Liberating Structures – Adventures in Oceanography and Teaching

Summary of this morning’s workshop on sustainable pedagogies

mglessmer — Mon, 16 Mar 2026 18:52:19 +0000

This morning, I ran a workshop for university teachers called “Teaching for Sustainability: Practicing for a sustainable future through sustainable pedagogies“. You can look at all the slides here, or see some of them below together with a quick summary of what I said about them. Most of what I am writing below I have written […]

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There is a Liberating Structures app!

mglessmer — Sat, 21 Jun 2025 15:26:19 +0000

I only found out recently that there is a Liberating Structures app! I like it! Nice to be able to browse on the bus or for quick inspiration in a workshop… In the app, it’s easy to find a Liberating Structure (with instructions!) to match your purpose, and they also propose several “strings” for different […]

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

mglessmer — Tue, 07 May 2024 16:55:39 +0000

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 […]

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Currently reading about wicked problems in teaching for sustainability

mglessmer — Thu, 11 Apr 2024 07:56:43 +0000

As part of my “Teaching for Sustainability” course, participants find & summarize articles that are relevant for developing their own teaching. From their summaries, the two articles below on using “wicked problems” in teaching for sustainability seemed so interesting that I had to go and read (and summarize) them myself… “Hopeful approaches to teaching and […]

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“The construction of meaning through vital engagement” (Nakamura & Csikzentmihalyi, 2003)

mglessmer — Wed, 27 Mar 2024 07:56:46 +0000

My awesome colleague and critical friend Peter sent me an article on “vital engagement”, which he has been talking about for a while and which I can very much relate to. It is about how some people find joy and meaning in almost everything they do, whereas for others, the experience of life in general […]

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Planning a seminar on relationships in the classroom

mglessmer — Thu, 21 Mar 2024 12:24:03 +0000

In April, I will be teaching one afternoon in a course on “developing and leading courses at LTH”, on what we traditionally called “belonging”. Here are my thoughts so far. Would love some feedback! My goal with this seminar, or Intended Learning Outcomes I hope that after this module is finished, participants can explain how […]

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Recap of the first meeting of my new course “Teaching for Sustainability”

mglessmer — Thu, 14 Mar 2024 11:10:03 +0000

Yesterday was the first meeting of this spring’s installment of my “teaching for sustainability” course and it is so inspiring and energizing to meet so many motivated and engaged teachers! Here is what we did. We started out with “impromptu networking” (see figure below for instructions) so each participant got to speak to three others […]

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“Liberating structures: Engaging everyone to build a good life together” (Lipmanowicz et al., 2015) — go read it and try them!

mglessmer — Thu, 29 Feb 2024 12:17:04 +0000

My friend Sigrid does short interviews with trainers and facilitators on her company Memogic‘s youtube channel, and I watched the interview with Inna Fischer (in German) yesterday. Inna’s energy was super inspiring, and she mentioned the “Liberating Structures”, which I then realized I had never blogged about before. So here we go! The goal of […]

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