Search: trust

Before Christmas, Rachel and I recorded an interview with my online teaching role model Niya Bond for OneHE, and it has been released now! What do you think?

What we believe about climate change often does not depend on what we know about climate change, but on what people around us believe. This makes it really difficult for climate scientists to make their warnings heard and acted upon by people outside their own bubble. In their article “Who do we trust on climate […]

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 […]

Rachel Forsyth and I are in the process of doing focus group interviews with students and teachers at Lund University on how their relationships to each other are influenced by the availability of GenAI. We are going to present a glimpse into the analysis of what teachers said in the first five interviews at LTH’s […]

I recently watched a really interesting seminar by Kari Steen-Johnsen (UiO), who is working on the impact of digitalization on democracy. She gave an AI Lund online seminar on “Concern and Enthusiasm for AI Across the Globe. The Role of Trust” (recording here).

Trust is important for learning and it’s the teacher’s job to create conditions in which trust can develop, but can there be too much trust, to the point where it inhibits critical thinking? Kelland (2025) looks at this question, starting from a definition of trust as an attitude towards other people that we hope will […]

One-on-one tutored students perform 2 standard deviations better than students who learn via traditional instruction. Can LLMs achieve similar results when acting as tutors? Typically, help-seeking behaviour is influenced for example by self-efficacy and task difficulty, availability of tools and their perceived usefulness, and possibly trying to balance independence and learning with reliance on a […]

Trust is often perceived as risky — what if students cheat, what if they don’t put in the effort we want them to put in, what if they don’t learn what we want them to learn — and therefore, there are dozens of rules in place that very much restrict students’ freedom and guide them […]

Since reading Macfarlane’s chapter the other day, I am thinking a lot about the influence of institutional policies (rather than teacher actions in direct contact with students) on trust. Now I am reading Carless (2009), who writes that “accountability can be a source rather than a remedy for distrust“.

Very pleasant working day in Kristianstad yesterday, so today I am doing a sprint, reading stuff about academic misconduct, trust, and GenAI! Here we go with lots of short summaries.

This is a very interesting (pre-ChatGPT!) study: Bochniarz et al. (2022) investigate highschool students’ concerns regarding perceived negative intentions of AI, i.e. “cynical hostility” towards AI.

When we teach, we have all these policies of how students need to let us know how they used GenAI, and of course the same holds for research publications. Research also finds that students expect a two-way transparency (Luo 2024), meaning they would like for us to disclose how we use GenAI.  In general, the […]

What is it with all the distrust in students? Macfarlane (2022) answers this question before the raise of ChatGPT when things probably got even worse… But that doesn’t really matter, because his main argument is that there is really very little evidence that cheating has gotten any worse over time, despite the introduction of the […]

The title of Goldshtein et al. (2025)’s editorial, “The role of learner trust in generative artificially intelligent learning environments“, sounded super intriguing. The question of trust in GenAI is so relevant; do students trust GenAI, and to do what, and why? And what does that do to their relationships with their teachers?

Conspiracy theories are everywhere, and people who believe on one conspiracy theory are highly likely to believe also in others, even if they are completely unrelated to the first one. How come? In the article I’m summarising here, Brauner et al. (2023) investigate the traits that correlate with believing in conspiracy theories.

Cheating is not a new phenomenon by any means, but with the raise of GenAI, it seems to be easier than ever, and teachers seem to be more suspicious than ever. But in contrast to direct plagiarism where a source can easily be identified, the use of GenAI to produce text in assignments can mostly […]

This article was probably the easiest and most fun to write in my whole career so far! Trust between students and teachers is a really engaging topic, so when Rachel first interviewed Peter and myself, we jumped on the opportunity to continue discussing it with her, and then also with students, who we started to […]

My own work on what makes students trust teachers was inspired by an interview that I did with Rachel Forsyth (in the botanical garden shown in the featured image, and half of it was inaudible on the recording due to wind!) for her and other’s study on what teachers do to build trust with students. […]

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.

Lewicka (2022) investigates how trust in higher education institutions is build (and rebuilt). This is a much broader question than the one that we have investigated, but I recognize many of the elements that we saw in our study, too. I had to redo their figure in order to process it, and here is my […]

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 […]

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 one slide about a recent study I did with my colleagues Rachel Forsyth and Peter Persson when we got the chance to ask a question in the student-led “SpeakUp Days” survey at LTH. And it turns out: Student trust teachers who show that they care about students (most typically […]

Now that my working assumption is that trust is essential for student learning, what about trust that our “students”, i.e. the participants in our academic development workshops, have in us? Does that work in a similar way, or how is it different?

After having read about “trust moves” that teachers report making (Felten et al., 2023), and currently working on figuring out what makes students trust their teachers (Persson et al., 2023), I now really need to sort out my reading of “trust” literature, which means putting it in my external memory, aka my blog. So here we […]

I am currently doing this super interesting research project on trust with my colleagues Peter Persson and Rachel Forsyth. Rachel and colleagues developed a model for “trust moves” that teachers employ, but are those moves actually effective in building trust? What makes students trust their teachers? That’s what we investigate in a pilot study that we’ll […]

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 […]

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 […]

When browsing Zeivots et al. (2026)’s article “Assessment design through co-design: reimagining assessment design practices in higher education“, one sentence caught my eye: “Students could see how their input mattered without the expectation that every suggestion would be enacted“. Since I am currently really interested in partnership and negotiations there, I then had to read […]

This morning, I ran a workshop for university teachers called “Teaching for Sustainability: Practicing for a sustainable future through sustainable pedagogies“. You can look at all the slides here, or see some of them below together with a quick summary of what I said about them. Most of what I am writing below I have written […]

I keep coming back to Karen Costa’s question “What if the critical #AI skill for our era is not how to use it, but how to resist it?” In the Poulidis et al. (2025) chess study, 40% of those who learned with AI and could press a button to get help said that in hypothetical […]

The other day I wrote about a paper on “sycophantic AI” and its implications on human interactions, and I am reminded of that daily when I hear kids on the bus mention how they talk to “chattis” (which seems to be a common nickname for ChatGPT around here) about all kinds of topics (which is […]

AI detection products cannot produce output to reliably destinguish between an AI generated text and one written by a human, and they reflect biases (for example more often flagging non-native speaker texts — see also my recent post about the “GenAI writes like me” post). We’ve known that for a while now, so why summarize […]

Since listening to Gerry’s defense of his PhD thesis the other day, I have been thinking about partnership a lot, and how we need to practice partnership also in order to practice democracy. And I vaguely remembered having seen an article where the typical “ladder” is wrapped into a circle, so that rather than being […]

Another fun GenAI article, today Cheng et al. (2025) on AITA stories and sycophantic models!

Last week, I had a great day listening first to the trial lecture and then the defense of Gerald Decelles III’s PhD thesis, and it was so inspiring! Both his trial lecture and defense were such excellent presentations that I have to compile my notes into a blog post to process my thoughts. In the […]

While some people see big potential in GenAI to make learning and teaching more inclusive — by leveling the playing field through providing people with personalized instruction and support that they might otherwise not get — it is of course not as easy as that. GenAI is only as good as the data it is […]

I did a lot of reading in preparation of our own MOOC, here are some summaries on how MOOCs work specifically when it comes to teaching sustainability.

Several of the advantages of asynchronous learning really came through for me while watching a recording of the Centre for Online and Distance Education’s webinar on “the power of asynchronous learning” (watch on youtube). First — that I even had access to a recording of this seminar and had not just missed it because I […]

When the picture in the featured image (a screenshot from the presentation of Alasdair Skelton’s presentation of his book “Our time: Finding Hope in a Climate Crisis“, watch the recording on youtube!) came up yesterday at the beginning of my lunch break, I felt it in my stomach. I don’t know anything about the coastline […]

Somehow there is often talk about educational ecosystems and everybody seems to have an intuitive idea of what that means. I decided I needed to find some references that actually provide definitions or at least more context, and that wasn’t as easy as I had thought! I am summarizing two papers below, though.

I love it when Christmas text messages from colleagues are recommendations for great papers, thanks, Rachel! :-D

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 […]

In the Affective Learning Model, the premise is that learning is shaped by emotions. Teachers that show care and concern positively influence students’ emotions, so they are more willing to engage in learning. In our own work, we have shown that affect is the category of trust moves most frequently mentioned by students. Generally, relationship […]

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 […]

I am sitting on the ferry sailing towards Germany, with new-found appreciation of the Öresund bridge and its harp-style carrying cables… And I am listening to a conversation with Michelle Miller on one of my all-time favorite podcasts, Tea for Teaching, on “teaching from the same side” (what a nice, figurative bridge to the featured […]

I am reading the course literature for a sustainability course that a colleague shared with me, to see if I want to use some of it in a similar course we are developing at the moment. Here are my notes to myself.

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” […]

The other day I got to go on one of the coolest study trips ever (well, at least on the coolest that I have been on after I stopped going to sea… :-D) — my colleague Ivar and his bridge building course visited the Öresund Bridge, and the artificial island Pepparholm, where the bridge connects […]

I just listened to episode 500 of “Squiggly Careers” on “Why Bringing Your Authentic Self to Work Is Bad Advice“. They explore the concept of “effective authenticity […] where you project a version of yourself that resonates with others whilst maintaining a semblance of genuineness“. This sounds a bit off-putting at first (“a semblance of […]

It all started out with me listening to one of my all-time favourite podcasts, Teaching in Higher Ed, to an episode on designing video with intention and authenticity. Actually, it started before, with me reading about “Relational Pedagogies” by Gravett (2022), but I could not find a way to start a blog post about the […]

I recently started the daily practice of reading the book “Stories of hope: reimagining education” (first blog post here), and this is how it continues from day 4 to day 11 (and where I take a break for the foreseeable future to focus on rest and recovery).

Including the student perspective in quality assurance of teaching is required by law in Sweden (and other places), and this means that they are asked to respond to surveys at the end of every course, have seats on all boards of education and others, and have strong, institutionalised student organisations. But of course there are […]

This is a really interesting article, both because of the recommendations they give and because of the “asynchronous, anonymous, and discussion-focused” method they use, “tailored to best fit the needs of autistic individuals“!

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 really enjoyed reading about GenAI as role playing, an analogy Shanahan et al. (2023) suggest to explain what GenAI does while avoiding thinking of GenAI agents as human-like.

Authentic assessment is often understood as students doing practical, real-life, mostly outside-of-university tasks (and universities are often perceived as not part of the “real world” even though they should be, as Lockard & Bloch-Schulman (2023) also discussed). Recently, authentic assessment is even sometimes called upon as the antidote to students cheating with GenAI.

The other day, I went on a one-day “writing retreat”. I generally work well from new spaces (I am writing this from Copenhagen central station as I am taking a break from “real” work and waiting for a connecting train) and especially moving spaces (so looking forward to being on the train for a couple […]

This is an article that I find interesting both because of the method (searching reddit for accounts of student experiences as data sources!) and because of the findings, which I’ll summarise below.

You might associate the name “Wenger” with Communities of Practice, as do I. So then it’s very interesting to read Wenger et al. (2011), where they distinguish between a community (of practice — a learning partnership in a specific domain with a shared identity and commitment to learning together) and a network (which is about […]

My notes on GenAI stuff are getting shorter and shorter, and that’s because I am reading the articles with a specific application in mind, and only writing down what seems relevant to answer that question. So don’t use these notes-to-self as summaries that tell you all you need to know about those articles, that’s not […]

When I read about “eliciting wonder and joy via invitations to see the world anew” in the abstract, I knew this article would be squeezed in before I continue with my scheduled reading list for the week. I have previously written about authentic assessment, and most recently about assessment for inclusion and distinctiveness, so this […]

Yesterday I wrote about how disclosing the use of GenAI erodes trust, but that it is even worse to get caught using GenAI without having disclosed it, So how do students handle this? In their study “Examining Student and Teacher Perspectives on Undisclosed Use of Generative AI in Academic Work“, Adnin et al. (2025) investigate […]

I’m in my podcast phase again… And still on the Tea for Teaching show! Just listened to an older episode where Anna Logan and Ann Marie Farrell talk about pedagogy for large classes.

More reading on trust in GenAI, today on how and why do students use GenAI feedback. Henderson et al. (2025), “Comparing Generative AI and teacher feedback: student perceptions of usefulness and trustworthiness“, use responses from approximately 7000 students to understand their thinking regarding to their use of GenAI.

I recently interviewed a bunch of teachers about thresholds they have faced and overcome, or are still facing, regarding teaching for sustainability. One question was where they would turn for inspiration and support if they wanted to develop their teaching. Despite me asking this clearly in my role as academic developer in their institution who […]

Kjersti Daae and myself have a poster at MNT today (kindly presented by Anna-Marie Strehl). Below is the text we wrote for the conference proceedings.

In preparation of the next meeting of our book club, here is my summary of Part III of Becoming an Everyday Changemaker: Healing and Justice at School by Venet (2024) (summary of Part I here, Part II here)!

I have been critical of the “impostor syndrome” — that everybody seems to be talking about everywhere these days! — for a while because it puts the responsibility of dealing with systemic biases on the individuals that need to be “fixed” (see here for women, and here more generally), and in Gonnaught (2024) the focus […]

On Thursday, I was lucky enough to be invited to attend the workshop “How to deal with climate anxiety as teachers and researchers?” co-organised by the Environmental Politics Research Group (EPRG) at Lund University and the Research Group on Green Politics (REGROUP) at the University of Copenhagen, that brought together very interesting presentations, first on research […]

On Friday, I participated in a workshop on the “pedagogy of hope”, that Diana Holmqvist from Linköping University ran. Since she is one of the two authors of my current favourite article on “carving space to learn for sustainable futures“, I absolutely wanted to attend despite feeling overwhelmed and overworked and close to burnout. And […]

I found the book “The Influencer Industry: The Quest for Authenticity on Social Media.” by Hund (2023) in something I read recently, and somehow the title spoke to me. Despite having been a fan for a long time (and blogging quite a bit about research on, and practice of using, social media), I’ve been using […]

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 […]

New super interesting guest post by Kirsty Dunnett, on playful higher education!

Today I present to you another artefact stemming from my new social media habits (browsing bluesky on the bus to work in the morning, usually finding at least one article that I then read; combined with not posting to Instagram or Facebook any more and instead dumping all my (n)ice pictures directly here on my […]

I now finished reading Venet (2024)’s “Becoming an Everyday Changemaker: Healing and Justice in School” (where I understood that “the process is the point“, and where then helpful tools like “Vent diagrams” were introduced). Now, reading the third part of the book felt so empowering. The Talmud quote that I modified for this post’s title, […]

The other day I read something (that I cannot find again) along the lines of “GenAI creates art for people who hate art, music for people who hate music, reading for people who hate reading”, and I have been thinking about that a lot. I have explored what GenAI can and cannot do (for example […]

This morning on the bus, I came across the article “Choreography and improvisation in hybrid teaching” by Lamb et al. (2025). I previously wrote about dance as a metaphor for how much work a teacher vs a student should put into learning, and I have been thinking a lot about how also the room influences […]

Some time at the end of last year, I came across something on Marcus Luther’s BlueSky that stuck with me. It was something related to his slow reading of “Becoming an Everyday Changemaker“, and reflections on that and how he applies it to his own teaching. I then ordered the book and followed his podcast […]

When my friend Robert sent me the link to a MOOC on “Paths of Transformation: Sustainability in Higher Education” (in German only, sorry!) yesterday, I jumped at the opportunity to take it. Here are some reflections.

I’m continuing my reading of Venet (2024)’s “Becoming an Everyday Changemaker: Healing and Justice at School” (online access for LU!). I first wrote about the first couple of pages here. In a nutshell, my main take-away then was that “the process is the point”. We cannot achieve healing and justice in school (which is what […]

We had spent the last month reading, coding, discussing, re-coding, discussing some more, re-coding, discussing even more, and then consensus coding free-text answers of 449 students, and submitted the manuscript. “Just for fun, let’s plug it all into ChatGPT!” Rachel said. And so we did. And after 4 seconds, out came an analysis that looked […]

Who uses GenAI, what for, and why does it matter? That’s what Anja Møgelvang (who also does lots of other fascinating work, for example on cooperative learning) and colleagues explore in the article “Gender Differences in the Use of Generative Artificial Intelligence Chatbots in Higher Education: Characteristics and Consequences”. They used responses of almost 2700 […]

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 […]

This morning, I read the article “Carving space to learn for sustainable futures: A theory-informed adult education approach to teaching” by Holmqvist & Millenberg (2024) and it really resonated with me. They write that “education for sustainability is, by necessity, value-based, place-embedded and emancipatory, seeking to help learners develop a desire to connect – to […]

Today one of my colleagues told me that a very common reaction she gets in her department is that people do not want to talk to her about sustainability because “that makes them feel guilty”, and also say that is why they do not want to talk about sustainability with their students. To me, that […]

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 […]

My awesome colleague Rachel Forsyth (of our amazing “trust” paper) sent me a message saying “unsurprising but important research” and then a link to Wang et al. (2024), and that is a good summary. In a study of more than 30 million grading records in a Learning Management System, Wang et al. (2024) find that […]

A couple of days ago, I attended the workshop “Rethinking student belonging and well-being at universities” (recording available here) organised by the Erasmus+ project BELONG. Here are some thoughts!

We’ve been given quite a substantial reading/watching list for the “Climate Activism 101” course, so let’s start with two things that aren’t actually on it, but maybe should be, before actually digging into the list. My summary of all of it here!

I am still trying to figure out ways to use GenAI to enhance instruction, not just as a “faster google” like some students described it to me, but in a way to really support learning. So I have been playing with Claude as a personal instructor for a couple of days. And I like it!

When I recently summarized an article that claimed that Large Language Models (LLM) are “bullshit”, I got a lot of strong reactions offline and online about that term, and a comment recommending the article “Beware of botshit: how to manage the epistemic risks of generative chatbots” (Thanks, Ian!). In that article, Hannigan, McCarthy and Spicer […]

Clearly I am not completely done with Social Media yet, so much to read, so much to think about…

In April, I will be teaching one afternoon in a course on “developing and leading courses at LTH”, on what we traditionally called “belonging”. Here are my thoughts so far. Would love some feedback!

In one of my favorite podcasts, Teaching in Higher Ed, I came across and interview with Karen Costa (and I wrote about another interview with her on another one of my favorite podcasts a while back, go check that out!) about articulating our Scope of Practice. And since I am feeling extremely overwhelmed at the […]

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, and the first part and second part of the summary of “PART II: Choosing teaching content and approaches”, and my first part of a summary of PART III — Designing and implementing teaching and learning practices here comes my last bit […]

I’m currently thinking a lot, and talking with a lot of students, about what builds trust between students and teachers: Mostly that teachers ask questions, listen, and respond. But then someone pointed out how students appreciate the “human-like” interactions that students have with ChatGPT, and Rachel sent me a study that also shows that.

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

Our work as academic developers at CEE is based on how we think that relationships between teachers work, and using that to influence their conversations in a way that improves teaching. Here is (part of) the literature we base this understanding on (a lot of this from in-house research, or close collaborators).

I’m currently talking about trust between students and teachers at every opportunity I get, and recently Torgny pointed me to an article that he wrote a while back that I wasn’t aware of, on “Teachers interacting with students: an important (and potentially overlooked) domain for academic development during times of impact” (Roxå & Marquis, 2019), […]

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 […]

For a couple of months now I have been skating dangerously close to where workload becomes unhealthy, but I recently had a really good experience planning out work (i.e. generating TONS of great ideas of what we definitely want to do) and negotiating priorities (i.e. cutting ideas back to what is realistic(ish)) for both myself […]

When I was teaching the emergency “how to teach online” courses online during the pandemic, I used to refer to an article by Rapanta et al. (2020) a lot, where they talk about teaching, cognitive, and social presence, which I want to link to in another post I am working on. But either I cannot […]

Fear can lead to fight, flight, or freeze responses — or so we often hear. So far, I was under the impression that fear was generally not a good emotion to create in students since from what I had read, it hinders learning. But my colleague Léa recently sent me the meta-analysis by Tannenbaum et […]

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!

An argument that I encounter a lot is that student assignments need to be graded in order for students to put in any effort at all. But is that true? In the literature, grades have been connected to stress and anxiety for students, more cheating, less cooperation, less thinking, less trust — so ultimately less […]

Below, Kirsty is discussing how it can potentially discourage efforts to improve teaching and teachers when we focus on the strength of evidence too much, and don’t value the developmental process itself enough. Definitely worth reading! :-)

The subtitle “A guide for intellectuals, introverts, and nerds who want to be effective teachers” really intrigued me, and below is a collection of thoughts on it.

This morning, I attended Rachel Forsyth’s presentation on “Handling the impact of AI tools: LU working group recommendations”, and here are some notes.

If we want to do a valid assessment of what a specific student can do, we need to know what information they had available when producing the artifact we are evaluating, who they could communicate with, and what tools they had access to. And we might want to restrict access to some or all of […]

This week, I gave a presentation on “supporting teachers at LTH to teach about sustainability” to an EU project with partners from universities in lots of different countries, and in the beginning I had to explain what my role of “academic developer” even entails, since this kind of job doesn’t exist at many universities. And […]

“Reach everyone, teach everyone” — that title caught me right away, and I’m glad I ordered and read the book by Tobin & Behling (2018)! They manage to make Universal Design for Learning feel like a manageable task, and one that can be done one small step at a time, rather than something so huge […]

Especially when it comes to teaching about climate change or sustainability more generally, it seems unavoidable to really consider mental states. While the dominant discourse around climate change has been about external, biophysical factors for a long time, and climate change was thus seen as a challenge that can be solved by technology and policy changes […]

Yesterday, I had a really inspiring chat with a colleague and they mentioned a model by Ellström (2001) that really helps think about how much freedom vs guidance we want to give students. That’s something that we obviously need to consider all the time, especially if we are working towards co-creation: For what tasks or […]

One reoccurring topic in all discussions around how to teach sustainability is how we can turn frustration into constructive action. I haven’t found a comprehensive answer, but I’ve been reading!

Over the last couple of weeks, I’ve talked to many people that are in one way or other involved in teaching about sustainability at high school or university level. One thing that has struck me is how many seem to be teaching about sustainability without actually believing that we can and will “fix” the big […]

Welcome to my wave watching week! :)

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 […]

In today’s edition of “what article are you currently inspired by?“: an article that my colleague Michael sent me. “Do Learners Really Know Best? Urban Legends in Education” by Kirschner & van Merriënboer (2013) How we teach is, of course, influenced by what we believe about “what works” in teaching. However, persistent urban legends are in […]

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, […]

I wrote about involving students in creating assessment criteria and quality definitions for their own learning on Thursday, and today I want to think a bit about involving students also in the feedback process, based on an article by Huisman et al. (2019) on “The impact of peer feedback on university students’ academic writing: a Meta-Analysis”. In that […]

Summarising my reading on “communities of practice”, and my views on how this framework might be useful for thinking about change in our context, for our iEarth/BioCEED-led course on “leading educational change”… Communities of practice are often used as a model for “learning through participation”, describing how culture influences how knowledge within organisations is built […]

On October 21. and 22., I attended the fourth iEarth GeoLearning Forum (GLF). The GLF is an opportunity for geoscience teachers and students from all over Norway to meet up and learn from and with each other. This year, the GLF was organised in a hotel close to Oslo, and attended by more than 100 participants, […]

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 […]

I’ve been posting over on my #WaveWatching Instagram @fascinocean_kiel and finally got around to copy&pasting all the pics over here. Enjoy catching up on what I’ve been up to!

I am currently teaching a lot of workshops on higher education topics where participants (who previously didn’t know each other, or me) spend 1-1.5 days talking about topics that can feel emotional and intimate and where I want to create an environment that is open and full of trust, and where connections form that last […]

For March’s #SciCommChall, Alice gave us a super cool challenge with really helpful instructions to come up with our own “personal branding statements”. And here I am following her instructions and coming up with my own personal branding statement. A little late, but better late than never… 1. Write down three words you’d use to […]

A couple of Sundays ago, I wrote about why I chose to post selfies on my scicomm Instagram @fascinocean_kiel, even though my topic is wave watching (check out that blog post here). And then this week I came across a very recently published study on “Constructing and influencing perceived authenticity in science communication: Experimenting with […]

Another summary post of my wave watching Insta @fascinocean_kiel! Enjoy! What is going on in the picture below? Just from looking at the picture I could only guess, but luckily I took dozens of pictures of that location with slightly different angles and at different times, so I could figure it out! To the right […]

“I don’t want my face on the internet!”, “My science should speak for itself, it shouldn’t matter who I am as a person!”, “I just don’t like what I look like in pictures!”, “People won’t perceive me as professional when I include selfies in my science communication work!”: There are many reasons for not posting […]

My scicomm Instagram @fascinocean_kiel is back! As in it’s something that I am putting more thought into again. While it started off strong almost two years ago with daily posts written specifically for Instagram, I’ve been in a bit of a slump. For a while, I just posted pictures from current blog posts with a […]

On living the dream — and getting there, through the nightmare (ok, not quite as dramatic, but you get the idea) I’ve been a fan of Marie Forleo‘s for many years now, watching all the youtube videos she puts out, re-listening many of the episodes on her podcast, forever sending links to friends who absolutely […]

My friend Pierré and I started working on this article when both of us were still working at the Geophysical Institute in Bergen. It took forever to get published, mainly because both of us had moved on to different jobs with other foci, so maybe it’s not a big deal that it took me over […]

Many big research projects and institutions regularly spend a lot of money on things like pens, mugs, canvas bags, or even pool noodles (I kid you not, one of my former employers did that!), all typically branded with the institution’s or project’s logo, that they give away in large quantities. Many of those are certainly […]

This blog post is meant as guidelines if someone other than me might have to set up this demonstration at some point… Have fun! :-) Setting up the stratification If I am working fast and nothing goes wrong, this takes almost 2.5 hours. Make sure you have enough time to set this up! Filling the […]

In a presentation about science communication I gave on Monday, I recommended a couple of resources for scientists interested in science communication. For example the amazing climatevisuals.org for advice on which images to use to communicate about climate change (plus lots of images that even come with explanations for what purpose they work well, and why!). And […]

Mirjam S. Glessmer & Pierré D. de Wet Abstract Even though experiments – whether demonstrated to, or personally performed by students – have been part of training in STEM for a long time, their effectiveness as an educational tool are sometimes questioned. For, despite students’ ability to produce correct answers to standard questions regarding these […]

Let me tell you the story of the picture below. I was walking along Kiel fjord with some friends and we saw this mama duck with all those tiny cute ducklings. We stopped and oooo’d and aaaaa’d and they were just so adorable!! But the after a while they swam on and we continued walking. […]

So how do we teach about the Coriolis force? The following is a shortened version of an article that Pierre de Wet and I wrote when I was still in Bergen, check it out here. The Coriolis demonstration A demonstration observing a body on a rotating table from within and from outside the rotating system […]

In most of my blog posts on outreach I focus on how to run the _perfect_ experiment. And while I still think that’s awesome, I recently read an article by Johanna Varner (“Scientific Outreach: Toward Effective Public Engagement with Biological Science”, 2014) that made a lot of points that I have definitely not stressed enough […]

How do we measure whether teaching interventions really do what they are supposed to be doing? (Spoiler alert: In this post, I won’t actually give a definite answer to that question, I am only talking about a paper I read that I found very helpful, and reflecting on a couple of ideas I am currently […]

In my last post, I talked about a model for stages of group development. Today I want to talk about how you can use this model when you are trying to make a group work together well. First, it is important to recognize that every team will go through most of the phases. Except for the […]

Last weekend I had the chance to fill in for a colleague and help run a training course for student tutors. One of the topics was what kind of group processes they should be prepared to encounter and how to deal with them. Here is more or less what I told them about Tucker’s 1956 model […]

My awesome colleague Marisa ran another workshop on Problem-Based Learning (PBL) in which I was lucky enough to assist. For the last workshop for people who are planning to use PBL in their teaching, we used the solar eclipse to build a case around. Since this time we weren’t as lucky to have a solar eclipse happening on […]

I’ve talked about Bloom’s taxonomy of learning objectives before but I have to admit that I’ve only gone back and read the original Bloom (1956) book and the revised taxonomy by Anderson & Krathwohl (2001) very recently. And it has been so worth it! I’ve spent the better part of last year coaxing people at work into […]

Why you need a good storm in order to perform with a group. We’ve all made the experience of having to work in groups. Sometimes it is fun, sometimes it is less fun. But you can actually influence how well group work is going to work out, and a first step is understanding that there […]

How do we talk about climate change in a way that will engage young people? I don’t know about you, but I sometimes get slightly tired of talking about climate change. It is a super important topic, one of the most important topics we can talk about, yet it sometimes feels like so much hard work and […]

My experiences with giving a lecture via Skype. As I mentioned in yesterday’s post, I taught two lectures at the University Centre of the Westfjords, Iceland, in 2012 while physically being in Norway. How did that work out? Teaching via Skype is a great option for when travel is not in the cards, be it […]