Currently reading: “Stories of hope: reimagining education”

I did not return to my practice of reading one chapter of the “Stories of Hope” book every day right after I returned from my vacation and just too much stuff happened everywhere, but luckily we are reading it in our book club, so now I needed to read until the end of part III before the meeting starts! Done is better than perfect, and that’s certainly also the case for this blog post…

Chapter 18: “Playing with learning: Adopting a playful approach to Higher Education learning and teaching” (Parkin, 2025)

In this chapter, a primary school- turned university teacher reflects on how they went from lecturing when they first started teaching at university to using different playful approaches (like LEGO and Playmobil). Two of their steps towards hope resonated with me particularly:

“Incorporate playful approaches to enhance the joy of teaching and learning, while supporting the development of student skills and knowledge” is advice that I can only echo and stress. I myself love a playful approach to teaching and learning (as you can see from my track record of using bingos, fortune tellers, tiny booklets, spinning tops from paper clips, even #KitchenOceanography as the whole concept), even just remembering all the weird things I have done over the years brought me joy! And I routinely encourage teachers to not take themselves so seriously and bring in playful things, too, but I can probably do better for the last suggested step towards hope in my role as academic developer, so not every teacher has to painfully carve out the space for it themselves: “Advocate for time, space, agency, and support to explore diverse teaching approaches“.

Chapter 19: “Making plants cool again: Re-introducing botany as a beacon of hope and innovation in our educational systems” (Surendran et al., 2025)

Plant science is, as the title implies, not seen as exactly cool these days, and is taught only to a very limited degree. This chapter makes the case that plant science can be super useful in many different ways and that we should find ways to give more people the opportunity to discover plant science and learn. They suggest botany clubs and community gardens (“Such clubs would help reignite a sense of wonder, as well as immediate relevance that transcends age and culture, to provide a sense of pride in having grown something of their own from seed to table.“), hands-on labs and school gardens, foraging, medicinal gardens, citizen science. Lots of cool ideas!

Chapter 20: “Putting theory into (proposed) action: The significance of campaign planning as an assessment task” (Di Marco Campbell, 2025)

This sounds like a super cool chapter! The idea with using campaign planning as an assessment task is to “offer our students opportunities to demonstrate hope through presenting their own visions for social change within their academic assessments“, for “radical visions of hope for enacting the change [students] wish to see in their world(s)“. It is happening in the context of an “Empowerment and Social Change” course (sounds like one that every program should include!), and the task is to use concepts and tools like engagement methods, leadership styles, and others, to “envision a meaningful form of action which they could, hypothetically, enact.”

In practice, students then submit social media posts, plans for websites and which key information would be included where, flyers, posters, videos. Some even identified local artists in the area where their hypothetical campaign would take place that they would wish to work with! So in a nutshell, students become super engaged with the project! Of course this needs to be embedded in reflection to integrate it with their personal and professional practice, too. This sounds like such a cool course that I would love to teach!

Chapter 21: “Freedom to learn: Developing autonomous critical learners through self- assessment in Higher Education (Di Domenico et al., 2025)

The authors describe how the focus on grades distracts from actual learning, and consider alternatives that build on three considerations:

• “overcoming enculturation”: there are a lot of often un-challenged norms embedded in educational culture, for example that the main goal of education is employment, or that grades need to be given by the teacher. These norms can be challenged and change over time, for example when co-creating assessment criteria with students, but it is really difficult to do so both for students and teachers.
• “developing mutual trust”: changing norms can be unsettling, require trust by the teachers and administration that students will not just give themselves high grades for nothing, and require that students don’t see their own involvement in assessment as the teacher being lazy. This needs a lot of communication between all actors.
• “facilitating metacognitive processes”, i.e. learning how to learn. This is often supported by reflection and journaling.

All very important stuff.

Chapter 22: “Hope in an art school” (Maier, 2025)

Maybe it is because I am out of time, or because I can identify with it so well, but to me, the discussion of how the mantra of “Do What You Love” can be really harmful when we start thinking about work as “not something one does for compensation, but an act of self-love”, when it becomes “the most elegant anti-worker ideology“, really stuck out in this chapter!

Done, in time for the meeting! :-D

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

Featured image from the ferry going home for Christmas! Love a day of limited internet, looking at the sea!

And a nice sunset doesn’t hurt, either, but why does it have to be so early?