I have found very little research on how or why teachers trust their students — until Rachel sent me this article and now my mind is blown. I’ve heard people say before that development of university teaching is decades behind school teaching, and it looks like this might be the case when it comes to […]
While I have worked on student sense of belonging myself, I have also long been wondering if it is not much more complicated than that. Hamshire et al. (2025) write that “[w]hilst seemingly well-intentioned, these assumptions [about how if student only feel belonging, they will come to class and learn] don’t always engage with wider […]
In this article, we investigate sense of belonging of students in STEM courses at the University of Bergen, Norway. We find — as expected from studies in mostly a US context, but for the first time investigated in a Scandinavian culture with generally high gender equality — that women report significantly lower sense of belonging […]
The book Belonging and Identity in STEM Higher Education, edited by Howson & Kingsbury (2024) has been opened on my desktop literally since the day it was published. And in an attempt to manage work load while still reading most of what I want to read, I picked the two chapters that had the most […]
In my series of things-I-want-to-say-in-an-upcoming-workshop-but-suspect-I-might-skip-to-make-time-for-participants’-topics, here is a quick summary of work I did with Emily M. Christiansen, Sehoya Cotner, Robin Costello, Sarah Hammarlund, & Madeline Kate Kiani on STEM students’ sense of belonging in Bergen a while back. The results are very interesting, mostly because they are very similar to what we have read […]
Belonging is a tricky concept and there is no consensus on how to measure it. And belonging can be in the university environment, in a course, in a discipline, with peers… Many scales include an aspect of “fitting in”, which is then sometimes turned around on students as pressure to fit in with their peers, […]
When we talk about fostering student sense of belonging, it is easiest to think about in-person interactions. However, a lot of our teaching these days is online, and in high-enrolment courses. What can we do then? Two elements are critical: Teacher presence and interactive course design. Lim, Arif and Farmer (2022) present a case study […]
In response to my blog post about belonging, I was made aware of the current issue of the Journal of University Teaching and Learning Practice (JUTLP) on “Pedagogies of belonging in an anxious world“. So now I am determined to actually read that whole issue! My short summaries of the first 7 articles below.
Last week, Sarah Hammarlund (of “Context Matters: How an Ecological-Belonging Intervention Can Reduce Inequities in STEM” by Hammarlund et al., 2022) gave a presentation here at LTH as part of a visit funded by iEarth* that led to a lot of good discussions amongst our colleagues about what we can do to increase students’ sense […]
During February this year, I had a phase of reading about the “tyranny of participation“, and this morning on the bus I read the super interesting article “Beyond participation: reimagining silence as pedagogical presence in the university seminar” by Hope (2026), in which she reinterprets silence from a lack of participation to forms of participation […]
Most assessment practices are really not up to the job, but instead of completely rethinking, most often existing assessments are only tweaked and only marginally improved. Thomas & Widdop Quinton (2026) propose a way to do things differently by co-creating assessment in a Design Thinking-informed process in teacher education.
These last couple of weeks, I have been writing. A lot. With 19 different co-authors on several manuscripts in stages that range from first drafts to waiting for proofs (guess not so much writing recently on the latter, but anyway, they count to my “in progress” writing projects, too!). Many of these collaborations are described […]
I remember learning about the “four ears” in Schulz von Thun’s model, where the same message (e.g. “there is not a lot of light here”) can be heard as stating a fact (“it’s dark here”), as saying something about the sender (“I’m uncomfortable when I cannot see properly”), as saying something something about the relationship […]
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 so excited to finally read this book! There are so many things to think about, and so many practical tips and tricks; I totally recommend any online teacher to read it (and even in-person teachers, it will definitely be good for you to read, too!).
I am currently playing with FeedbackFruits as a plugin in our LMS, Canvas, mainly because they offer social annotation features to documents and videos and I am super curious about those, and then I am generally very interested in asynchronous online teaching and learning and how to make it a joyful experience. So the FeedbackFruits-hosted […]
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 […]
After reading about the “tyranny of participation” the other day, I looked into some more literature citing Gourlay (2015) to possibly get some ideas of how to encourage cognitive engagement without assuming what that would look like from the outside.
I just saw that Kjersti, Cathy’s and my article has been replaced as the latest publication on IJAD’s website, and that “What is good academic development practice? Introducing Australasian standards” by Harvey et al. (2026) has been published on the first of January this year! Which I of course have to read right away, because […]
Encouraging active participation in class is often a goal since it is correlated with better learning outcomes, but that became a lot more difficult when teaching had to suddenly move online in 2020. But maybe not all about online teaching was bad, or at least not for everybody?
The wide availability of GenAI has introduced challenges to relationships between teachers and students and within the respective groups (see for example Rachel’s and my work on that!). GenAI being able — and to unknown extent being used — to perform actions that before had to be done by humans creates different perceptions of what […]
This blog post contains the second part of the summary of the Hamann et al. (2025) book on “The Psychology of Collective Climate Action: Building Climate Courage” (summary of Part 1 here), but I want to start out with something I learned in Mel Robin’s podcast this morning, and that is the difference between “stress” […]
I read this book on my vacation and loved it! It is written for activists (that aren’t actually called activists, so that everybody can feel included whether they identify as activist or not, but I want to claim the word) and written by activists with large expertise in climate psychology research (and who also disclose […]
This is quite an intriguing article! Feeling more related (more belonging?) might make us feel less autonomous (except with people we are super close with)? If, motivated by self-determination theory, we try to give students opportunities to experience both autonomy and relatedness, and for feelings of relatedness/belonging, we force/encourage students to work with people they […]
We are using the book “Academic Teaching” by Elmgren and Olding in our “Introduction to Teaching and Learning” course. They came out with a new edition this year (2025; and to be fair, it was Elmgren and Henriksson before!) and we’ve got it in the office now! Here are my notes on a super quick […]
I have been reading a lot about care in teaching as the focus moved away from control and past belonging and mattering, so it was quite interesting to read a very similar discussion on engineering and sustainability!
Today I fell into this really weird rabbit hole on intentions and self-completion. My interest was first sparked by an article by Gollwitzer et al. (2009) on “When intentions go public: Does social reality widen the intention-behavior gap?”, where they find that disclosing intentions, if the disclosure is noticed by other people, can make it […]
I’m totally appropriating half of the title of Wilson et al. (2025)’s article, “Walking Through the Future in the Present”, as the name of an activity that I want to try to help teachers make the transition from imagining new ways of teaching to actually doing it. Inspired by what they did, but then also […]
I was super excited to get the notification that a recording of the presentation “Accessibility and inclusion in digital learning” by Marie Leijon had been uploaded to our Learning Management System! When Marie presented in the LU “Accessibility Tuesday” series last year, she provoked a lot of thoughts in me — many about the room, […]
What makes some students persist until they get a degree, despite experiences of failure, while others drop out? Typically, student persistence is explained with feelings of self-efficacy, experiencing a sense of belonging, and valuing the curriculum. Failure and dropout are often explained with personal (e.g., gender, grades at entry exam, preparedness, study habits), institutional (e.g., […]
In response to my post summarising Biesta’s purpose of education, my friend Terese sent me a speech David Orr gave in 1990 with a very similar vibe. Even though the details of the situation have changed since 1990 (and very much not for the better), the overall message is still as relevant now as it […]
Last night, I watched Gert Biesta on the Talking Teaching podcast (youtube video embedded below, above some wave watching pics! ;-)) and it is giving me language and images to use when talking about the purpose of education.
A good relationship between teachers and students helps students learn better, but it is very unclear what exactly makes a good relationship. Is it trust as we recently investigated, or is it a feeling of belonging, or is it care, or all of it, or something else? Nobody knows right now, and it gets even […]
Back in 2022, I worked on a really cool study on belonging and test anxiety together with the awesome colleagues you see in the featured image: aside from me taking the selfie, from left to right there are Emily Christiansen, Sehoya Cotner, Sarah Hammarlund, and Robin Costello working on coding responses (missing only Kate Kiani […]
I really enjoyed reading the Gravett & Ajjavi (2022) article on “belonging as a situated practice”, especially since I see a connection with other thoughts I am having on place-based learning (inspired for example by Holmqvist & Millenberg (2024) and several of Servant-Mikols works) that I cannot quite put my finger on yet, so it was […]
Hearing promises of “safe spaces” is usually a quick way to get me very angry. Safe for whom? And safe from whom? Probably not safe for minorities from dominant discourses… But then calling for “brave spaces” instead does not help a lot either. Brave spaces demand bravery from everybody, so far so good, but what […]
Yesterday, I had the pleasure of giving a keynote at the “Inclusive Lund University” conference, together with my colleagues Rachel Forsyth and Peter Persson. We talked about our recent study (that has been accepted for publication in IJAD, woohoo!) on what makes students trust teachers, and what that means for us as teachers.
Today, I spent my lunch break in an online presentation on “the importance of the room” given by Marie Leijon from Malmö University as part of the “Accessibility Tuesday” series at LU, and I am very glad I did! So many things to think about!
This afternoon, we had the second seminar in the “Inclusive Classroom” course, this time on “learning support for students with disabilities at LU”. Emma Carlsson and Philip Johansson visited us and told us about their work at the Disability Support Services (which are a unit at the Study Support and Learning group within Lund University […]
Yesterday I was one of those annoying people on their laptop during a seminar, taking notes during Maria Weurlander’s presentation on “When learning becomes difficult: Emotional challenges in education”, and then our discussions on the topic. But it was just too interesting and relevant not to!
Students can engage in higher education in different ways: behavioral, emotional, cognitive, or in any combination of those. Traditionally, this is seen as engagement with the curriculum inside the classroom, but increasingly the view of student engagement is widened to include forms where students take more ownership of their own learning, for example when becoming […]
The assumption that teacher-student relationships are important has been around for a long time and is probably uncontested. But when it comes to describing what exactly makes a good relationship, there is no consensus yet, and many aspects, like a sense of belonging, or the teacher caring, or trust in teachers, have been investigated. Here […]
Kirsty “gave me the task” to (that sounds harsher than it was — she pointed me to a super interesting article and we agreed to both) do a concept map following the Kinchin et al. (2018) article on “Researcher-led academic development”, so before I could do that, I had to read… And that spiralled a […]
Following up on “PART I: Education and the challenge of building a more sustainable world” that I summarized here, here comes PART II: Choosing teaching content and approaches
You might have noticed that I am exploring different concepts of what makes a good teacher-student relationship recently: belonging, caring, and most recently, trust. Why am I not just picking one? Short answer is that teacher-student relationships are really complicated, and those three are only some of the facets that are important, but there is […]
Yesterday, a colleague pointed me to Microsoft Reflect, “A well-being app to support connection, expression, and learning”, and I had a quick play. It’s a tool to support reflection in educational settings (something that I am thinking about a lot in the context of teaching sustainability). Since it is not designed specifically for use in […]
As a very privileged continuing-generation student, I did occasionally notice how it helped when, during my studies, people in key positions at the university recognised my last name, or when I got very detailed instruction and support in writing letters to committees (actually, maybe I did not even write those letters myself, now that I […]
I have been part of running a course called “the inclusive classroom” this fall. I learned a lot of new things both from other instructors (for example Louise’s excellent “office” metaphor for brain functions) and from participants (for example Damien & Rhiannon’s “design for the edges” below, a very inspiring read!). And now at the […]
iEarth’s current journal club paper deals with collaborative exams as learning opportunities, and this fits perfectly with Anja Møgelvang’s recent article on cooperative learning, where we can find inspiration for how to make this work in practice. So here are my thoughts!
Sitting on the ferry back to Sweden, I listened to one of my favorite podcasts, “tea for teaching“. The episode was on the role of faculty engagement, specifically showing students that the professor cares, and how three emails can already make a difference!
Last summer, I sat in the botanical garden with Rachel Forsyth and had a super interesting conversation about the importance of trust between teachers and students, and what I do to help build it with my own students — as an interview as part of one of her research projects. And now there is a […]
Yesterday I went on a lovely after-work walk with one of my favorite podcasts (check them out, all highly recommended!), and I want to mention two podcast episodes Iistened to recently, through the lens (mixing my metaphors here, but you get the idea) of how to show students that they matter to us as teachers.
This article has repeatedly been making waves in my circles over the last couple of months: “How well-intentioned white male physicists maintain ignorance of inequity and justify inaction” by Dancy & Hodari (2022). My take-away in a nutshell: Ignorance is bliss. It’s totally worth a read!
I read the book “Relationship-rich education. How human connections drive success in college” by Felten & Lambert (2020) almost a year ago and found it super inspiring, but also very hard to summarize. You should check it out yourself, of course, but here are my key take-aways.
When I was recently thinking about emotions and teaching about sustainability, I came across the term “emotionally-responsive teaching” that really spoke to me, even though I did not really know what it was. Trying to read more about it it turns out that maybe it isn’t as clear a concept as I had hoped, or maybe […]
We recently ran a round-table discussion on “How to teach students who are not “mini-me”s (and don’t want to be)” at the Lund University Teaching and Learning conference last year, and now I am trying to write a conference paper on what we discussed there. So naturally, I am starting out by re-reading the literature […]
The German NGO “Streitgut” recently posted a youtube video with a reference to an article on how activating different identities influences willingness to help, that I then had to check out because we are working so much with belonging and ingroup/outgroup issues right now. My summary of that article below: Identity and emergency intervention: How […]
After all the thinking about belonging I’ve done recently, I came across the article by Janke et al. (2017) today that measures “social identification with academia” as Venn-diagram with varying degrees of overlap of the circles for “self” and “academics”, which I thought was neat. The reason I found the article was because I was […]
Yesterday morning, we had a very interesting “teaching breakfast” as part of #CoCreatingGFI: Anja Møgelvang introduced us to Cooperative Learning. Anja is a PhD student at the Center for Excellence in Biology teaching BioCEED, and in addition has 15 years of experience in high school teaching, and 5 in teacher education, so who better suited […]
As we are continuing working on our “sense of belonging” project at UiB (read more about my thoughts on students’ sense of belonging and what we can do about it here; and the general idea behind this project is to first get a baseline of student experiences, and then figure out how to make all students […]
Today is my blog’s 9th Birthday! How incredible is that? I’ve published 1,300 blog posts (this one is, in fact, exactly number 1,300!). Who would have thought that this would come out of me being a bored babysitter because A&I(happy anniversary, btw!)’s kids are always just too well-behaved and were sleeping, and I was on the […]
On the “tea for teaching” podcast episode on trauma-aware pedagogy that I wrote about here, the book by Lang (2021) on “Small teaching: Everyday lessons from the science of learning” was recommended. It sounded so interesting that I decided I had to read it*, and I am glad I did! The book is full of small (really, […]
Today was the first time in half a year or so that I listened to a podcast (other than the Academic Imperfectionist, where I make sure to not miss an episode, and, occasionally, the Amazing If Squiggly Careers, which I also find super helpful in navigating my own squiggly career), and I will take that […]
I’ve recently started including the topic of microaggressions in my academic development workshops, and here is one reflection on the topic (including the super helpful sandals&boots-analogy by Presley Pizzo). I initially wrote this for a newsletter to all teachers at my faculty, but then I also wrote a second – much more hands-on-“three-things-to-do” – version, […]
Starting out with a wave watching picture from my walk before the first day of the conference. When in Aarhus, I had to get in the 90 minute walk before the first presentation and visit the infinite bridge! Last week, I attended my first ICED, The International Consortium for Educational Development’s, conference. And since I […]
Already at the time of posting, I have added to my to-read list for an updated version of this post. Please let me know of any additional literature I should include, and of any other comments you might have! As it says in the title, this work is incomplete and in progress! “The rights perspective, […]
This summer I had a fun little side project: I was co-supervising a Bachelor thesis in geography at Kiel University! Janina Dreeßen, with Katja Kuhwald as her main supervisor, did an excellent job, and I am presenting her work at the #FieldWorkFix conference today. If you can’t join later, here are my slides and what […]
The first lecture I attended as a student wasn’t actually a regular lecture, even though I did not know that at the time. It was an intervention. Together with about a hundred or so new students, I sat nervously in a lecture theatre in the physics department. I had enrolled in physical oceanography, which was […]
