For this week’s iEarth journal club, we are reading the chapter ‘Education as Relational Process’, from Kenneth J. Gergen’s book ‘An Invitation to Social Construction‘. My thoughts below.
Kirsty sent me this super interesting text with a vision of Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) being a collective enterprise, rather than a mostly individual one. I love the vision and am excited to repost below!
Sitting on the ferry back to Sweden, I listened to one of my favorite podcasts, “tea for teaching“. The episode was on the role of faculty engagement, specifically showing students that the professor cares, and how three emails can already make a difference!
Kjersti and I, together with Linda and Francesco, just published an article in Oceanography on the fieldwork bingo we developed for the student cruises earlier this year (and that came quite a long way from our first version as a postcard!). I am currently very much on the bingo-as-a-tool-to-nudge-people-to-do-stuff trip (see also my “Universal Design for Learning” bingo), so I am happy to now have an article I can point people to! So go and read Glessmer, Latuta, Saltalamacchia, and Daae (2023): “Activity bingo: Nudging students to make the most out of fieldwork”!
Last summer, I sat in the botanical garden with Rachel Forsyth and had a super interesting conversation about the importance of trust between teachers and students, and what I do to help build it with my own students — as an interview as part of one of her research projects. And now there is a publication (Felten et al., 2023) that explores the topic further and suggests a conceptual model for building trust in the classroom!
Another guest post by Kirsty Dunnett about the difficulty of applying skills from a maths course in the context of geoscience courses, and what can be done to make it easier. Thanks for writing, Kirsty :-)
How can we imagine future universities that are less market-driven and more socially just, focussed on community and sustainability? Possibly by using a different metaphor, that of ecology, according to Kinchin (2023), who also suggests five “moves” that would be required to move towards an ecological university. A super interesting perspective! (Thanks for sharing this article with me, Kirsty! :-))
As you’ve seen from my recent Biodiversity Collage posts, I have gotten into serious games as tools for teaching. Today, I am reading up on a different game, the Climate Fresk (which I also got introduced to when I got to play it in a workshop led by my awesome colleague Léa Lévy, and which she and colleagues have evaluated as teaching tool in our context). Let’s see what experiences other people have had with it!
I started reading an article on gamification by Robson et al. and then went down the rabbit hole of their other publications. But at least now I have thought about gamification in a new way!
Lots of reading on serious games as tools in sustainability teaching going on here at the moment…