The Dutch community currently involves a highly engaged collective of teachers at UniC, an innovative secondary school in Utrecht. UniC is a secondary school in Utrecht where students can discover and develop their talents and prioritizes their students’ own learning needs. In their pedagogical approach UniC coaches towards the national school exam, thereby not only focusing on knowledge acquisition but also stressing developing competencies, skills and personal development. Students work on themes or assignments in their own pace, at their own level, and can choose their own learning methods and tools. In this way, topics studied can associate to the world of the students, and motivate them to reflect and to discuss.

Teachers’ practices at UniC normally involves developing themes and assignments and providing guidance for students’ self-directed learning process. In addition, teachers give workshops in case students require more necessary or background information concerning particular knowledge domains. There are no fixed testing periods, which means that students can deliberate together with their teacher when they have accomplished an assignment and when they can take a test to complete the assignment. The nature and the timing of the end result of any assignment is negotiated with the teacher. Furthermore, the teacher community at UniC can be characterized as highly reflective, since teachers observe each others’ pedagogical practices and provide intensive constructive feedback based on their enquiries. Additionally, development towards self-reflective professionalism is strongly fostered at UniC, since a great deal of opportunities are offered for participating in in-service teacher courses.

At UniC, teachers take part in a multi-disciplinary team consisting of researchers, project coordinator, students, school leader, and external experts who collaborate on the design, implementation and evaluation of a new learning module based on principles taken from the knowledge creation metaphor on learning. The main goal this community at UniC attempts to achieve is to develop and to advance an instructional module in which students create their own knowledge and develop agency during technology-supported authentic projects in which they work in small groups on shared objects. To accomplish this aim, the design team is intensively engaged in boundary-crossing practices between the traditional roles represented by the various groups.

Purpose of meetings of the project partners serve to improve the design of the learning module based on experiences of teachers and researchers encountered during implementation of the module and based on theoretical insights. This collaborative design project will take place longitudinally, spanning several modules.

In addition to the community at UniC, researchers at Utrecht University are engaged in the first phases of disseminating  KP-Lab theory, practices and tools to a broader audience in the Netherlands. The means we have employed for attaining this aim is by delivering (invited) presentations at various symposia[i] in the Netherlands that are mainly related to the theme of innovative pedagogical methods and research. Also, the project coordinator that is involved in our project at UniC is since recently mobilized to function as our main mediator between teachers working in diverse educational institutions in the Netherlands and the academic field of educational sciences.