Silje Dehli

Background

Silje Dehli is a teacher at the faculty of Industrial Design Engineering, who discovered her passion for education design as she taught design courses at TU Delft. As coordinator of the first-year BSc Design Project 1, Silje is confronted on a daily basis with the gap between secondary school and university. Whereas she would love to teach the course based on self-regulated learning principles – something which Silje has extensively experimented with, e.g. by offering different design projects students could try without being graded for them – she acknowledges that, in fact, most first-year students are unable to truly benefit from such freedom. Being a designer at heart, this is not something which she finds discouraging, but rather something she considers a challenge to meet with an open and optimistic attitude: given the state in which secondary students enter university, what can I do in my education to help my students take more responsibility?

Towards IDEE

It is no surprise then, that, when the call for IDEE went out, Silje felt an immediate connection with the IDEE theme Students taking more responsibility for their own learning process. One of the things that she likes most about IDEE, is that through the project she has dedicated time to spent on diving into the literature on student responsibility and how to enhance this in education. She considers this theme extremely relevant, not only for her own education, but for all education that TU Delft has to offer. The way Silje looks at it, the value of IDEE resides in designing evidence-based education innovations that will genuinely improve the quality of education for students, enabling them to learn to take more responsibility.

As part of IDEE

“We shouldn’t underestimate that our current education systems, focussed as they are on performance, condition young people to think that they need to do well, that they need to get high grades, and that this is what matters most in education. True learning comes from making mistakes, but making mistakes is precisely what they have come to experience as the most uncomfortable and scary. Through IDEE, I hope to learn more about how to provide students with the kind of learning environment that makes them uncomfortable, without this becoming overwhelming and too stressful.”

Did you know that ...?

• Silje completed the “Leerlijn onderwijskundig leiderschap” on education for learning? One of the things that Silje took from this was the concept of “failing forward”.
• Silje has a strong interest in the workings and complexities of the adolescent brain? Want to strike up a conversation with Silje about this and related topics, reach out at S.R.Dehli@tudelft.nl.