Published! Dunnett et al. (2026) “Impacts of three discipline-specific fora for discussing teaching and learning”

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.

We have the

• GeoLearning Forum, an annual meeting of Norwegian geoscience teachers and students. This is iEarth’s fully catered 2-day flagship event that brings together 100+ teachers and students
• Journal Club, which is a monthly lunch-time meeting at UiO to discuss (typically short) papers. I have never attended, but I have read several of the suggested articles (and written blog posts about them)
• Teachers’ Breakfast, which happen about monthly at GFI and developed from external input-focused to now discussing topics that teachers bring themselves

In the article, we analyze barriers to attendance (unsurprisingly, most often mentioned are no time and scheduling conflicts), indirect engagement (some participants discuss their experiences at the events with people who haven’t attended), and impact. The GeoLearning Forum leads to the biggest changes of teaching practice, because at a ratio of attendance of about 50% staff to 50% students, teachers start thinking about students as co-creators in new ways. The Journal Club doesn’t have a big impact on teaching practice, but since teachers become more aware of the huge amount of literature they can potentially consult it changes the way they see teaching and their roles as teachers. And since it is artifact-based, it easily allows for engagement with the topic even for people who cannot attend (like me reading and blogging, and then other people reading my posts). The Teachers’ Breakfast also influences teaching practice, but not as much as it changes thinking about how practice could potentially be changed. So that’s an interesting next question — as awesome it is that we managed to establish the format that a lot of teachers attend regularly and suggest their own topics for, and to create a feeling of community of teachers, how can we support transfer of the new thoughts into actual changes to teaching practice?

This was an interesting study, great that it is now published! Read the actual paper here! :-)

Dunnett, K., Lundmark, A. M., Glessmer, M. S., Daae, K., & Sodemann, H. (2026). Impacts of three discipline-specific fora for discussing teaching and learning. International Journal for Academic Development, 1–14. https://doi.org/10.1080/1360144X.2026.2658427

Featured image from a recent dip. Taking pictures of water is so much more fun if there is sun playing on it and it’s not just grey all the way to the horizon where the grey sky starts…

And of course the obligatory picture of this view: