Featured post

About my “Adventures in Oceanography and Teaching“

I started my blog in 2013 when I was a postdoctoral researcher in physical oceanography at the Geophysical Institute, University of Bergen. Right now, I am an academic developer at LTH, Lund University. Through all the changes in my career and life, my blog stayed, and grew with me, documenting my “Adventures in Oceanography and Teaching”, with varying foci over time.

I mostly write about

  • Interesting ideas on learning and teaching: I write about my own ideas and experiences, but also about literature, conversations, conferences, … that touched me in some way
  • #KitchenOceanographyexperiments that can be done with household items, and how to use them in teaching and science communication, and just for my own enjoyment (and most recently: freediving!)
  • #WaveWatching: hyper-local expeditions to connect theoretical concepts with the real world (here I show you lots of pictures from where I encounter water in my daily life, and I promise you’ll never look at water the same way as before!)

Welcome!

Currently reading: “The impact of grades on student motivation” (Chamberlin et al., 2023)

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 learning. So what does grading student work do for student motivation? My summary of Chamberlin et al. (2023) below.

Continue reading

Currently reading: “Teaching with rubrics: the good, the bad, and the ugly” (Andrade, 2005)

Doing my reading for the monthly iEarth journal club… Thanks for suggesting yet another interesting article, Kirsty! This one is “Teaching with rubrics: the good, the bad, and the ugly” (Andrade, 2005) — a great introduction on how to work with rubrics (and only 2.5 pages of entertaining, easy-to-read text, plus an example rubric). My summary of the article:

Continue reading

An office as an analogy to explain the three brain functions

In last week’s seminar on inclusive teaching, Louise Morreau, psychologist at the student health services at Lund University, gave an inspiring presentation and used such a great image to talk about how we can think of the brain’s functions, that I have to adapt it for myself right away (because that is how MY brain works).

Continue reading

Recommended watching: The myth of average (Todd Rose)

I recently watched “the myth of average” by Todd Rose, and he makes the most convincing argument for not designing teaching for “the average student” in hopes of that making it work optimally for all students, but instead looking at the extremes and making it work for everybody (you see where we are going here — Universal Design for Learning ;-)). I really enjoyed watching it and I think I might make it “recommended watching” in all upcoming courses. Check it out! Continue reading

Guest post by Kirsty Dunnett: The strength of evidence in (geosciences) education research: might a hierarchy do more harm than good?

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! :-)

Continue reading

Facilitating the Biodiversity Collage and reading more about serious games in teaching about sustainability

Last week I had the pleasure to work with “real” students (“real” in contrast to the teachers that I typically work with) and it gave me so much energy* to meet such wonderful young people (wow, I feel old). But it’s true! I facilitated the Biodiversity Collage and that gave me new motivation to read some more articles on how other people use serious games in teaching about sustainability.

Continue reading

How to create an Activity Bingo for teaching purposes

We have recently shared our experiences with a Bingo game to nudge students to make the most out of fieldwork (Glessmer et al., 2023), and I have created Bingos for other purposes, like designing courses with Universal Design for Learning in mind, or for my freediving club’s summer camp, or the iEarth GeoLearning Forum 2023 (yes, you can look forward to that!). And now, Kjersti and I have come up with the Bingo of Bingos: A “how to design your Activity Bingo for teaching purposes” Bingo! Because who doesn’t love a gamified approach to basically everything?

Continue reading