Category Archives: literature

Structuring local, inquiry-based field work (Praskievicz, 2022)

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 which Kjersti, Hans-Christian and I suggest an (even more) structured method to do fieldwork (blog post with more details here). Continue reading

Exploring PBL, reflection, student identity, and sustainability in Ginie Servant-Mikols’ 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 Ginie Servant-Mikols, which I found so inspiring that I listened to another interview with her, and then browsed her publication list, and turns out this is going to be super helpful for what we are planning on doing! Here are my first take-aways.

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“Why students trust teachers, and what we can do to increase their trust”. Keynote at the Lund University conference on inclusive teaching, with Rachel Forsyth and Peter Persson

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.

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Thinking about Storytelling in Teaching for Sustainability

I am on the fringes of a course on “Integrating Sustainability Competences in the Curriculum” that my awesome colleague Steven Curtis is currently teaching. And the way he introduces the course — in an audio file, where he (with seagulls screaming in the background) tells the story of us meeting on a dock, ready to board a ship to start this journey of discovery together, where he will be the navigator, but we’ll need everybody’s skills and contributions to make it safely to our destination — was so cool and impressive, that I (obviously!) had to read up a bit on storytelling in higher education for sustainability! Here is my compilation of two books on the matter (that I, admittedly, mostly browsed).

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Currently reading & thinking about “The best of both worlds: A critical pedagogy of place” (Gruenewald, 2003)

I am on the fringes of a course on “Integrating Sustainability Competences in the Curriculum” that my awesome colleague Steven Curtis is currently teaching, and he asked me to read an article about “A critical pedagogy of place” (Gruenewald, 2003) and moderate a discussion about it. Below, I am summarizing the article and adding some thoughts from a recent seminar that Laura Weitze gave here at LU.

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Currently reading: “The Ideal Outcome of Education for Sustainability: Transformative Sustainability Learning” (Michel et al., 2020)

I have written about transformative experiences (wave watching! When you suddenly see the world with new eyes) and transformative learning (with my favourite head-hands-heart model) before, but here comes the transformative sustainability learning theory (Michel et al., 2020)!

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Currently reading “F2F, zoom, or asynchronous learning? Higher education students’ preferences and perceived benefits and pitfalls” (Shlomo & Rosenberg-Kima, 2024)

We often discuss teaching and learning formats, and now there is a nice study that compares face-to-face, synchronous online, and asynchronous online in the same introductory physics course: Both stated student preferences at the beginning of the semester, what they actually end up doing, and what they think benefits and pitfalls are. Very interesting!

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Unsurprising but important research: there is a sequential bias based on order in which work is presented and then graded in learning management systems (after Wang et al., 2024)

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 students with surnames later in the alphabet (and thus graded later in the sequence) a) get lower grades, b) get more negative and impolite comments, and c) are complaining more about their grades to the relevant authority. This happens across subjects, and accumulates for students in such a way that it shows up in final grades and can thus potentially even influence job opportunities. So what should we do?

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Second meeting of the “Climate Activism 101” course, and more reading

The more I am reading about activism, the more I become aware of how my thinking is constrained by the images that I have accepted as ways to simplify a complex world. For example, the pyramid view of society with some king/head of state/CEO at the top, supported by a small elite of sorts, supported by a large mass of ordinary people makes change only possible if, somehow, the elite and head are reached and convinced to change (or violently exchanged, but I prefer the non-violent way). But the pyramid is really only an image, one very simplified representation of reality of many, and seeing the world this way mostly serves to keep things the way they are since challenging them, in this image, seems impossible. Whereas if you think about the upside-down pyramid supported by pillars (as suggested already in the readings last time), suddenly many opportunities open up!

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