Where do you find your educational drive?
Evelien: 'That passion has been there from an early age. I remember once as a child I made a coloring page in which I walked across the schoolyard. I thought I was going to be a primary school teacher. In the end, I became a doctor because I wanted to help people. During my training, I noticed that I wanted an extra challenge and not just to see patients. Being a general practitioner is quite a solo job and in education I really enjoy working together. I then started doing the differentiation education in the last year of my GP training and that's how I got into it.'
'I enjoy transferring the knowledge I have and it also encourages me to keep my knowledge up to date. I also think it's a nice challenge to make young people enthusiastic about the profession, because there is quite a lot of negative attention for it, for example about the workload.'
Floris: 'I've also been stuck in it since my student days. I was doing research at the time and then you’re also assigned to teaching tasks. I really enjoy looking through the eyes of the students. They have a very nice, naïve (in the good sense of the word) view. They ask fun questions that make me think. Why am I doing this in the first place? It makes me realise again and again how much fun my own work is and by looking at it from a distance, it makes me a better doctor.'
How do you work together?
Floris: 'We have been working together for three years now as directors of the first quarter of the Medicine and Biomedical Sciences programmes. As a director, you make sure that you put people together who are good at teaching because they know a lot about their profession and can convey that to students in a pleasant, passionate way.'
Evelien: 'The first year of our collaboration was very busy and we also had to get to know each other as buddies. Who does what and who is good at what? That was quite intensive. Now we have found our own role in it and we complement each other well. It's nice to spar with each other. You always have a sounding board.'
What have you learned from each other?
Floris: 'Our collaboration is very organic, so most ideas are born together. Evelien works in a much more structured way than I do and that helps to keep going back to the question 'What are we doing now and what's next?'. She keeps the focus sharp. Evelien is very helpful to me for that.'
Evelien: 'I think Floris is very creative. I feel like he already knows a lot more than I do about all kinds of things. The content of the first quarter is quite in-depth, so his research background also helps to ask certain critical questions. In the beginning, it was quite a search. Floris knows so much. What do I have to add to that? But I've noticed that I also find the mental side of studying very interesting. It's nice to take on your own role more and more and to be inspired by the other person.'
What do you hope your students take away from your education?
Evelien: 'Do something with what you're passionate about! I don't see it as my job to just produce very ambitious doctors. I want to deliver realistic doctors who are not only busy building their CVs, but also develop as people. Then, of course, they may also find out that medicine is not the field they want to continue in.'
Floris: 'The theme of the first quarter is 'wonder'. We want to give students a taste of all kinds of aspects of medicine and biomedical sciences. If you just tell the students to marvel, they'll drown. That is why we offer them several perspectives with which they can work, such as the perspective of the cell, metabolism, anatomy, people and society, etc. I hope that these frameworks will help them to get a good picture of the profession.'
What are you proud of?
Floris: 'Last year, for the first time, we had a major change in the curriculum, which was called SIMPEL. That offered the opportunity to rebuild the entire quarter. That's when we took the step with those perspectives. We got feedback from students that it works well to zoom out first and then look at the profession from those perspectives. Teachers were also happy with it.'
Evelien: 'Yes, I think that's perhaps the most satisfying thing. Of course, it's nice that students are happy with the changes, but thanks to SIMPEL we have organised sessions with all the head teachers of our quarter. Because they heard from each other what they were doing, the curriculum revision yielded much more than just a change in modules. Teachers also exchanged a lot with each other. I think that made the quarter even better, because teachers know each other better and better know where to find each other.'