Universiteit Leiden

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Frank Chouraqui new Director of Education Philosophy

Frank Chouraqui has been appointed as Director of Education at the Intsitute of Philosophy as from 1 January 2019. His mission is to maintain the quality of teaching, job satisfaction for all colleagues and a fulfilling student experience for all students.

Frank Chouraqui
Frank Chouraqui

First thing to take care of

'To establish our upcoming teaching needs with clarity. Do we want to use tutorials? How many courses can we provide? Who will be teaching which course? All our lecturers are the right people for some of these courses,  but when we match a course topic and level with a lecturer who is right for this specific set of circumstances, we can build a superb experience for all.'​​​​​​​

Focus be for the upcoming period

'There are the usual focuses to do with the running of the educational activities. This has to do mainly with timing: consult with the heads of programmes and lecturers in time and to finalize who lectures what early enough so everyone can be prepared without stress. This is the basis upon which we can build further.

Our further focus will follow three lines:

  1. The student experience: maintain and improve the excellent quality of teaching we’ve been offering and continue our efforts towards cohort building: making our student groups cohesive and welcoming to all. This includes some longer-term thinking about which lecturers the students will see form year to year, in what constellations the students meet week after week for example.
  2. The protection of research time for the lecturers on a research contract: our course load is heavy, and we have excellent teachers. We shall make careful use of the nudges at our disposal to ensure overheads like preparation are optimized. For example by organising repeat teaching when possible, spreading workload across the staff members in more even ways, and streamlining some assessment policies.
  3. We rely often on temporary teachers. We owe it to them, to the students and to the profession to make sure that their stay with us is beneficial to their careers. Here, the plan is to carefully devise medium-term trajectories (over 4 to 6 semesters) so our temporary teachers can enjoy some level of stability, become embedded in the life of the institute and in the experience of our students. This also includes consulting with them to make sure their teaching doesn’t impair their research record when they hit the market, and to support their career developments, by arranging for BKOs on their behalf.'​​​​​​​
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