theories of change – Adventures in Oceanography and Teaching

Binging someone else’s reading list for their sustainability course

mglessmer — Sat, 01 Nov 2025 20:12:21 +0000

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. Systems and transitions Andersson et al. (2014) look at “Societal systems–complex or worse?” […]

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Roxå et al. (2025): “Entangled in context: addressing academic development and choice architecture”

mglessmer — Tue, 20 May 2025 09:29:29 +0000

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 […]

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“Teachers should be allowed to be learners”! Currently reading Lidgren et al. (2006)

mglessmer — Thu, 20 Feb 2025 10:24:00 +0000

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 […]

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It is not up to us to complete the work, but neither are we free to desist from it

mglessmer — Sat, 15 Feb 2025 12:07:09 +0000

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, […]

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Currently reading Kezar (2005) on “Moving from I to We: Reorganizing for collaboration in higher education”

mglessmer — Wed, 04 Dec 2024 15:37:03 +0000

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 […]

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Reading about team-based faculty development (Bolander Laksov et al., 2022)

mglessmer — Wed, 14 Aug 2024 07:01:54 +0000

Bolander Laksov et al. (2022) designed a program “to support teams of clinical teachers to build capacity to lead educational change based on educational research in their clinical environments” to run over a year with 8 half-day workshops that each included preparatory tasks. Three years later, three of the five projects are still going strong, […]

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Wamsler et al. (2021)’s literature review on “Linking internal and external transformation for sustainability and climate action”, and “Inner Development Goals”

mglessmer — Fri, 03 Feb 2023 09:58:37 +0000

Especially when it comes to teaching about climate change or sustainability more generally, it seems unavoidable to really consider mental states. While the dominant discourse around climate change has been about external, biophysical factors for a long time, and climate change was thus seen as a challenge that can be solved by technology and policy changes […]

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“Systems conveners in complex landscapes” (Wenger-Trayner & Wenger-Trayner, 2014)

mglessmer — Thu, 19 Jan 2023 09:54:39 +0000

If I had to pick one book that has influenced my current thinking about teaching and learning the most, I would pick Wenger’s 1998 “Communities of practice: Learning, meaning, and identity” (link to my summary of the book and some later work on CoPs). What I find really helpful to think about in the CoP […]

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Reinholz et al. (2021)’s eight most used theories of change and how they relate to each other in my head

mglessmer — Tue, 03 May 2022 07:01:47 +0000

I’ve been playing with this figure (inspired by the Reinholz et al. 2021 article) for a while now for the iEarth/BioCeed Leading Educational Change course, where we try to look at our change project through many different lenses in order to find out which ones are most relevant to help us shape and plan the […]

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Thinking about theories of change (based on Reinholz et al., 2021)

mglessmer — Sat, 05 Mar 2022 10:47:56 +0000

I’ve spent quite some time thinking about how to apply theories of change to changing learning and teaching culture (initially in the framework of the iEarth/BioCEED course on “leading educational change”, but more and more beyond that, too). Kezar & Holcombe (2019) say we should use several theories of change simultaneously to make things happen, and […]

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