Our podcast journey
Second Summer School: Interview with teacher
Our podcast journey through Europe continues in The Netherland, whereWil Willemsen Dutch former teacher and long-time EPAS coordinator talks about his experience in the Summer School.
Wil Willemsen lives in Nijmegen, the oldest city in the Netherlands, and became a teacher at 21. He has been building bridges between European schools ever since. A guest speaker at the EUCLASS Alliance Summer School in Athens, he looks back in the podcast on a career spanning more than forty years.
His journey began in a vocational school for young people with learning difficulties and complex social backgrounds, future bricklayers, carpenters, painters and metalworkers. With limited English, the strategy was to get them working with their hands: building furniture and benches for the school.
Years later he ran a large exchange programme in Nijmegen involving 250 students and teachers from 10 European countries, including a partner school from Verona.
For the European Parliament Liaison Office in the Netherlands he developed the European Parliament Ambassador School programme, coordinating 120 schools, about 20 of them vocational, and visiting around 50 schools a year to promote European citizenship, trips to Brussels and Strasbourg, debates and Europe Day.
According to Wil, young people are more interested in Europe than they were ten years ago. Yet in vocational schools a large group still feels disconnected from politics and unheard. These students keep the real economy running with their manual work, but without a concrete sense of what the Union offers them, they risk drifting towards populism and Euroscepticism.
Listen now to the full episode to discover more!
In his Summer School workshop, Wil ran a real classroom simulation:
- Sticky notes: each teacher writes down their first association with the EU; the notes go on the wall and start a debate based on facts and arguments, not surface opinions
- “Spot the Differences”: comparing images of Europe before and after the Union
- Live guests on Teams: a former VET student (Nisreen Hakrash) who did an internship at the European Parliament, EBBD programme president Cynthia Woolderink, MEP Brigitte van den Berg, and teachers Annette Dagelet and Mark van Oosten (ROC Midden Nederland), who take their classes to Brussels and to the European Central Bank in Frankfurt
Wil encourages VET schools to network and bring groups of students to Euroscola in Strasbourg: for a full day, students in formal dress sit in the European Parliament’s seats, vote and debate on their own, with no teacher interference. Another suggestion is a school “European Song Contest”, with songs in different European languages.
His closing advice is simple and direct:
"tell students that a vocational student’s vote carries exactly the same political weight as a surgeon’s. He points to the Brexit referendum, after which many young people took to the streets only once the result was in."