Comenius Teaching Fellow Grant for Luca Gelsomino

Assistant Professor Luca Gelsomino has received a Comenius Teaching Fellow Grant of € 50.000 from the Dutch National Education Institute (NKO) for his project ‘ReValue: a transdisciplinary approach to supply chain management education’. The project is aimed at innovation at the course level, making supply chain management education more transdisciplinary. The initiative is a collaboration with University of Applied Sciences Windesheim.

Gelsomino’s project – in which he collaborates with Maxime Boullion, a doctoral candidate at FEB and senior researcher at Windesheim - addresses a gap between the societal relevance of supply chains and how supply chain management (SCM) is typically taught. Societal challenges such as climate impact, labour conditions and resource scarcity are central to SCM practice, yet engaging students with these issues requires transdisciplinary perspectives and close interaction with practice. In the Netherlands, this is complicated by the institutional separation between research universities (WO) and universities of applied sciences (HBO), which despite their complementary forms of knowledge and skills rarely collaborate. To respond to this challenge, the project reorganises the pre-master course ‘Purchasing and Supply Chain Management’ at the University of Groningen into a joint living lab, ReValue, developed and delivered together with Windesheim.

Structured collaboration between research- and applied universities

The structured collaboration between a research university and a university of applied sciences around real-world supply chain challenges is what makes this project innovative. Student groups will work in communities of practice within different thematic tracks. Practitioners will participate in the communities as problem owners, providing challenges and constraints, while instructors from both institutions will provide guidance. Gelsomino: “This design allows students to integrate analytical and problem-solving skills while engaging with real organizational settings. The educational design is supported by state-of-the-art technological and pedagogical tools. Students use a supply chain mapping tool to explore multi-tier networks and associated societal risks, and draw on an open repository of short transdisciplinary learning materials developed with experts from outside business and management.” The project focuses on developing student agency, stakeholdership and collaborative capacity, and will deliver transferable outputs that support wider adoption of transdisciplinary, cross-institutional Supply Chain Management education.

NKO and Comenius Teaching Fellow Grants

The Dutch National Education Institute (NKO, Dutch abbreviation) part of the Dutch Research Council (NWO) – aims to use knowledge from research to improve the quality of education in the Netherlands. It does so by coordinating and funding educational research, and by making the results of this research accessible and useful for educational practice and policy. The aim of the Comenius programme is to give impetus to educational innovation and improvements by professionals in higher education. Comenius Teaching Fellow Grants are meant for small-scale innovations in an educational institutions. Proposed projects must be implemented within the context of a course, subject learning path or skills trajectory. The educational improvement should directly benefit Dutch higher education students.

Questions? Please contact Luca Gelsomino.