oa Waarderend onderzoek – een andere manier om kwaliteit te verbeelden

Internal audits in education and research are means to detect possible risks and to judge their quality based on a number of quality standards. Up to now this has been a successful way to evaluate education and research. However, being accreditable or not seems to be not how educational programmes or research units handle possible risks (from hindsight). Instead, they focus on the ambitions, successes and the impact on stakeholders in professional practices, education and research. Gerdien Vegter and Frank Vonk opt for reframing quality standards in terms of ambition, stakeholder satisfaction, learning and growing, mirroring different approaches, real dialogue, and collective and individual values. In her reaction Stoopendaal agrees that appreciation, stimulation, critical reflection and dialoguing may provide a way out of the dominating regime of quantitative quality assessments in the public sector.