I always like studies that use authentic data from out in the wild. I think it is so elegant to look at what is happening in real life rather than trying to generate data and then having people not respond leading to too small sample sizes, people misunderstanding the question (which might also have been […]
I loved the book “Designing and Facilitating Workshops with Intentionality” by Tolu Noah (2025) so much when I read it last summer! I have very fond memories of sitting in my parents’ garden with the book, working through it by applying everything to a course I was preparing, so when I saw the invitation to […]
Feeling that you matter — to peers, staff, university — is important for student mental health. To really understand what it means for students to matter, Smith & McLellan (2026) analyze 155 respondents’ open-ended responses to the questions of describing situations where they felt that they did (not) matter while at university.
I am thinking about this for students in year 4/5 in the context of a sustainability course where we challenge them to question a lot of assumptions that they have met throughout most of their studies. We want a course-wide code of conduct, and then group contracts within each project group.
For a course I am currently planning, I had pitched using the “inner team” (“Inneres Team” von Schulz von Thun) as a method to reflect on personal and professional values and which ones come into play in different situations. I was thinking about using them on paper in a session where everybody works on their […]
Didn’t feel like I had time to go for a morning dip, but made the time and am glad I went, both because that’s always awesome and because it gave me the chance to listen to the episode “How college students make, keep and lose friends with Janice McCabe” on one of my alltime favourite […]
With the presence of AI, oral exams have made a strong come-back because it is harder to cheat on them. But they come with lots of problems, too: A lot of students struggle with anxiety that prevents them from showing all they know, it is difficult to assess fairly, and it is unclear whether oral […]
When I hear the term “vision”, I always think of the former german chancellor Helmut Schmidt, who is quoted as having said “people with visions should go see a doctor.” With that out of the way — sustainability science has recognized that positive visions about the future are “influential, if not indispensable, stimulus for change” […]
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 […]
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 […]
