Mirjam Sophia Glessmer

Teaching involves a lot of emotional labor — handling of our own and others’ emotions — especially when dealing with controversial or emotionally difficult course content, but also just in general because teaching is all about dealing with other humans. Emotional labor is also unequally distributed, with women, younger teachers, and minorities carrying most of […]

Most of the time when I have written about trust, it was about trust in the relationship between people. But trust also has other dimensions. For example, “Institutional Trust Load” according to Spencer (2026) describes trust which “is structurally relied upon to sustain administrative processes under conditions of ambiguity, inconsistency, or deferred resolution“. So trust […]

Just read this (3-page only, so check it out yourself!) article and think that it is super helpful! While we often talk about climate action as either an individual problem OR a structural problem, as behavior change OR technological solutions; in this paper it is clear that we need AND CAN DO all of the […]

I urgently need to close some tabs in my browser for my mental health, but I cannot close them without looking at them individually because surely there is a reason for why they have been open for so long, so here is a bunch of quick summaries of AI stuff.

I’m reading some of Lund University’s visiting professor in Sustainability in Higher Education Zoe Robinson’s work. Some brief(ish) summaries below. It is such an opportunity and inspiration to have Zoe in Lund!

Related to whether we teach in a fact-based, normative or pluralistic way, there is also the issue with teaching about topics that might be controversial (hello again, sustainability, and my post earlier on conflicts and resistance), and how to deal with that. After recently having heard his work on “teaching controversial issues” summarized as “don’t […]

Since sustainable development is a wicked problem, it is not too surprising that also students in our classes come with different ideas of how to meet the challenges, and that that can lead to conflicts. I am doing some reading around how people deal with this in response to a colleague asking me what to […]

I am preparing a self-study module for students in their 4th or 5th year in engineering programs taking a course on the polycrisis and the stuff they will have to deal with in their professional lives, and below is a first draft. This module is a voluntary offer for students in addition to in-person opportunities […]

Yesterday, I participated in a workshop by the Swedish Education for Sustainable Development working group, and it sparked a lot of thoughts. The workshop was one of those formats where the agenda is set at the beginning of a meeting, based on what topics participants bring. In my breakout group, we discussed whether it is […]

I am so excited to finally read this book! There are so many things to think about, and so many practical tips and tricks; I totally recommend any online teacher to read it (and even in-person teachers, it will definitely be good for you to read, too!).

I browsed this book and I think it is SO USEFUL, especially probably for people who don’t have a ton of experience with leading staff development workshops.

Climate emotions are often discussed as individual. Although it is often suggested to talk about emotions and to find supportive community to process and deal with them (see for example the steps talk and unite here), most often there is no discussion of how emotions are shaped by society in the first place.  Peters et […]

Sunday at the pool, waiting for my training to start, I read about the first half of the book “the existential toolkit for climate justice educators: how to teach in a burning world“.

There are tons of different formats for regular academic development events with the goal to foster and enhance discussions of teaching and learning, each with their own theory of change and responding to different boundary conditions. In this paper, we compare three that were run within the iEarth project.

I am currently playing with FeedbackFruits as a plugin in our LMS, Canvas, mainly because they offer social annotation features to documents and videos and I am super curious about those, and then I am generally very interested in asynchronous online teaching and learning and how to make it a joyful experience. So the FeedbackFruits-hosted […]

In a world where more and more people carry trauma, we need to assume that there are students in all our classes that do, too. How can we make sure to teach in ways that reduce harm, avoid re‑traumatization, and support all learners’ capacity to engage and learn?

We know that relationships in teaching are hugely important — many students say that they’ve been one conversation away from quitting, and good relationships have positive impact not just on retention but on lots of other outcomes. Teachers are expected to initiate and build relationships, and especially in the classroom, since that is the only space […]

I like to think of myself as fairly pragmatic, so I was intrigued about the body of literature that uses pragmatism in SoTL or teaching and learning more generally. While I found a lot of it to be a slightly more elaborate version of “do the best with what you have”, so really not very […]

I always advocate for talking about sustainability even when you feel not ready to do it, because I believe that not talking about things is never a good solution. But I realized in a conversation last week that I am making a lot of assumptions about how comfortable and skilled people are in moderating conversations, […]

Loved reading this short piece in which 419 qualitative researchers from 32 countries write very directly that they reject GenAI in reflexive qualitative research because 1. GenAI is incapable of meaning-making; 2. Qualitative research needs to be done by humans; and 3. GenAI is too harmful to the environment and to the human workers who […]