Episode #62 - Drs. Rutger Engels, Ginie Servant-Miklos - Bildung Climate School, Rotterdam, NL

MICROCOLLEGE: The Thoreau College Podcast

This week on the podcast we spoke with Drs. Rutger Engels and Ginie Servant-Miklos, who recently staged the "Bildung Climate School," a part-type summer pilot program in Rotterdam, the Netherlands that draws inspiration from the model of the Danish folk high school as described by Lene Rachel Andersen in The Nordic Secret as well as from the microcolleges in the United States. Carefully structured from a research perspective to test pedagogical strategies and program impacts for future prototypes and initiatives, the Bildung Climate School brought together students from differing tracks of the Netherlands' highly stratified post-secondary education system for 2 hours per day for 9 weeks during the summer of 2024. The program they experienced put into practice elements of what Ginie calls "the pedagogies of collapse," combining a frank examination of the sobering ecological and economic challenges facing humanity with embodied artistic and social practices and techniques for working through anxiety, building community, and even having fun.

Ginie Servant-Miklos is an engaged environmental educator with fifteen years of experience in education practice, research, and advocacy. She currently holds an Assistant Professorship in behavioural sciences at the Erasmus School of Social and Behavioural Sciences in Rotterdam, The Netherlands. Her research and education work focuses on developing innovative pedagogies for societal impact. She developed the Experimental Pedagogics educational design framework, co-founded the Bildung Climate School with Prof. Rutger Engels, and is the author of Pedagogies of Collapse: A Hopeful Education for the End of the World as We Know It. She is a Senior Fellow of the Comenius Network for educational innovators in the Netherlands. She is the founder and chair of the board of the FairFight Foundation, an organisation that provides girls and women from Zambia, Zimbabwe, and India with the mental and physical benefits of martial arts practice, as well as educational support. Ginie is a vocal activist for sustainability and gender equality, advocating for change through public engagements like TEDx talks, debates, podcasts, and other digital media outlets. Ginie obtained a Bachelor of Arts in Politics, Philosophy and Economics from the University of Kent, an LLM in International Law from Kent Law School, an MA in International Relations from Sciences Po Lille, a PhD in Education Philosophy and Psychology from Erasmus University Rotterdam, and a post-doctoral research grant in Sustainability Education from Aalborg University. She was also a visiting professor in Experimental Pedagogics at Tyumen University.

Rutger Engels, PhD, is an award-winning full professor in Developmental Psychopathology, at the Erasmus University Rotterdam (EUR), and a board member of the venture philanthropy ‘De Verre Bergen’. Dr Engels received his MA in Psychology at the University of Groningen, his Ph.D. at the Faculty of Medicine, University of Maastricht, followed by a post-doc at Utrecht University. In 2001, he was appointed as a professor in Nijmegen. From 2014-2018, he was CEO of the Trimbos Institute, the National Institute for Mental Health and Addictions, and a distinguished professor in Developmental Psychopathology at Utrecht University. From 2018-2021, he was Rector Magnificus of EUR, one of the top public research universities of Europe. Currently, he is cofounding a specialized mental health clinic on psychedelic-assisted treatments. His fundamental and applied research focuses on mental health and substance use in adolescents and adults. In the last decades, he has coordinated programs aiming to design, test, and ship (technology-enabled) interventions for mental health, addictions, resiliency, and personal growth.