With a wealth of experience as a teacher and performer, Femke van Assouw is passionately committed to creativity in education. For over a decade, she has taught creativity at SintLucas, the vocational school for creative talent in Eindhoven. Here, she encourages students to rediscover their creative core and integrates hands-on engagement at the heart of the design process. Her approach goes beyond traditional lessons and emphasises developing the natural, but often forgotten, creative ability that is present in every human being.

Femke’s journey once began on stage, including as a Red Riding Hood at the Efteling and in theatre productions, self-written acts and television appearances. She combined her passion for performance with education by obtaining her BA in Education from Fontys Hogeschool voor de Kunsten and later her Bachelor of Fine Art and Design in Education. Her love for creativity led her to recently complete a Master’s in Educational Needs, researching the transformative power of creativity in education.

As a certified facilitator in Design Thinking, Creative Problem Solving, Lego Serious Play and Playsonality©, Femke knows how to seamlessly integrate innovative methods into her teaching and as a Facilitator. Her mission? To reconnect students, teachers and teams with their imagination and creativity – and no; she is not talking about ’tinkering’ but about being able to AND MAY use your (naturally present) creative ability. Because let’s face it, the ability to fantasise and create is in all of us, but often we have kind of forgotten this.

Femke was the winner of the MBO-Talk at the CVI Conference 2024.
Tuesday 13 May
12.30-13.00pm
Space Auditorium – green

When students work from their own issues, you sometimes hear back that they find it difficult to give feedback to each other: “What can I say about it?” and “I’m not an expert, am I?”. But everyone’s input is important to give meaning to an issue and take the next step. Everyone learns from each other.

In this musical workshop, we respond creatively to the other person’s input. We will MAKE instead of PRACTICE. You will work together across the boundaries of disciplines and hierarchy. With a little help from metaphors. Intuition and chance play the leading role. And everyone’s input leads us to a concrete and shareable solution.

Karina works at Leerroute Ä6, a new form of education within SintLucas that trains to become a media designer, with personal learning as its starting point. There is maximum space for a student to make his or her own choices. Here, students learn at their own pace, level and content in a community consisting of core groups guided by a core coach.

Making back
Wednesday 14 May
12.30-13.30pm
Karina van Heck and Ellen van de Ven

Discover how to have positive impact in change processes with Appreciative Inquiry. Learn how this way of looking and acting is an extremely powerful tool to generate positive change. Using practical examples from our own practice, we will show you how appreciative change works for us. We share how, together with colleagues and students, we discover what works and what it takes to keep moving forward. Then we invite you to experience appreciative change yourself.

Positive impact with appreciative change
Wednesday 14 May
16:00-17:00
Miekede Vreede and Mieke van der Heijden