Category: literature

In thinking about who trust whom and why (not), it’s always interesting to see how people talk about other people, in this case how teachers talk about first generation students.

Sitting on the ferry back to Sweden a week ago (was it only a week ago?!), I listened to the episode “Sit Spot Mindfulness” on 60 second SoTL, and then had to immediately (or at least as soon as I had internet close Møn) read the original publication by Bitting et al. (2026).

I’ve seen lots of summaries and references to the “WONKHE report” on AI, so I had to check it out. It is based on focus group interviews and a survey with responses from more than 1k UK students, and it is a bit difficult to read because it is not always clear what results are […]

Wals (2022) argues that the classical key competencies for sustainability are not sufficient, that we also need to learn to disrupt, and then learn from the resistance against that. Interesting!!

Stratford et al. (2025) describe current pedagogies that fail to engage with the polycrisis (“meta-crisis” in their article) and thus contribute to mental health struggles in students as “pedagogies of misery”, which, they argue, we should disrupt by means of “Anthropocene Intelligence”.

Another article that I read just now and that really resonated with me is Laidlaw (2026), where they explore teachers’ reactions to GenAI as an identity crisis, not a skills gap.

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 […]

This is a really great book with lots of food for thought to reflect on teaching practices and bring more humanity into teaching. Since I have thought about trust and ways to build it quite a lot, as well as about inclusive (or even better, nonclusive) teaching and many related concepts, my notes below are […]

The central question in Kotz et al. (2026)’s preprint is about “understanding how to increase evidence-consistent beliefs and support for empirically grounded policy responses” on contested societal issues. They investigate whether conversations with LLMs can change peoples’ minds, and if so for what types of audiences it works best. They build on other research that […]

Check it out! :-) Glessmer, M. S., Årvik, A. D., and Daae, K. (2026). Students co-creating their Community of Inquiry. Oceanography 39(2), https://doi.org/10.5670/oceanog.2026.e208.

I always like studies that use authentic data from out in the wild. I think it is so elegant to look at what is happening in real life rather than trying to generate data and then having people not respond leading to too small sample sizes, people misunderstanding the question (which might also have been […]

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.

Didn’t feel like I had time to go for a morning dip, but made the time and am glad I went, both because that’s always awesome and because it gave me the chance to listen to the episode “How college students make, keep and lose friends with Janice McCabe” on one of my alltime favourite […]

With the presence of AI, oral exams have made a strong come-back because it is harder to cheat on them. But they come with lots of problems, too: A lot of students struggle with anxiety that prevents them from showing all they know, it is difficult to assess fairly, and it is unclear whether oral […]

When I hear the term “vision”, I always think of the former german chancellor Helmut Schmidt, who is quoted as having said “people with visions should go see a doctor.” With that out of the way — sustainability science has recognized that positive visions about the future are “influential, if not indispensable, stimulus for change” […]

Teaching involves a lot of emotional labor — handling of our own and others’ emotions — especially when dealing with controversial or emotionally difficult course content, but also just in general because teaching is all about dealing with other humans. Emotional labor is also unequally distributed, with women, younger teachers, and minorities carrying most of […]

Most of the time when I have written about trust, it was about trust in the relationship between people. But trust also has other dimensions. For example, “Institutional Trust Load” according to Spencer (2026) describes trust which “is structurally relied upon to sustain administrative processes under conditions of ambiguity, inconsistency, or deferred resolution“. So trust […]

Just read this (3-page only, so check it out yourself!) article and think that it is super helpful! While we often talk about climate action as either an individual problem OR a structural problem, as behavior change OR technological solutions; in this paper it is clear that we need AND CAN DO all of the […]

I urgently need to close some tabs in my browser for my mental health, but I cannot close them without looking at them individually because surely there is a reason for why they have been open for so long, so here is a bunch of quick summaries of AI stuff.

I’m reading some of Lund University’s visiting professor in Sustainability in Higher Education Zoe Robinson’s work. Some brief(ish) summaries below. It is such an opportunity and inspiration to have Zoe in Lund!

Since sustainable development is a wicked problem, it is not too surprising that also students in our classes come with different ideas of how to meet the challenges, and that that can lead to conflicts. I am doing some reading around how people deal with this in response to a colleague asking me what to […]

I am preparing a self-study module for students in their 4th or 5th year in engineering programs taking a course on the polycrisis and the stuff they will have to deal with in their professional lives, and below is a first draft. This module is a voluntary offer for students in addition to in-person opportunities […]

Yesterday, I participated in a workshop by the Swedish Education for Sustainable Development working group, and it sparked a lot of thoughts. The workshop was one of those formats where the agenda is set at the beginning of a meeting, based on what topics participants bring. In my breakout group, we discussed whether it is […]

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 browsed this book and I think it is SO USEFUL, especially probably for people who don’t have a ton of experience with leading staff development workshops.

Climate emotions are often discussed as individual. Although it is often suggested to talk about emotions and to find supportive community to process and deal with them (see for example the steps talk and unite here), most often there is no discussion of how emotions are shaped by society in the first place.  Peters et […]

Sunday at the pool, waiting for my training to start, I read about the first half of the book “the existential toolkit for climate justice educators: how to teach in a burning world“.

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.

In a world where more and more people carry trauma, we need to assume that there are students in all our classes that do, too. How can we make sure to teach in ways that reduce harm, avoid re‑traumatization, and support all learners’ capacity to engage and learn?

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 […]

I like to think of myself as fairly pragmatic, so I was intrigued about the body of literature that uses pragmatism in SoTL or teaching and learning more generally. While I found a lot of it to be a slightly more elaborate version of “do the best with what you have”, so really not very […]

I always advocate for talking about sustainability even when you feel not ready to do it, because I believe that not talking about things is never a good solution. But I realized in a conversation last week that I am making a lot of assumptions about how comfortable and skilled people are in moderating conversations, […]

Loved reading this short piece in which 419 qualitative researchers from 32 countries write very directly that they reject GenAI in reflexive qualitative research because 1. GenAI is incapable of meaning-making; 2. Qualitative research needs to be done by humans; and 3. GenAI is too harmful to the environment and to the human workers who […]

Not gonna lie, when already the second line of an abstract contains reference to some guy-who-I-have-never-heard-of’s “conceptual distinction” of something, I find it very hard to motivate myself to continue reading. On the other hand, the title sounds so relevant that I still did it. This is my summary of what I understand from Van […]

I first wrote about Alasdair Skelton’s book “Our time: Finding Hope in a Climate Crisis“ before I had even read it, based on a presentation Alasdair gave online. This time round, I am looking at the story in a different way. Quite literally, as I am now reading the book rather than listen to Alasdair […]

I finished reading bell hook’s book “Teaching to transgress. Education as the practice of freedom” a couple of weeks ago, and a sentence very early on resonated with me so much: “The classroom remains the most radical space of possibility in the academy“. Yes, that’s why my job is so important! When I read that […]

Even though I have nothing to do with health education whatsoever, this article really sparked my interest. Osborne et al. (2026) “highlight the importance of recognising that any aspect of curricula which explore human experience may overlap with students’ lives“, and that should be the case also in all of my teaching (see my thoughts […]

We like to think of the educational system as a meritocracy, where people are rewarded and advanced purely based on their performance, but at the same time most people know that it is not. In my own work we have looked at first-generation students, students whose parents have not been in higher education, and I […]

There is a youtube channel that I have recently discovered that I love and just have to share after I found myself looking at the view in the featured image, talking on the phone with my friend about the channel: A former game designer, Marie-Jo Leroux, now gives advice on effective gamification of learning in […]

There is a “study out of MIT” that somehow absolutely dominated my LinkedIn feed a couple of weeks ago (the source really typically given as “study out of MIT” or very similar, so I had to do some digging to find it! But maybe the clue should have been in the missing citation already…). Anyway, […]

Some reading about AI and assessment on the bus this morning… Quick summary so I don’t forget!

In the context of mental health and higher education, who has a duty to care and what does care even mean? Byrom et al. (2026), in “Responsibility and other dangerous ideas: who cares, who can, and who should in higher education“, distinguish three ways to approach care:

Suter et al. (2026) argue that given the urgent need for action against climate change (and seeing that pretty much all available research shows that it doesn’t influence researchers’ reputation or credibility to be activists and scientists, those are not excuses!), more people should combine activism with at the same time figuring out what works.

In the preprint “How AI impacts skill formation” by Shen & Tamkin (2026), study participants are learning a new Python library either in a control condition or with an “AI assistant”, and researchers observe how the participants prompt AI during learning and measure completion times and quiz scores after learning. They find that “AI-enhanced productivity […]

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 […]

How do we teach for sustainability when the class is huge and there is a lot of content to be covered? One really nice example is described by Monger (2022), who is “teaching oceanography by engaging students in civic activism“.

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 […]

Intriguing title! Lodge et al. (2023) discuss a “quadrant typology of human and machine interactions for education” with the two axes individual-to-collaborative and extending-to-offloading. Calculators fall into “cognitive offloading“, meaning it’s individual and offloading.

I have been thinking a lot about what platform to host our MOOC on and how that decision locks us into a lot of things, for example to certify completion of the course and with that requirements to use quizzes and peer-review, but also more generally the ways in which participants can interact, can navigate […]

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 […]

Let’s read about everybody’s favourite topic: The polycrisis! Here, I am summarizing a framework that takes “polycrisis” from buzzword to useful concept.

I am still on the “tyranny of participation” trip, this time reading about students’ experiences in peer discussions and inequities in roles that students take on in those discussions. Generally, we assume that students learn through peer discussions, but we also know that not all students learn equally in that format. What are the barriers […]

Usually we like to think that self-regulation in feedback seeking and learning is a good thing: When students get stuck, they can ask for support that helps them overcome the difficulty and continue learning. This can become problematic, though, when students ask for hints too early and often, get used to that behaviour, and then […]

This is one of these texts that I wish I had known earlier: to give to students to help them understand their learning, but also to teachers as a super easy introduction to how to think about difficulties in learning: “Making things hard on yourself, but in a good way: Creating desirable difficulties to enhance […]

Innovation seems to still be one of the favourite buzzwords around, and in teaching, it often means fancier technology, larger group sizes that purportedly have even better learning outcomes, and all of that, of course, based in evidence showing typically large numbers of some sort. In this framing, Thirkell (2026) writes, “[p]edagogical innovation risks becoming […]

As I am thinking more and more about the details of our upcoming MOOC on “Teaching for Sustainability”, I am less and less convinced that I actually want to have automated certification at the end. So Emerson (2026) on ““It Honestly Made Me Want to Work Harder”: Student Evaluation of Using Ungrading in an Online Asynchronous […]

Ok, now I am hooked on student engagement and what it really means, or, more importantly, should mean! So here are quick summaries of three more articles that I read to make sense of the “tyranny“.

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 distinguish 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 […]

Torgny told me to read this, so I did… I only skimmed most of the details of the US landscape of centers for teaching and learning, but I found it really helpful to read about the Hub-Incubator-Temple-Sieve (HITS) framework (short introduction of the four lenses also in the evaluation guide for centers for teaching and […]

Shreedhar et al. (2026) is a really important study on climate action and social media strategy: When you want to get people to do something (for example sign up for a talk), it’s much better to tell them to do it (“do not stand by idly!”) than to ask them for support, and it is […]

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.

Fitton et al. (2026) describe a the difficulties that teachers describe in working with a project aimed at decolonizing the curriculum, and that might partly explain why there is so little progress on decolonialization.

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!

Very intrigued by that title, especially since I just wrote about student engagement as something positive, that all universities claim to want! Gourlay (2015) describes that traditionally, student engagement is described as behavioural, emotional, and cognitive engagement with a learning situation (and possibly beyond), other people in the context, and the content — often set […]

Why is it that even though most people agree (and most university policies state) that active student engagement is desirable, there are still large lecture theatres being built? Loughlin (2025) explores the “theory of action”, which distinguishes between what people or organisations say they do (for example in mission statements or policies; “espoused theory”) and […]

No matter how sick I am of GenAI, this is a cool paper! Magnani & Clindaniel (2025) look at lots and lots of GenAI generated texts and images — both generated with a generic prompt and with one specifically asking for scientifically correct representations — depicting Neanderthal behavior and compare it to what science actually […]

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 […]

Late last year, we had a “Transformation Thursday” lunch on philosophy of science, led by a colleague. Now we will follow up on that with a journal club on Nagatsu et al. (2020)’s “Philosophy of science for sustainability science“.

It is really difficult to know if students have learned what we wanted them to learn, and especially when we have to collect evidence of that learning for a valid assessment — the best we can do is look for proxies that we take to stand for bigger and more complex outcomes. But “[t]he proxies […]

Such an interesting question! Here are three pieces of writing that are currently on my mind.

I am still deep in my asynchronous online learning phase, and the paper by Yang et al. (2026), “Applying a Think-Pair-Share (TPS) Structure to Asynchronous Online Discussions (AODs): A Mixed Methods Study”, looked super interesting!

In an old blog post, I wrote about the importance of facilitation/teaching presence in the context of the pandemic and people teaching on video calls from their homes. In there, I refer to one article that refers to lots of older sources, and I think now I finally read one of those…

Ignoring for now that an important aspect of a teacher giving feedback to students is what it signals about the relationship — that the teacher cares enough about the student and their learning to invest time and energy into understanding the students’ thoughts and figuring out how to help them improve — how good a […]

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.

I’ve dabbled in this when I was working with science communication, but now in the context of developing our MOOC, I am interested again in how we can utilize micro-opportunities for learning — commute times, waiting in a doctor’s office, even bathroom breaks. There are so many times when people are on their phones and […]

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.

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 […]

There are often tasks that everybody agrees are important, but that for some reason do not get implemented. In Sundström & Holmberg (2018)’s paper “When implementation falters: The challenge of having peripheral issues stick in organisations” they investigate this issue in the context of information security, but I am (surprise!) mostly curious about what we […]

Why does highlighting positive behaviors sometimes inspire others to similar actions, and other times provoke them to do the exact opposite?

“Sustainability educators face a conundrum in the midst of climate collapse: what if to teach truthfully is to break hearts? What if teaching with the most current and rigorous research is tantamount to inducing hopelessness, anger, and anxiety?” This is the introduction to Williams and Grain (2025)’s article “Teaching in a Time of Climate Collapse: […]

I’m getting a bit sick of reading GenAI papers, but I guess not reading is also not an alternative… And this one is actually very interesting!

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 […]

I have a bunch of articles that were recommended during our LTHEChat on teaching sustainability last year that have been sitting in a special folder, waiting for a day like today where the best thing to do (right after a dip and a looong, comfy breakfast) is to curl up on the couch and read. […]

How do the experiences that students make when seeking feedback influence their motivation for doing it again?

I was recently sent Clara Hallgarth’s Master’s thesis on “Educational Methods for Fostering Sustainability Competencies: A Toolkit for Integration of Sustainable Education in Engineering” (thanks, Clara!) and really enjoyed reading it; it’s a  treasure trove of great references and even better ideas! I am summarizing my main takeaways below, but keep in mind that this […]

One reason why sustainability education is so difficult is that in contrast to many other things we routinely teach, we cannot just take some teachable product, but need to transform teaching itself. Teachers need pedagogical knowledge of sustainability, and Sandri (2022) explores what “pedagogy” even means in the context of sustainability education, because while often […]

LTH has been running Pedagogical Inspiration Conferences since 2003, with the 13th conference happening in December 2025. I was really impressed by the number (and quality!) of presentations on teaching sustainability there (see my summaries of the contributions below).

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

Published on the 23rd of December! Check it out here! K. Daae, C. Bovill & M. S. Glessmer (23 Dec 2025): How academic developers can use modelling to promote active learning and co-creation, International Journal for Academic Development, DOI: 10.1080/1360144X.2025.2602863

Ok, “How to SoTL” is only the working title of the paper and the name of the Teams group in which we all collaborated, the actual title ended up being “Developing a scholarly approach and contributing to conversations about teaching and learning“. But: that paper was just published last night in Oceanography!

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 a nutshell: “hand movement can boost impact“! And especially if one uses “illustrator” gestures to make content easier to understand, one is perceived as more competent and thus more persuasive.

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 […]

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?

Most teachers I talk with recognize that asking GenAI to grade student exams is a terrible idea, but when it comes to formative feedback, there are a lot of teachers that think that that is maybe not such a terrible idea. Students can get feedback much more promptly than if a teacher has to read […]

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 […]

A while back in Bergen, I had a writing session with three of my favourite colleagues, on a project which we have nicknamed “how to SoTL” — writing a low-threshold introduction to SoTL for busy teachers, with the idea that people who might be interested in publishing in TOS Oceanography or the Nordic Journal of […]

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 […]

Hockings et al. (2018) write: “Over recent months and years, the balance between contact hours and independent study time has been one focus of attention, the underlying assumption being that fewer contact hours means poorer value for money and lower quality learning experience“. And that assumption is super common! But: “The number of contact hours measures […]

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 […]

What competences do educators need to Teach for Sustainability? Corres et al. (2020) review 14 articles that describe educator competence frameworks (all of them from within Europe, but not chosen for that specific reason!). My main takeaways below! 

Today, I finally watched Anne-Kathrin Peters’ keynote at the Teaching and Learning conference at the University of Bergen (check it out here), and in it she mentions the article “Pain and pleasure in working with sustainability and transformation at a Technical University: An exploration of the role of educational developers through collaborative autoethnography” by Peters […]

Together with my colleagues Steven Curtis and Terese Thoni, I ran a workshop at the Lund University Teaching and Learning conference 2024 — and now the proceedings have been published!

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 […]

Teaching in Higher Ed with host Bonni Stachowiak is really one of my top 3 all time favorite podcasts. Today, I listened to her talking with Simon Cullen and Danny Oppenheimer in an episode on “rethinking student attendance policies for deeper engagement and learning“, and they talk about it in a way that really resonated […]

I was listening to an episode of “dead ideas in teaching and learning” on my walk back from dipping this morning (now you can really see that fall has come!) and I really enjoyed it and can well imagine using as at “recommended listening” to prepare participants for workshops on AI and/or assessment.

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.

I really had a hard time getting started with this article by Meyerson & Scully (1995) on “tempered radicalism and the politics of ambivalence and change“. They introduce that ““Tempered Radicals” are individuals who identify with and are committed to their organizations, and are also committed to a cause, community, or ideology that is fundamentally different […]

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” […]

In the book “The Psychology of Collective Climate Action: Building Climate Courage” by Hamann et al. (2025), I came across Wandercoaching, a peer-coaching initiative for sustainability initiatives at universities. They share the materials they use here, and I really liked the “tools for your sustainable university” guide full of different methods — many of them […]

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 article investigates five schools in Belgium and Sweden doing “open schooling”, a very specific approach to developing and conducting teaching and learning, but I think the results are still super relevant and transferable to other situations where the goal is to teach for sustainability!

Preparing for a presentation that Terese and I will be giving soon at the “Inclusive Lund University” conference on how the inclusion and sustainability communities very much want the same thing and therefore should cooperate much more than they currently do, I came across the book “All means all” and the chapter on “The Magic […]

This feels like a bit of a throwback to my science communication phase (for example reviewing the book “communicating climate change” in 2018, or “communicating climate change to young people” in 2014), but it’s always good to remind yourself of the basics…

Student attendance has been a hot topic for a while now. In this study, an impressive 101 interviews with students from one first-year course on what teacher behaviours influence their attendance are analysed. They find that structured guidance, promoting active participation, acknowledging students’ feelings, and teaching performance are the most important categories.

This is a nice little study! Do students use their phones (in a disruptive way, not to respond to a teacher-posed Menti question or similar) more in certain types of physical spaces, and more in certain instructional settings?

I really enjoyed reading Nguyen and Welch (2025)’s exploration of using GenAI to analyse qualitative data. They come to the same conclusion as Rachel and myself in our article (don’t do it!), but they very comprehensively look at different problematic facets, and explain them in detail.

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 […]

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 […]

In this article, we investigate students’ experiences with active learning at the Geophysical Institute at the University of Bergen, Norway (where we have put a lot of effort recently into introducing co-creation).

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).

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 […]

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 […]

A lot of young people experience eco-anxiety (and old people, too, but they are not the focus of this study; but see here some numbers from Marlis’ recent talk). There are a lot of suggestions on how to cope with eco-anxiety (see the same blogpost, and also the models by Pikala, or the Hope Wheel, or […]

In Dunnett & Glessmer (2025), we pushed back on the idea that listing identity facets was a good way to do positionality statements in publication or the classroom, and stress that instead, reflection and a declaration of impact of facets was needed. And here comes a great toolkit for “robust reflexivity“!

Sometimes, it is really difficult to navigate cultural expectations around teaching for sustainability. My colleague Léa and I just published a “perspectives” article about an experience in Léa’s teaching that we reflected on together.

I am challenging myself to read one chapter of “Stories of hope: reimagining education” per day. Here is how it has been going for the first 4 days! In this series, I am summarising the “stories of hope”, but I am also reflecting on the practice of daily reading. I started out by collecting the […]

Wickström (2015) states that the (Swedish) academic development has become dominated by very few concepts and theoretical models, mostly constructive alignment, Bloom‘s and SOLO taxonomy, and deep- and surface learning (which, funnily enough, I complained about here just recently. And just to make it clear, in the article it is used without the “approach”, which […]

Constructive alignment is basically the simplest idea in teaching: Figure out what you want students to learn and how you would know that they learned it, then figure out what they need to do in order to learn that. But it is also controversial, because of its origins and because it was implemented as a […]

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 […]

This article sounds so relevant: How do we teach to say “no” to unethical or harmful behaviour (and, in extension, future research (which is where the authors are heading), or maybe, me thinks, participating in other collective harmful behaviour towards, for example, the climate)? This comes from a very different disciplinary context from mine, so […]

Ramp & Hummels (2025) describe the peer-consultation method “carousel“, “a method to facilitate the exchange of perspectives of different actors working in parallel on different challenges“: Each presenter gets 30 minutes to present a project and ask 2-4 peers for input and feedback.

Academia and activism, how do they go together? I’ve been curious about that for a while, as evidenced by these posts. Today I came across an article that investigates not only academic activism, but activism in the classroom.

We are discussing more and more about the importance of hope when talking about climate change and general sustainability questions, and I wrote about different approaches before (for example, Webb (2013)’s five types of hope, which are patient, critical, sound, resolute, and transformative hope, and Macy & Johnstone (2022)’s Active Hope). And now here is […]

A very common advice, in my experience especially when we feel overworked, or struggle with climate anxiety, is that we should invest in some self-care, be kind to ourselves. Turns out, however, that this might not the best advice.

In a study of 869 students of the University of Glasgow, Hill-Harding et al. (2025) find high level of negative climate emotions: Powerlessness, helplessness, sadness, anger. Many also report impairment due to climate anxiety. When rating agreement with different statements, participants agreed strongly with statements like “People have failed to take care of the planet” […]

I read this paper on the bus this morning, but in a nutshell: it investigates PhD students’ research self-efficacy (i.e. the confidence in ones own ability to do research) and help-seeking behaviour, both of which are important to develop during PhD studies.

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!

This is the second half of my summary of this book, the first half of the book is summarised in this blog post!

I’ve read and written about the importance of hope, especially when teaching for sustainability, before, and a book that always comes up in this context is Active hope by Macy & Johnstone (2022). And I finally got my hands on it (access via LUB)!

Feels like a very long time ago, but Kjersti, Hans-Christian and myself contributed two vignettes to the book “Teaching fieldwork in geography, earth and environmental sciences“, which has now become available!

Having just written about desirable difficulties yesterday, this Schwerter et al. (2025) article on “Differential use and effectiveness of practice testing: Who benefits and who engages?” fits the theme perfectly.

This morning, on my walk to my dip and back, I listened to Tom Lowe on Talking Learning & Teaching speaking about student attendance.

The STEM Education Research Centre at the University of Bergen had a really interesting presentation today (and the sketchy internet connection was more than made up for by all the kind people in the room that started streaming it from different angles!): Louis Deslauriers on “The Illusion of Learning, What to Do About It, and […]

“When advantaged group employees courageously stand up for the rights of their colleagues with marginalized identities, research suggests that they communicate a powerful, public “message of value” to such individuals“, according to Thoroughgood et al. (2024). And this message can have more effects in addition to signaling to the colleagues with marginalised identities that they […]

I have complained a lot about how I miss the old Twitter that was such an important tool for me a decade ago, and most importantly during the pandemic, and how I have been looking for, and into several different, alternatives. And here is a paper that confirmed my impression that science Twitter has moved […]

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.

Lopes & Galleli (2025) look at how what happens at universities is influenced both formal structures (policy documents, …) and the hidden curriculum (informal and implicit messaging about what is socially accepted in the context, for example through jokes). They investigated a document analysis and conducted interviews with professors and students at universities in Brazil. […]

International students are not only far from home, but they are often also in a new culture — both regarding how teaching and learning and relationships at university work, but also just coping with everyday life outside of university, they might struggle with language, visas or bank accounts (ask me how I know…), or constantly […]

Testing drives learning, at least to some extent. Testing can also cause a lot of stress and anxiety that hinder learning. But there might be a way of testing that actually benefits learning without causing too much stress: Mastery-based testing, provided it is combined with good feedback!

In preparation for this fall’s online course on “Teaching for Sustainability“, I was looking into what kind of methods I want to model. And then — perfect timing — I started reading of Noah (2025)’s brilliant book on “Designing and Facilitating Workshops with Intentionality: A Guide to Crafting Engaging Professional Learning Experiences in Higher Education” […]

I’m currently preparing several courses and this book “Classroom Assessment Techniques” has been on my “to read during the summer” pile since last summer or so… So it was about time I moved it to my desk and dug into it! The book exists in much newer editions, this just happens to be the one […]

I have been planning to read “SoTL in action: Illuminating critical moments of practice” edited by Chick (2023) for literally weeks, and then when I finally managed to put my hands on it in one of the university libraries (summer opening hours here are a joke!) I had already invested so much energy into this […]

I am still trying to read up on SoTL for a project I am working on, but keep getting side-tracked (but at least this time it is by a SoTL book. After a super quick detour from the book to an article it cites, on my favourite topic still, social media, that is…. :-D).

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 was very intrigued when I came across a chapter by Cambridge, Wenger-Trayner, et al. (2024) on “Theoretical and practical principles for generative AI in communities of practice and social learning”. They tell the story of how a contribution by ChatGPT — despite being prompted by a participant in a group conversation, and read out […]

I’ve been vaguely interested in the persistence of emotions ever since Marlis’ presentation about eco-emotions since at least mine can fluctuate enormously (which makes it very hard to fill in any surveys that is asking about emotions because I never know whether they want to know how I feel right this second, or on average […]

Hard to believe I never summarized this paper by my own colleagues, on SoTL, in our own context at Lund University before, but here we go!

In anticipation of a big thunderstorm this afternoon I started the day with a long morning dip, postponed a meeting so I don’t have to be on public transport if the thunderstorm is as bad as predicted, and now decided to read a whole folder of articles about the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) […]

As you saw in my recent post on the first draft of my “teaching consultations menu”, I found a really awesome book on “Designing and Facilitating Workshops with Intentionality: A Guide to Crafting Engaging Professional Learning Experiences in Higher Education” by Noah (2025). Before I show you how I applied the book to a course […]

Yesterday I listened to a podcast interview with Gerd Biesta called “After the age of world-view”. It is an episode in a series of podcasts as research for a book, which I think is a brilliant idea — record interviews with the double use as interesting podcast episodes AND data for research! Bam! Plus this […]

I found a new book that I would love to do a slow-reading book club on! I really enjoyed what we did with the Everyday Changemaker book, and I would love to read Kahane (2025)’s “Everyday habits for transforming systems” with a group of close colleagues so we can think through what it means for […]

I discovered the book “Designing and Facilitating Workshops with Intentionality: A Guide to Crafting Engaging Professional Learning Experiences in Higher Education” by Tolu Noah (2025) through an interview on my favourite Tea for Teaching podcast, and it is such a treasure trove!

Why do people fail to act against climate change, and what interventions could make them act? That’s what Sinclair et al. (2025) investigate in an “intervention tournament”!

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.

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 […]

It is extremely common that we experience strong emotions around climate change and all the other crises in the world. Some or all of these emotions are likely to come up for out students, too — because of topics in the courses we teach, or because they are informed citizens, in our classes or outside. […]

Palacin-Silva et al. (2018) describe a capstone project developed to integrate sustainability in software engineering education. Their course has five main aims: Understanding [something technical]; Implementing [something technical] to support the needs of an organization; Mastering [something technical] Understanding [business challenges of something technical]; and Applying [something technical]. So originally, the course was very much […]

Reflective writing comes up a lot as The Solution to fix all kinds of problems related to students possibly not engaging and using GenAI to write their assignments etc.. If they had to write a reflection on their learning, they would surely have to engage, right? Wrong. Of course GenAI can write nice reflections if […]

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 […]

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 […]

Soleymani et al. (2025) explore “Personal Experience and Value Creation in Postdigital Education” in a large-scale survey (1227 people responded to their survey) of MOOCs run at the TU Delft. They use a value-creation framework, which categorises value into five cycles: immediate, potential, applied, realised, and transformative, and investigate how participants perceived the MOOCs in […]

I found a sample of “the systems thinking playbook” online, and while there is quite some overlap with the climate change playbook it developed into later, there are also some cool things in the early version that got dropped (hopefully only for space and not because they realised they don’t work to teach what they […]

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“.

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 […]

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.

Belkina et al. (2025) did a systematic review of case studies of implementations of GenAI in higher education and, based on that, found key teacher skills and knowledge necessary for GenAI implementation: Basically, being able to use GenAI for adaptive & personalised feedback and personalised learning; being able to use it in diverse teaching strategies; […]

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 […]

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.

I found another “head, hands, heart” model! This time, Calvert et al. (2022) use it as a frame to organise the key competencies for sustainability:

I’m thinking quite a lot about responsibility — of students for their learning, for example in the context of active learning and co-creation, of teachers for what they are teaching — but I actually have a long history with thinking about teaching for responsibility in a different context. My first ever publication on teaching and […]

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 […]

I am currently talking a lot with LTH teachers to figure out what the thresholds are that make it difficult for them (and other teachers) to take action on changing their teaching to put a focus on sustainability (or the polycrises, or however you want to call the big challenges of our time). Teachers in […]

Rachel Lombardi et al. (2011) write “The overutilisation but simultaneous undertheorisation of sustainability as a term means that it can lend itself to a vast array of very divergent goals“. Or, in other words, as long as sustainability is just a vague buzzword, it is easy to accept, but that is because it is also […]

Big pet peeve of mine: Organisational bulk emails, i.e. emails from within the organisation that are sent out to everybody (or at least a large list of people). In my experience often without any obvious thought behind why this message needs to go to everybody, and how to make it efficient in information transfer. So […]

It took me a while to appreciate the UDL* framework since I first started looking into it 3 years ago. Without context, it seemed overwhelming in the amount of details that we are supposed to consider when designing teaching. Initially, I tried making sense of all the different facets by finding examples of what they […]

I like using the “Spiral of Silence” when talking about why it is so difficult to talk about sustainability, so here comes an updated version!

There are wildly differing understandings of what student self-assessment can and should do. It can be part of supporting the learning process in formative assessments or as a valuable skill to master in itself to support future learning, or part of measuring learning outcomes in summative assessment.

Today I found the model by Pihkala (2022) that I think can be helpful when thinking and talking about eco-anxiety (and that I, of course, had to recreate in order to fully think through — see above).

My colleague Torgny Roxå had a new paper come out (on our shared Birthday no less!) on how academic development depends on context. Together with colleagues from Bratislava, they investigate the “educational choice architecture” (ECA), the boundary conditions that nudge teachers towards certain choices, much like big department stores get customers to buy things they […]

Sharing is not always caring! And especially expecting others to share things about themselves that they might not be ready to share. The editorial “Positionality statements in engineering education: A European perspective” by Kirsty and myself that is now published (contact me for a pdf if you don’t have access!) has been in the works […]

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., […]

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 […]

A very common remark when talking about Teaching for Sustainability is that it is political and we shouldn’t indoctrinate our students, hence stay away from politics, and thus from sustainability teaching. My take on that is that everything is political since politics is about how we want to live together in society, but that there […]

Having lived in Norway for 3 years during my postdoc, and now in Sweden for the last 3.5 years, I am often frustrated how many people misunderstand the consistently high rankings in international comparisons of gender equality as actual gender equality. Yeah, maybe it is worse in most other places, but based on my personal […]

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.

Teachers often talk about how they want their students to be “curious”. And what that means to them is to be asking themselves questions, but also to stay on track investigating them until they have found an answer, by which time they have probably at least a dozen new questions that they now also pursue. […]

Recently on Bluesky, I came across a post by Bo Thomson who wrote about the article I am summarising below “I frequently had students ask “Why are we reading this in a class on …?” My answer was always the same: One day your choice of how to select, develop, or use a technology may […]

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.

Already a month ago, my colleague and current guest professor in our group, Klara Bolander Laksov, published the column “Democracy – An Educational Mission for Higher Education” in “universitetsläraren“, the magazine of my union, the Swedish Association of University Teachers and Researchers.

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)!

In a recent Transformation Thursday (the monthly networking opportunity that Terese and I have started, where we sit in one of the university canteens over lunch and invite teachers wanting to talk about Teaching for Sustainability to join us), I talked about how I had recently seen the “thumb war” game intervention to show how […]

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 […]

The study I am summarising here is a meta-analysis of 40 studies on how teacher characteristics influence secondary-school students, and they find that teacher characteristics and competencies explain 9% of the difference in student performance!

As many other places in the world, my university works with the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) as a framework, and for many researchers and teachers pointing to one or two of the goals is a common justification of why their research is relevant and important. But in many cases, the SDGs are not used […]

Samuelsson et al. (2025) recently investigated students’ reasons for absence, and it turns out that at least our first-year students at LTH are very strategic about attendance vs learning in other ways elsewhere. But even though students have proven that they can learn well on their own, for social reasons it is still nice for […]

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 have such a backlog of wave watching pics that I really need to blog more… Two articles today, the first one on “Students’ Perceptions of Self and Peers Predict Self-Reports of Cheating” by Henslee et al. (2025). I really enjoyed reading about Ellis & Murdoch (2024)’s educational integrity enforcement pyramide recently, but that’s a […]

I decided to read this article because I am thinking about both “decoding the disciplines” and “students as partners” in different contexts, and I wanted to see how they come together, but then I got really excited about the “don’t set goals, set systems” part that I feel is often missing in my work.

Bardach & Murayama (2025) discuss the conflicting results of studies on motivation, where rewards are found to both increase and decrease motivation, depending on the study. They point out that a binary view is not helpful, but describe “motivation transformation”, a process that can transfer extrinsic motivation into intrinsic. In that view, extrinsically motivated learning […]

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 […]

Beautiful day to read about the gender gap at LTH! Or at least about the implicit biases found in the environment I work in every day, and where I try to work for equitable learning opportunities. In a nutshell, it is as bad here as it is everywhere else…

Since I referred to it in the post I just published, here is a quick summary of Ellis et al. (2014) on “Systematic reflection: Implications for learning from failures and successes”.

On a recent walk (and dip, see featured image!), I listened to one of my all-time favourite podcasts, The Teaching in Higher Ed Podcast, where host Bonni Stachowiak discussed with guests Lauren Barbeau and Claudia Cornejo Happel about cultivating critical teaching behaviours. Starting from the assumption that good teaching can be learnt, but that it also […]

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 […]

I have had the pdf of the article ‘There was very little room for me to be me’: the lived tensions between assessment standardisation and student diversity” by Nieminen et al. (2024) open on my computer for months, but now that I am going into a week of vacations (yay!!) it’s time to close documents, […]

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

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 […]

What is the purpose of education? In the midst of preparing classes, giving classes, reading student work, giving feedback, assessing, we don’t often enough stop and think about why we are really doing all of this. Yesterday, I did have the chance to discuss the purpose of education for a while with colleagues, though, and […]

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 […]

One way to help students engage with what they value and believe themselves, and how values and beliefs and interests influence what positions people take, might be setting up a role play, where students take on roles that they might find themselves in in the future. I do not have a lot of experiences with […]

I just read this really interesting and important article about “assessment for inclusion, which seeks to ensure diverse students are not disadvantaged through assessment practices” by Tai et al. (2022). Traditional assessment practices often discriminates against people in so many different ways that I had not really carefully considered before.

The “jigsaw method” is used for cooperative learning (and Anja Møgelvang explains here what that is). In a nutshell, let’s say we have a group of 25 students. We can split them into 5 groups à 5 students each. That is their home group, that they sit at one group table with for the duration […]

In “Emerging learning environments in engineering education” by Hadgraft & Kolmos (2020), which my colleague recommended I read, the authors state that “engineering institutions might be falling behind in re-thinking the entire curriculum for educating students to handle complex situations. Most commonly, changes are made at the single course level which leads to a lack […]

When Rachel writes she agrees that an article is brilliant and important and a ’must read’ for anyone in higher ed involved in/concerned about academic integrity and assessment security, guess I have to read it…

I have written about this, my current favourite book, repeatedly before, while I was reading it for the first time (blog post 1, 2, and 3), but here comes a slightly more deliberate summary for the purpose of a book club that will run from now until summer, with three meetings to discuss the three […]

“Teaching Analysis Polls” are a very useful method to get formative, constructive feedback from a whole class. An external facilitator comes in and structures an approximately 30 minute long discussion without the instructor, who is later informed about the points that the students agreed on were most relevant to convey. In Kordts et al. (2025) […]

In many studies, student attendance of scheduled teaching activities has been found to correlate with student success. However, attendance pattern got majorly disrupted with the Covid-19 pandemic, and seem to not have gone back to “normal” levels and even declining, and many teachers perceive this as a bad sign. At the same time, academic achievements […]

In the Introduction to Teaching and Learning course that I teach twice each year, we include a compulsory “individual reflection”, where participants pick an experience they have had in a higher education context, as student or teacher, and reflect on it in the context of the theory they learn during the course. While most participants […]

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

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 […]

Our experience with how students argue in the Climate Fresk serious game is that they often jump to technical solutions to climate change right away and are unwilling to even entertain the thought of any other approach. Someone will invent something, and that will fix everything (false hope that does not lead to action, as […]

After following the journey of my voting letter in the tracking app for more than a week and seeing that it did not make it to Sunday’s election on time, here are some things that give me hope today. First, and importantly, seeing how Kiel, where my letter should have gone, has voted even though […]

“Generous scholarship is an intentional, collegial approach to scholarship that helps to mitigate the sense of isolation and depletion of energy often associated with managerial, production-oriented academic contexts” (Martinovic et al., 2022)

The title “A neutral toolkit? For a fundamental critique of constructive alignment” by Newby & Cornelisen (2025) sounded provocative enough that it went directly to the top of my reading list! And I am really not sure what to make of it yet. Help me understand!

I finally managed to listen to Lund University’s “HT samtal” podcast episode on “Teaching sensitive topics“, where Dean Sara Håkansson talks with four teachers from the Humanities & Theology faculty at Lund University. Below, I am summarising the points that stood out to me, unfortunately without acknowledging who made them, because I was so focussed […]

I have always liked online learning, and ever since my first MOOC experiences (with the “Evidence-based undergraduate STEM teaching” MOOC on Coursera back in 2015, which set me on the path of letting people take pictures of disciplinary content out in the real world and sharing it on Twitter, which then became #WaveWatching, and now […]

What are the barriers to including sustainability into courses and curricula at Lund University? Lidgren, Rodhe and Huisingh (2006) start from the premise that universities have an important role to play, “the state of the world is not the work of ignorant people, but rather the opposite, the result of work made by people with […]

I am in the brainstorming phase of a super cool project where we are planning to collaborate on; giving an academic development course in two countries simultaneously, teaching both online with everybody, and in person at the two hubs. I have always liked the combination of online and in-person teaching!

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 […]

Climbing the steps out of the water after an ice dip lets me see the world from a different perspective. Instead of focussing on not slipping and on controlling my breath on the way down, on the way up I can linger, observe, and document. Building such small (or larger) moments into life and work, […]

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 […]

When Rachel sends me something, I read ;-) If students, in their second week at university, say that they “can’t be arsed” to do an in-class exercise — will they persist at university, and succeed? Or does success depend on other factors than their motivation? And how should we, as teachers, react?

My most loyal guest poster strikes again! Welcome Kirsty Dunnett, today writing about Galløe (2023)’s chapter on how emotions differentiate opportunities.

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 […]

Yesterday, I talked to someone about Sustainability Communication and what we should be teaching our students, and I was honestly expecting something like the Karpman Drama Triangle (see featured image) or something of that sort. Plus of course more sophisticated models. But turns out that Sustainability Communication is a much big field than I realized! […]

I picked up my copy of Venet (2024)’s “Becoming an Everyday Changemaker: Healing and Justice at School” this morning and I loved the book before I even started reading the introduction, because one sentence in the acknowledgements (that I was going to skip) caught my eye: “writing from bed is a time-honored […] way of […]

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 […]

After writing about “Teaching about, with, in, through, for sustainability?” last night, writing about Engineering Education as Sustainable Development seems to be the logical next step. This is a summary of Narong (2024)’s framework.

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 […]

I recently discussed the problems with calling for “inclusion” with a participant in my course on, ironically, “the inclusive classroom”. But she told me about colleagues working on “nonclusion”, so here I am reading up on it. Hedvall and Ericsson (2024) summarise it in their article’s title already: “The Problem with “Inclusion”? It Is Done […]

Welcome to a new guest post by my most loyal guest blogger, Kirsty Dunnett, on odd experiences with peer review and generative AI which, in combination, provoke a lot of questions. Enter Kirsty:

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 […]

I really enjoyed reading the article “The Value of Openness in Open Science” by Santana (2024), which I accidentally stumbled across on bluesy (Connect with me there: @mirjamglessmer.bsky.social). Santana (2014) make the point that maximum openness, while maybe well-intended, is not necessarily optimal.

Reading up on more positionality statement discussions for ongoing work with Kirsty, which started from us drawing up our own positionality statements and discussing the differences [see hers and mine — and I would do mine substantially different now after a lot of thinking has gone into the topic!], and then us reading an article […]

When teaching for sustainability, we need to give students the chance to practice working with Wicked Problems, and we as teachers need to figure out where they are at in terms of thinking about the problem itself, possible solutions, and the way there. Lönngren, Ingerman & Svanström (2017) investigate this in the context of water […]

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 […]

Following up on what I wrote on Friday about how my colleague respond to her talking about sustainability issues with “don’t make me feel guilty”, I am exploring eco-guilt as a search term that seems to produce quite a different set of results. In contrast to the literature I summarised on Friday, where guilt is […]

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 […]

I have recently noticed over and over again that many teachers tell us that they would love to work more collaboratively, that they are craving community, that they would like to talk through their course with someone who can provide a very different perspective on, for example, sustainability, yet it is not happening. Everybody is […]

Before I started browsing this book, my gut feeling was that while it would surely be educational to read, I really did not feel like a history lesson of the last 50 years of failed education for sustainability would be empowering in any way. But that changed as I started browsing, so I decided that […]

“Paradoxically, it seems that although academic development centres to an increasing degree support academics in avoiding burnout, support structures to hinder burnout of academic developers are almost non-existent.” (Bolander Laksov & McGrath, 2020)

One problem of academic development is the “returner problem” — enthusiasm that participants might show during the workshops or other professional development opportunities we provide does often not result in changes to teaching practice. So what to do about that?

Today I came across the metaphor of “collaborative knotworking” for academic development. I think it is really helpful to think about this in the context of the “returning home problem” (or more recently, the “returner problem“): Despite sometimes enthusiastic responses during academic development workshops, these most often do not translate into changed teaching practices. There […]

Social media has become a bit of a dumpster fire on most channels that I have been using, but even so I have a hard time letting go. I like the aspects of cultivating a big network, self-expression (btw, I wrote a blog post on some interesting research on that here) and professional branding. But […]

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. […]

Quality assurance at universities is often oversimplified: Single events, captured in indicators that rely on one facet, are met with quick interventions, without any understanding of the complexities of the situation or longer term strategies. This leads to flip-flopping between states, for example getting rid of student group works because students report to not like […]

I am catching up on my reading for the iEarth Journal Club! This month is very much in line with what my recent thinking on place-based learning, active lunch breaks to connect disciplinary content to everyday experience and also to reconnect with the fun of it, and our forthcoming vignette in a Teaching Fieldwork book, in […]

Inspired by Robert’s Climate Activism 101 course, I have become more and more interested in reading about non-violent protests and understanding how they work.

I am currently in the early stages of co-developing a course, most likely project-based, on sustainability for engineering students. I have written a lot about how I am trying to make sense of key competencies in sustainability and how to assess them, but then I recently stumbled across a Future Learning Design podcast interview  with […]

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.