Category Archives: Uncategorized

The paradoxes we are confronted with when teaching for sustainability, and attempts at dealing with them, using Liberating Structures

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Today, I tried two new “liberating structures” in my “teaching for sustainability” course: First the “Wicked Questions“, where we surfaced some “opposing-yet-complimentary” strategies that we need to pursue simultaneously to succeed, and then we worked towards “15% solutions“, with a focus on small changes that we have the freedom and resources to implement now. And this is how it went.

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Exploring another serious game for teaching for sustainability

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Yesterday evening I joined a group of 14 teachers who met up to learn from, and support, our colleague, Ester Barinaga, who wanted to try a new game for teaching purposes and needed guinea-pigs to test it on. The topic was money: contrary to popular belief, money is not at all neutral, and what currency is available, who distributes money and how, what rules exist for trading, … have huge effects on how an economy develops. We explored different aspects through variations of a very simple setup and had space to express emotions and reflect on what happened under different conditions.

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Thinking about presents?

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How about giving books about waves or the ocean to your loved ones?

We have an illustrated book about waves specifically for kids, or a photo guide to wave watching for anyone — both available in English or German!

Or if you don’t have access to puddles, rivers, lakes, or the sea, or would like a little structure to explore the oceans in, check out the 24 days of #KitchenOceanography book! Works great as advent calendar with one experiment every day, or as a I-want-to-pick-and-do-an-experiment-now book!

An office as an analogy to explain the three brain functions

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

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Recommended watching: The myth of average (Todd Rose)

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

10 years of “Adventures in Oceanography and Teaching”!

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Today marks the 10 year anniversary of my blog, “Adventures in Oceanography and Teaching”! This blog is a pretty detailed documentation of my development as a teacher over the last 10 years. Now that my job is “to teach teachers how to teach”, is there any value in keeping the historical record of how I used to think about things, before I knew better?

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About my “Adventures in Oceanography and Teaching“

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Welcome to my blog, where I mostly write about

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

I started my blog in 2013 when I was a postdoctoral researcher in physical oceanography at the Geophysical Institute, University of Bergen, Norway, to have a place to document my #KitchenOceanography. But I kept blogging when I then went back Germany; first to Hamburg University of Technology as educational developer, then to the Leibniz Institute for Science and Mathematics Education (IPN) in Kiel for a stint in educational and science communication research, and back to Hamburg as a science communicator at GEO. Right now, I am an academic developer both at the Center for Engineering Education, Lund University, Sweden, and at the Geophysical Institute, University of Bergen, Norway. Through all the changes in my career and life, my blog stayed, and grew with me, documenting my “Adventures in Oceanography and Teaching”. Welcome!

Learning and Teaching

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For all of you who don’t fancy wading though wave watching and kitchen oceanography blog posts in search of those posts on teaching and learning in higher education (I usually summarise articles, podcast episodes or conversations I found useful, sometimes post new slides I create, or share methods that I saw, heard about, or tried myself), here is an overview!!

For a less overwhelming list, check out some of the tags, for example “recommended by CEE” (summaries of literature that me and/or my colleagues find recommendation-worthy), “recommended reading” (my personal recommendations), “teaching sustainability” (interesting literature for my collegial project course on teaching sustainability), and many others.