Tag: trust

It’s time to read all the open tabs on trust so I can close at least some of them! Quick summaries below.

I have found very little research on how or why teachers trust their students — until Rachel sent me this article and now my mind is blown. I’ve heard people say before that development of university teaching is decades behind school teaching, and it looks like this might be the case when it comes to […]

Even though this study is on writing instruction — which is probably the subject that is affected most by the presence of GenAI — I think it is relevant far beyond: What does the presence of GenAI do to teacher emotions?

This is a really great book with lots of food for thought to reflect on teaching practices and bring more humanity into teaching. Since I have thought about trust and ways to build it quite a lot, as well as about inclusive (or even better, nonclusive) teaching and many related concepts, my notes below are […]

Didn’t feel like I had time to go for a morning dip, but made the time and am glad I went, both because that’s always awesome and because it gave me the chance to listen to the episode “How college students make, keep and lose friends with Janice McCabe” on one of my alltime favourite […]

Most of the time when I have written about trust, it was about trust in the relationship between people. But trust also has other dimensions. For example, “Institutional Trust Load” according to Spencer (2026) describes trust which “is structurally relied upon to sustain administrative processes under conditions of ambiguity, inconsistency, or deferred resolution“. So trust […]

We know that relationships in teaching are hugely important — many students say that they’ve been one conversation away from quitting, and good relationships have positive impact not just on retention but on lots of other outcomes. Teachers are expected to initiate and build relationships, and especially in the classroom, since that is the only space […]

In March, Rachel Forsyth and I were invited to give the keynote at Stockholm University’s teacher conference 2026. The conference theme was “teaching for democracy and sustainability”, and about a year before the conference, we ambitiously announced we would be talking about “Teaching for tomorrow — trust, agency and sustainability in higher education”. Now the […]

Last week, I had a great day listening first to the trial lecture and then the defense of Gerald Decelles III’s PhD thesis, and it was so inspiring! Both his trial lecture and defense were such excellent presentations that I have to compile my notes into a blog post to process my thoughts. In the […]

Before Christmas, Rachel and I recorded an interview with my online teaching role model Niya Bond for OneHE, and it has been released now! What do you think?

What we believe about climate change often does not depend on what we know about climate change, but on what people around us believe. This makes it really difficult for climate scientists to make their warnings heard and acted upon by people outside their own bubble. In their article “Who do we trust on climate […]

While I have worked on student sense of belonging myself, I have also long been wondering if it is not much more complicated than that. Hamshire et al. (2025) write that “[w]hilst seemingly well-intentioned, these assumptions [about how if student only feel belonging, they will come to class and learn] don’t always engage with wider […]

I am sitting on the ferry sailing towards Germany, with new-found appreciation of the Öresund bridge and its harp-style carrying cables… And I am listening to a conversation with Michelle Miller on one of my all-time favorite podcasts, Tea for Teaching, on “teaching from the same side” (what a nice, figurative bridge to the featured […]

Rachel Forsyth and I are in the process of doing focus group interviews with students and teachers at Lund University on how their relationships to each other are influenced by the availability of GenAI. We are going to present a glimpse into the analysis of what teachers said in the first five interviews at LTH’s […]

I recently watched a really interesting seminar by Kari Steen-Johnsen (UiO), who is working on the impact of digitalization on democracy. She gave an AI Lund online seminar on “Concern and Enthusiasm for AI Across the Globe. The Role of Trust” (recording here).

I just listened to episode 500 of “Squiggly Careers” on “Why Bringing Your Authentic Self to Work Is Bad Advice“. They explore the concept of “effective authenticity […] where you project a version of yourself that resonates with others whilst maintaining a semblance of genuineness“. This sounds a bit off-putting at first (“a semblance of […]

Trust is important for learning and it’s the teacher’s job to create conditions in which trust can develop, but can there be too much trust, to the point where it inhibits critical thinking? Kelland (2025) looks at this question, starting from a definition of trust as an attitude towards other people that we hope will […]

It all started out with me listening to one of my all-time favourite podcasts, Teaching in Higher Ed, to an episode on designing video with intention and authenticity. Actually, it started before, with me reading about “Relational Pedagogies” by Gravett (2022), but I could not find a way to start a blog post about the […]

Authentic assessment is often understood as students doing practical, real-life, mostly outside-of-university tasks (and universities are often perceived as not part of the “real world” even though they should be, as Lockard & Bloch-Schulman (2023) also discussed). Recently, authentic assessment is even sometimes called upon as the antidote to students cheating with GenAI.

This is an article that I find interesting both because of the method (searching reddit for accounts of student experiences as data sources!) and because of the findings, which I’ll summarise below.

Trust is often perceived as risky — what if students cheat, what if they don’t put in the effort we want them to put in, what if they don’t learn what we want them to learn — and therefore, there are dozens of rules in place that very much restrict students’ freedom and guide them […]

Since reading Macfarlane’s chapter the other day, I am thinking a lot about the influence of institutional policies (rather than teacher actions in direct contact with students) on trust. Now I am reading Carless (2009), who writes that “accountability can be a source rather than a remedy for distrust“.

My notes on GenAI stuff are getting shorter and shorter, and that’s because I am reading the articles with a specific application in mind, and only writing down what seems relevant to answer that question. So don’t use these notes-to-self as summaries that tell you all you need to know about those articles, that’s not […]

Very pleasant working day in Kristianstad yesterday, so today I am doing a sprint, reading stuff about academic misconduct, trust, and GenAI! Here we go with lots of short summaries.

This is a very interesting (pre-ChatGPT!) study: Bochniarz et al. (2022) investigate highschool students’ concerns regarding perceived negative intentions of AI, i.e. “cynical hostility” towards AI.

When we teach, we have all these policies of how students need to let us know how they used GenAI, and of course the same holds for research publications. Research also finds that students expect a two-way transparency (Luo 2024), meaning they would like for us to disclose how we use GenAI.  In general, the […]

What is it with all the distrust in students? Macfarlane (2022) answers this question before the raise of ChatGPT when things probably got even worse… But that doesn’t really matter, because his main argument is that there is really very little evidence that cheating has gotten any worse over time, despite the introduction of the […]

More reading on trust in GenAI, today on how and why do students use GenAI feedback. Henderson et al. (2025), “Comparing Generative AI and teacher feedback: student perceptions of usefulness and trustworthiness“, use responses from approximately 7000 students to understand their thinking regarding to their use of GenAI.

The title of Goldshtein et al. (2025)’s editorial, “The role of learner trust in generative artificially intelligent learning environments“, sounded super intriguing. The question of trust in GenAI is so relevant; do students trust GenAI, and to do what, and why? And what does that do to their relationships with their teachers?

Conspiracy theories are everywhere, and people who believe on one conspiracy theory are highly likely to believe also in others, even if they are completely unrelated to the first one. How come? In the article I’m summarising here, Brauner et al. (2023) investigate the traits that correlate with believing in conspiracy theories.

Cheating is not a new phenomenon by any means, but with the raise of GenAI, it seems to be easier than ever, and teachers seem to be more suspicious than ever. But in contrast to direct plagiarism where a source can easily be identified, the use of GenAI to produce text in assignments can mostly […]

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, […]

This article was probably the easiest and most fun to write in my whole career so far! Trust between students and teachers is a really engaging topic, so when Rachel first interviewed Peter and myself, we jumped on the opportunity to continue discussing it with her, and then also with students, who we started to […]

My own work on what makes students trust teachers was inspired by an interview that I did with Rachel Forsyth (in the botanical garden shown in the featured image, and half of it was inaudible on the recording due to wind!) for her and other’s study on what teachers do to build trust with students. […]

Quality assurance at universities is often oversimplified: Single events, captured in indicators that rely on one facet, are met with quick interventions, without any understanding of the complexities of the situation or longer term strategies. This leads to flip-flopping between states, for example getting rid of student group works because students report to not like […]

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.

Lewicka (2022) investigates how trust in higher education institutions is build (and rebuilt). This is a much broader question than the one that we have investigated, but I recognize many of the elements that we saw in our study, too. I had to redo their figure in order to process it, and here is my […]

The assumption that teacher-student relationships are important has been around for a long time and is probably uncontested. But when it comes to describing what exactly makes a good relationship, there is no consensus yet, and many aspects, like a sense of belonging, or the teacher caring, or trust in teachers, have been investigated. Here […]

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!

In my series of things-I-want-to-say-in-an-upcoming-workshop-but-suspect-I-might-skip-to-make-time-for-participants’-topics, here one slide about a recent study I did with my colleagues Rachel Forsyth and Peter Persson when we got the chance to ask a question in the student-led “SpeakUp Days” survey at LTH. And it turns out: Student trust teachers who show that they care about students (most typically […]

Our work as academic developers at CEE is based on how we think that relationships between teachers work, and using that to influence their conversations in a way that improves teaching. Here is (part of) the literature we base this understanding on (a lot of this from in-house research, or close collaborators).

Now that my working assumption is that trust is essential for student learning, what about trust that our “students”, i.e. the participants in our academic development workshops, have in us? Does that work in a similar way, or how is it different?

You might have noticed that I am exploring different concepts of what makes a good teacher-student relationship recently: belonging, caring, and most recently, trust. Why am I not just picking one? Short answer is that teacher-student relationships are really complicated, and those three are only some of the facets that are important, but there is […]

After having read about “trust moves” that teachers report making (Felten et al., 2023), and currently working on figuring out what makes students trust their teachers (Persson et al., 2023), I now really need to sort out my reading of “trust” literature, which means putting it in my external memory, aka my blog. So here we […]

I am currently doing this super interesting research project on trust with my colleagues Peter Persson and Rachel Forsyth. Rachel and colleagues developed a model for “trust moves” that teachers employ, but are those moves actually effective in building trust? What makes students trust their teachers? That’s what we investigate in a pilot study that we’ll […]

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 […]

In most of my blog posts on outreach I focus on how to run the _perfect_ experiment. And while I still think that’s awesome, I recently read an article by Johanna Varner (“Scientific Outreach: Toward Effective Public Engagement with Biological Science”, 2014) that made a lot of points that I have definitely not stressed enough […]