Mirjam Sophia Glessmer

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 […]

Not gonna lie, when already the second line of an abstract contains reference to some guy-who-I-have-never-heard-of’s “conceptual distinction” of something, I find it very hard to motivate myself to continue reading. On the other hand, the title sounds so relevant that I still did it. This is my summary of what I understand from Van […]

I first wrote about Alasdair Skelton’s book “Our time: Finding Hope in a Climate Crisis“ before I had even read it, based on a presentation Alasdair gave online. This time round, I am looking at the story in a different way. Quite literally, as I am now reading the book rather than listen to Alasdair […]

In March, Rachel Forsyth and I were invited to give the keynote at Stockholm University’s teacher conference 2026. The conference theme was “teaching for democracy and sustainability”, and about a year before the conference, we ambitiously announced we would be talking about “Teaching for tomorrow — trust, agency and sustainability in higher education”. Now the […]

I finished reading bell hook’s book “Teaching to transgress. Education as the practice of freedom” a couple of weeks ago, and a sentence very early on resonated with me so much: “The classroom remains the most radical space of possibility in the academy“. Yes, that’s why my job is so important! When I read that […]

Even though I have nothing to do with health education whatsoever, this article really sparked my interest. Osborne et al. (2026) “highlight the importance of recognising that any aspect of curricula which explore human experience may overlap with students’ lives“, and that should be the case also in all of my teaching (see my thoughts […]

We like to think of the educational system as a meritocracy, where people are rewarded and advanced purely based on their performance, but at the same time most people know that it is not. In my own work we have looked at first-generation students, students whose parents have not been in higher education, and I […]

There is a youtube channel that I have recently discovered that I love and just have to share after I found myself looking at the view in the featured image, talking on the phone with my friend about the channel: A former game designer, Marie-Jo Leroux, now gives advice on effective gamification of learning in […]

There is a “study out of MIT” that somehow absolutely dominated my LinkedIn feed a couple of weeks ago (the source really typically given as “study out of MIT” or very similar, so I had to do some digging to find it! But maybe the clue should have been in the missing citation already…). Anyway, […]

Some reading about AI and assessment on the bus this morning… Quick summary so I don’t forget!

In the featured image above, you see water shooting out from underneath the bridge; down from a slightly raised reservoir upstream, over the weir, towards the sea.

In the context of mental health and higher education, who has a duty to care and what does care even mean? Byrom et al. (2026), in “Responsibility and other dangerous ideas: who cares, who can, and who should in higher education“, distinguish three ways to approach care:

Suter et al. (2026) argue that given the urgent need for action against climate change (and seeing that pretty much all available research shows that it doesn’t influence researchers’ reputation or credibility to be activists and scientists, those are not excuses!), more people should combine activism with at the same time figuring out what works.

In the preprint “How AI impacts skill formation” by Shen & Tamkin (2026), study participants are learning a new Python library either in a control condition or with an “AI assistant”, and researchers observe how the participants prompt AI during learning and measure completion times and quiz scores after learning. They find that “AI-enhanced productivity […]

I see statistics on social media every day about 1 in 3 young people who say that there are topics they talk about with an AI but not with another human. And almost all our students report that they use AI for learning, because they aren’t being judged, they don’t feel like they are bothering […]

How do we teach for sustainability when the class is huge and there is a lot of content to be covered? One really nice example is described by Monger (2022), who is “teaching oceanography by engaging students in civic activism“.

My friend Torge (who I had a super exciting rotating tank experiment project with, “Dry Theory 2 Juicy Reality“, check it out!), sent me the picture above and asked whether I had any idea what was happening there. I had not. But I had to find out! (Sorry to everybody else who wanted something from […]