ASSESSMENT OF GENDER MAINSTREAMING COMPETENCES AND TRIPLE LOOP-LEARNING AMONG ADULT LEARNERS: HIGHLIGHTS AND PITFALLS

At Van Hall Larenstein University of Applied Sciences, the Netherlands, we educate rural development professionals from all over the world in the Masters Management of Development course. One of the specialisations in this course is focused on gender mainstreaming in rural development. The education is competence-based, therefore knowledge, in particular theories on gender but also skills training is part of the curriculum. To become competent in working on gender equality in particular a change in attitude is required. In our education we believe that the triple-loop learning approach challenges one’s existing framework as well as one’s mental models and assumptions.

As is the experience in most institutions which practice competence-based education (CBE) assessing changes in attitude is not an easy task. In this paper a concrete approach that puts into practice the tripleloop learning strategy is presented.