Title: Make teaching a scientific enterprise through evidence-based teaching and learning practices.

Presenter: Anders Schomacker and Carly Faber, University of Tromsø

Date: 05.03.2024

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Carly is a postdoc with iEarth working on cultural change in geoscience education. Anders is a professor and head of education at the University of Tromsø, the arctic university, as well as education chair and focus area leader in iEarth, the Centre for integrated Earth Science Education.

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Title: The 'Field TA Academy' at UNIS: supporting teaching and learning in the field and beyond.

Presenter: Anna Pienkowski, University centre in Svalbard

Date: 04.04.2024

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This talk outlines the ‘Field Teaching Assistant Academy’ at UNIS, a course for graduate students centred on improving their practices in teaching and student learning. Co-organised by iEarth, this hands-on course has now run successfully for 3 years, providing an important foundation for the professional development of geoscience teaching assistants.

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Title: From coffee breaks to collaborations: studying social networks to understand change in higher education.

Presenter: Dario Blumenschein, University of Bergen

Date: 24.04.2024

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In this Digital Learning Forum where we will wonder if your next casual conversation by the coffee machine might just spark a revolution in teaching methods across the country.

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Our PhD candidate Dario Blumenschein will present his research where, through the lens of Social Network Analysis (SNA), the goal is to uncover how some of these relationships between us are quietly transforming the landscape of higher education. Discover with us the importance of these networks and how they can strategically inform and guide change.

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Title: What would "Integrated Earth Science Education" mean, anyway.

Presenter: Bjarte Hannisdal, University of Bergen

Date: 24.05.2024

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Bjarte Hannisdal, Associate Professor of Geobiology and Education Chair of the iEarth Center for Integrated Earth Science Education, which is a Norwegian Center of Excellence in Education. Bjarte is a very skilled and innovative teacher, and his Introduction to geobiology course has won UiB’s Owl Prize and Norway’s Education Quality Award for Higher Education.

The problems of "interdisciplinarity" and "systems science" are well known and the challenges they raise for higher education are widely discussed. Less well known are the conceptual stumbling blocks and millennia-old assumptions that prevent us from overcoming some of these challenges.

Here I will briefly sketch how a more integrative approach is possible and how it can present a way forward for higher education.

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Title: Who decides what we are teaching?

Presenter: Johanna Annala, Tampere University, Finland.

Date: 02.10.2024

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Johanna is a docent, university lecturer and leader of the University Pedagogy Team at the Faculty of Education and Culture, Tampere University, Finland. Johanna is an experienced higher education researcher with expertise in research on curriculum changes, teacher’s agency and in qualitative methods.

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The Norwegian higher education (HE) landscape is shifting. Downsizing of educational programmes and staff layoffs have become a reality at several HE institutions. What can we learn from large-scale HE reforms in our neighbouring countries? In this Digital Learning Forum, Johanna Annala (Tampere University, iEarth Prof. II) will share her research on staff experiences from a restructuring of education in Finnish universities. What role did academic staff play in shaping the new landscape, and how did they balance academic core values against the demand for efficiency, and economic and societal benefit?

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Title: Get them and keep them

Presenter: A. Mattias Lundmark, University of Oslo

Date: 22.11.2024

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A. Mattias Lundmark,Associate Professor at the Section for Geodidactics at the University of Oslo,and focus area leader at iEarth, Center for Integrated Earth Science Education.Mattias is an engaging and innovative instructor leading iEarths focus area 2:The students’ learning environment, where he aims to bring students’ expertise into courses and study programs through continuous collaborative pedagogical development, where students and staff work together to create a dynamic and inclusive education.

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Attracting students to the geosciences has never been more important given the environmental and sustainability challenges society faces.But smaller cohorts of eligible students in the coming years and a declining interest in STEM, makes recruitment increasingly challenging. Meanwhile,drop-out rates in many of our study programs are high. What can we do to get more geoscience students, and keep them once they come? In this iEDLF we’ll talk about some of the things we do, and perhaps should do...

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Title: Collegial learning and cultural change in higher education

Presenter: Klara Bolander Laksov

Date: 27.11.2024

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Klara is a professor of Higher Education at Stockholm University, Sweden, and director at the Centre for the Advancement of University Teaching, CeUL. Klara will present some of her research on how to work with cultural change in the ambition to move from an individualised isolated view to a shared, community of practice approach to education.

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As with scholarship of discovery, scholarship of teaching and learning puts an increasing emphasis on collaboration in higher education. To be successful when working with teaching and educational development is not something we can do in isolation from colleagues, structures, and culture. Instead, logics of conversations, collaborations and sharing, are stressed as core for the development of teaching and learning in educational courses and programs. However, for such a shift in the view of teaching and education we need to invest time and effort in understanding and working with cultural change.

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