Currently reading: “Stories of hope: reimagining education”
I am challenging myself to read one chapter of “Stories of hope: reimagining education” per day. Here is how it has been going for the first 4 days! In this series, I am summarising the “stories of hope”, but I am also reflecting on the practice of daily reading. I started out by collecting the daily notes in one longer blog post (which might make it easier to find them later when they are all in one or two places), but at the same time, daily posts would make the daily reading more obvious and put a little more pressure on me to keep reading… So we’ll see how this develops!
Day 1. Inverting the distribution of Higher Education: From top-down to student-led (Heller and Leeder, 2025)
Heller and Leeder (2025) propose a vision of education that resonates with me so much! They want education to be distributed and inclusive, meaning in their case that open-access courses are offered by universities (where the academics contributing to develop and run the courses would gain “academic rewards” through some sort of peer-review system, which would be valued like research rewards) and students would access the courses online, receive guidance from a mentor affiliated with the course, possibly in a local hub, and receive points that are given and accepted by the network of partner universities. They start their chapter with fictional quotes of what students would say about how they can flexibly access quality education from anywhere (meaning they can choose to move to or stay wherever they want to live, and reduce the carbon footprint that would come with commuting), but still have the social component in a local hub. But also for the academics, this model would feel more rewarding, both because they can contribute to a meaningful project and live their creativity and collegiality, and because their contribution would be valued by their students and their employers.
I feel like I have already seen this model come to life in some places, for example with the Contemporary Approaches to University Teaching MOOC. Maybe not fully — and I wouldn’t know since I just know the product but wasn’t part of the process — but it seems that the vision is very similar. It is also the vision that we have for our MOOC — for it to be open to, and without costs for anyone, bringing together a network of colleagues as contributors, with guidance for facilitators of online and local communities. Reading this chapter feels inspiring and re-energizing and like it is carrying me a little bit, confirming to myself that I am on the right track with my work!
Day 2: A critical pedagogy for a critical time (Booth, 2025)
I am tired and it is Friday evening. I don’t want to read something that requires attention. But I also feel that investing a little bit of energy into reading about reimagining education might be a good transition into the weekend. And I want to read a chapter a day, so I cannot already stop before day 2!
In this chapter, Booth (2025) proposes to position the university as a hub in the community, creating spaces for dialogue — appreciative enquiry — in a World Café approach (but not the annoying one where you are pushed from table to table, scribbling on flipcharts with thick markers without time to think; they describe it, amongst others, as “listen together for patterns, insights and deeper questions“), where the questions are co-created with students and the wider community influence what to teach, what research to invest in, etc.. For this, universities — and academics — need to move their focus from enhancing collective and individual academic reputation towards what the community needs. “Moving the focus of university praxis away from the market and towards the community, there is the potential to produce meaningful dialogue that questions the necessity of social inequality—and it is more likely to bring about social change“. They describe how these things happened during the pandemic in some places — maybe not by design, but maybe more out of perceived necessity — but conclude that example by writing that “[k]indness, and the local knowledge that underpins it, can be transformational.”
And it is true, I have also seen transformation come out of local knowledge and kindness, and yes, this is a hopeful chapter, even though I am so tired! But now I am wondering, should I make this a daily practise, or should it be a daily practice on workdays only, so skipping the weekends and when I will be on vacation soon? Maybe the latter one is the more healthy thing to do for myself in the long run…
Day 3: “Serious fun: Reimagining Higher Education from a humane perspective” (Honeychurch, 2025)
So turns out that I am so curious about this new practice that I need to continue reading today, on a Saturday. And that was already before I read the title of today’s chapter, now I am even more excited!
Honeychurch (2025) starts out with a Nietzsche quote “what does not kill me makes me stronger“. I had no idea it was Nietzsche who said that, even though this is a quote I regularly use, usually speaking to myself, in the context of “ok, now let’s push through this, let’s activate whatever grit we have available!”. I also did not know the first part of the quote: “From the military school of life.” So let’s unpack all that is wrong with this attitude towards, with a military model of, education, which is pretty much everything. Honeychurch (2025) distinguishes with the military-type grit from a healthy resilience, an ability to bounce back, that we of course want to foster, where we want to have education that is full of passion, joy, and excitement.
So how do we do that? Honeychurch (2025) suggests starting with language. If we talk about “sink or swim“, suggesting that students need lifelines, it sounds like education (and within that, passing one randome exam somewhere) is a matter of life or death, and that is also how we and our students are going to perceive it [edit 7/9/2025 to add: interesting, now that I am re-reading this today before publishing it, it strikes me how I just wrote about another self-fulfilling prophecy that we should maybe avoid this morning, “assessment drives learning“…]. If the language becomes more friendly and playful, “bouncing back” from a challenge also becomes much easier than “recovering from a struggle“. One term that might help with that is “serious fun“: “The idea is for learners to want to engage in learning for its own sake because it is enjoyable“. Assessment stands easily in the way of this, but switching to mastery-based assessment solutions where students can resubmit after feedback until they are happy with the result could be one way of making it less stressful, while also getting rid of the idea that only summative assessment is important, while formative is just a waste of time.
Towards the end, Honeychurch (2025) has a call to action: “As individuals, we might not know how to change our educational institutions, or we might think that we don’t have the power to effect meaningful change, but if we all work together, then maybe we can start to push back against the devastation that neo-liberalism is inflicting on academics and academia. Injecting moments of serious fun might not be a panacea, but it should help us and our learners to develop an attitude of resilience.” The first two suggested steps towards hope then are “Learning and teaching in Higher Education should be an enjoyable adventure” (and I love this — this is how I think of it, as you also see from my blog’s tag line “Adventures in Oceanography and Teaching” — on my blog, I am sharing my personal learning adventures!) and “Teaching and learning can be serious fun—and our hopeful task.” And with this I end for today, too: I am glad I read this on a Saturday — this is indeed a practise that gives me hope!
Day 4: “Fostering hope and humanity through transformative education: A call to reimagine mentorship” (Chugh et al., 2025)
In this chapter, mentorship in itself is told as a story of hope: “As mentors share their wisdom and experiences, they illuminate a path of growth for mentees, instilling a sense of optimism that transcends traditional boundaries.” This happens, according to Chugh et al. (2025), ideally in a choice-based, yet structured programme with training opportunities, but where both mentors and mentees still retain space for spontaneity and authenticity in their relationship. What I find especially interesting is the call to ensure for mentorship to be “integrated into the institutional culture and recognised as a cornerstone of professional development“, evaluated to stay “responsive to the evolving needs of participants“, funded, supported by administration, time allocated to it, and well-advertised (which I find very important, so that it is not only the already well-connected that find out about it and benefit from it even more) and welcoming to everybody.
What I noticed a lot in this chapter is that context matters. The study was conducted in the medical field in India, so I felt that it was really difficult for me to imagine what mentorship is typically like, both in the field and in the country, and therefore how revolutionary different the proposed model is now. I participated in the mentorship program Via:Mento Ocean at Kiel University years ago and I feel like that the vision described here is very close to my experience in that program. Which is actually in itself a hopeful story — a lot of good stuff already exists, at least in some places!
Day 4 still, chapter 5: “Creating hope through T-shaped values” (Abrahamson et al., 2025)
What’s better than blogging on a Sunday morning? So one more chapter because it’s fun! (But I would like to point out that between the previous one and this one, I actually read another article and posted a blog post about it, and edited and posted another one, so I am trying to resist getting sucked too much into this book!)
Abrahamson et al. (2025) describes their vision of “T-shaped” students, with a broad mastery of “essential non-academic life skills” like problem-solving, communication and global citizenship on the horizontal bar of the T, and then deep discipline-specific knowledge on the vertical pillar. To teach such T-shaped students, we also need T-shaped teachers that can teach both the width and the depth. Abrahamson et al. (2025) suggest that being a T-shaped teacher means integrating SoTL into ones practice: “Embracing context as a foundational element, these hopeful educators leverage their roles in various settings to drive positive change in learning and teaching practices. Their aim is to challenge conventions and celebrate diversity, creating inclusive spaces where students from different contexts and cultures can learn with and from one another“, and to me another connection to SoTL here is to share about what you find works in your own context with other teachers, and learn from them about what works in their context, so you can apply it back to your own. And being a T-shaped teacher is also about how we approach students: “The T-shaped educator operates with an ethic of care, viewing students not merely as recipients of knowledge but as individuals on a transformative journey of empowerment and social responsibility“.
When speaking about Teaching for Sustainability, we often run into the paradigm of “miles deep, inches wide” that Lidgren et al. (2006) found dominates Lund University (and probably most universities) — how can I teach about sustainability when I really only know about my own tiny little are of expertise? Here, I think the T-shaped teacher model can be very helpful to consider. Nobody wants to take away anyones right to be the most expert expert in their tiny area, and nobody expects anyone else to be experts in all of sustainability, either. But balancing the expertise with at least a surface-level breadth of knowledge and skills — about sustainability, but also about how to teach key sustainbility competencies, how to create welcoming and inclusive and equitable classrooms — seems a much more fair expectation of ourselves and others.
Lastly, I really liked Abrahamson et al. (2025)’s last step in the list of steps towards hope: “Embrace curiosity about what you, and your learners, are doing and explore why.”
Day 4 still, chapter 6: “The human and nothing but the whole human: With head, heart, and hand” (Tasler, 2025)
Since the head-heart-hand model for teaching sustainability is one of my favourites, I am curious about this chapter! It’s Sunday afternoon and I am avoiding doing the dishes, for full disclosure… But already the abstract is confirming that this is a great choice of procrastination activity: “educators require as much care and support as their students, as both are engaged in ongoing identity negotiations through learning and teaching“. So true!
Tasler is an academic developer who noticed that over the last years, we (as a profession) have put more and more effort into “supporting students to make it through the process rather than students having the headspace for playful experimentation“, which is a sad observation that is also true in my context. Tasler (2025) suggests that to turn this around, we need to first develop ourselves as teachers, “to embark on the journey towards unconditional positive self-regard“, to then be able to have a positive impact on our students, too. So they use the head-hand-heart model to suggest how we do that!
Head — we are collectively overworked and overloaded, and this might even be part of our professional identities. This has worsened during and after the pandemic, where we now entertain two parallel structures for teaching but also collegial networking and pretty much everything else: The in-person and digital ones. Tasler (2025) asks “How have many of us had time to reflect on which areas of physical presence and which areas of digital presence are the most effective to keep and which ones we should let go of, during the last years of reactive firefighting?” And then even gives us the “official space to think about this“, and points for reflection.
I was going to read this chapter and publish the blog post and go to training, but now I think this might take more time… For me, there are definitely structures that I built during the pandemic that I need to reconsider. For example, working part-time in two countries (none of which is my home country), in two different educational systems, different professional roles, with different colleagues and students, with different languages (none of which is my own or English), you get the point. This was exciting during the pandemic, but has been overwhelming for quite some time, yet I have not quit. Nor do I want to completely, because there are so many great things I get to contribute to, for example my ongoing course on Teaching for Sustainability with Robert! But still, there are things that I might be able to prune and purge, and the last group of prompts might be helpful there: “Can I sit with the idea that there is no such thing as catching up? How does this feel? How can I work with this concept?” Does that mean that I don’t actually need to read every Teams message at every university? Mind=blown.
Hand — here, Tasler (2025) suggests considering doing SoTL, but not just as research, but as intentional practice. “In this framework, the focus is not on squeezing in a research-style project, but on embedding the evidence of our teaching practice and its impact as an integral part of being an educator“, and Tasler (2025) suggests SoTL as an act of self-care! And looking through the examples they give for what that could look like, I am very much doing: scrolling social media for inspiration for my teaching, intentionally making time to talk with colleagues, reading articles on teaching and learning, noticing what goes on in my teaching, and keeping notes of all of that (and you are reading the collected works right here!). This practice builds evidence of our teaching practice, but is also the basis for future decision making. The next step is then critical engagement with what we noted, and making it available to others (also happening on this blog, at least some of the critical engagement…).
Reflection prompts here include “Whose expectation am I fulfulling here?” which I find really difficult. I am working on quite a few projects where my main motivation is to support the project’s PI because I like them as people, and I have felt for a while that I should cut back there, or at least consider that seriously and find other ways to support them and maintain the relationship…
Heart — This is about teaching as identity negotiation. Tasler (2025) cites Kelchterman (2009) with “Who I am in how I teach is the message”, which somehow hits home, similarly to “the emotional work is part of the work” a couple of days ago. “Unconditional positive regard“, “meeting the other with unconditional respect and the knowledge of our shared humanity“, is a way to meet others’ reactions with kindness, even though what they might bring to us might not be constructive or pleasant. And, even more difficult, bring this to ourselves, too! And here, the reflection prompts of course include “How could you exercise unconditional positive self-regard?” And with this question I will leave you for today…
Abegglen, S., Heller, R. F., Madhok, R., Neuhaus, F., Sandars, J., Sinfield, S., & Gitanjali Singh, U. (2025). Stories of hope: reimagining education. https://www.openbookpublishers.com/books/10.11647/obp.0462
Pictures from this morning’s sunrise swim!
This is just so magical!
Even with water drops on the lens…
And a foggy look back towards the shore.
