exchange students and researchers to stick together. After all, they all share the experience of being guests in another country and it might be of great comfort to share stories, mishaps, or information about how to deal with this or that annoying habit or incomprehensible piece of bureaucracy. However, you will learn most if you just throw yourself in the deep end of the pool and immediately engage with people you meet in shops, on the street, in bars, or elsewhere. That might be somewhat scary, but I’ve learned that people are really welcoming to those who take up a genuine interest in becoming part of their community. And I think it is this attitude of openness and positive engagement with different communities that is necessary if we want to overcome the challenges that the first decades of the 21st century have thrown at us. Growing populism and the ever-growing social, economic, and cultural gaps between groups of people have led to more social and cultural segregation. This is all the more apparent if we look at how covid-19 affects different communities in different ways. Here in The Netherlands too, the community that you’re part of has a great influence on the ways in which the pandemic affects your personal and your social life. We have to be more attentive to the differences and needs of different communities if we wish to emerge from the pandemic as a nation that has grown together, rather than apart.
Challenges of the COVID-19 crisis
And while we’re on the topic! That cursed pandemic, am I right? I think hardly anyone will disagree with me when I say that I simply hate the way in which the pandemic has affected our life at the university. I miss seeing my colleagues, interacting with students, going to conferences. But by the way things are looking now, it seems like we’ll have to hang on quite a while longer. Fortunately I’ve learned so many new things about online education in the past few months, and although teaching via Kaltura is far from perfect, I think this shift to remote teaching has also offered us a lot of insights for the development of future pedagogical tools. Even after the pandemic is over.