During one of the Exchange Co-ordinators (ECO) meetings in the early 1990s, Carl-Jørgen Bindslev, Chair of the Board of ETEN at that time, and some other participants decided that the network should be organised in a different way in order to focus on the content of what social educator and teacher training institutions were teaching and what their intentions were to be. Long discussions took place in Newcastle in 1999 and it was during those meetings that the basic format for the Thematic Interest Groups (TIGs) was settled.

Over the next several years, various issues were discussed, including the format for TIGS, the creation of new TIGs, the elimination of TIGs, for which there was little interest, and the identification of issues which were a best fit for a TIG from an educational perspective.

A Short History of the ETEN Urban Education TIG
One of the first TIGs to be formed was Urban Education. The basis for this TIG emerged from ideas about teacher training that had been developed at The Hague University of Applied Sciences, the Netherlands. The fundamental idea that characterised the vision at that time was that a teacher training college, wherever it was located, must have a relationship with the physical surroundings of the college and the target population for which one is educating.
Almost at the same time, in the early 1990s, several teachers were involved in education in schools in the inner city of The Hague. Especially Dutch language trainers and teachers of Dutch as a second language who were also involved in the in-service training of Turkish language teachers. One of these teachers was also an advocate for an educational focus on what is going on in inner cities regarding the education of migrant children in inner-city schools. At some point during the early 1990s Gerard de Kruif, of the Hague University of Applied Sciences, joined him and his group with the focus of preparing teachers to work in inner cities.

Read the entire text in the book!

Categories: The history of ETEN