Interviews with teachers who participated in the Conference NU2024
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Sofia Ahlberg
Senior Lecturer at the Department of English and Vice-Dean for Education and Collaboration at the Faculty of Languages.
What do you primarily teach?
I mainly teach contemporary literature, mostly for teacher students.
What did you present at the conference?
I conducted a workshop together with my PhD student Suzanne Ericson and children's author Anna Nutti Wiandt, who is currently working on the "Children in Sápmi" series. Anna's books are bilingual, written in Northern Sámi and Swedish on the same page. Our project is about indigenous literature and how teachers belonging to a majority culture relate to literature written within another culture. We believe that there is a concern among teachers about how to work with Sámi literature in the classroom, a fear of doing wrong or overstepping. At the same time, Anna argues that despite these concerns, it is better to dare to work with Sámi literature in teaching than not to. These were the questions we wanted to explore in our workshop.
The set-up was very interactive and also multilingual: Suzanne and I spoke both English and Swedish, and Anna read partly from her book in Northern Sámi.
What was the response to your workshop?
We received many positive reactions and thought-provoking questions! Even the conference's keynote speaker, Katrice Horsley, was there, and she wanted to discuss how she, as a professional storyteller with stories from all over the world in her repertoire, can relate to stories from different cultures.
What did you find most interesting during the conference?
What was entirely unique for me about the conference were the many "hands-on activities," where participants were active themselves. I attended workshops almost exclusively and participated in many small group discussions where we, among other things, had to solve various pedagogical problems together. As Vice-Dean for Education, I have a great interest in what research in higher education pedagogy can look like, and the interactive sessions gave me an opportunity to go behind the scenes of various research studies and to answer the same questions that the participants in the studies were asked. In this way, I was able to engage in the research process and understand how results were reached.
Why is it rewarding to participate in the NU Conference?
One of the best things about the conference is that it is a meeting place for different professions and roles, such as teachers, heads of departments, educational leaders, educational developers, and pedagogical leaders. I am convinced that all these actors must collaborate on educational issues, and the NU Conference is an excellent platform for such collaboration.
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Lisa Fredriksson Carreras
Senior Lecturer at the Department of Pharmaceutical Biosciences.
What do you primarily teach?
I teach cell biology for future pharmacists and prescriptionists, both at the undergraduate level during the first three semesters and at an advanced level on a master’s course. I am also the coordinator for the pharmacy program.
What did you present at the conference?
I gave a presentation together with my colleague Emma Lundkvist about a package of activities we have developed for our new students in the prescriptionist and pharmacy programs to provide a good introduction to higher education. We have noticed that students find the transition from high school to university challenging and are more uncertain in their new roles than before. Our idea has been to lower the threshold for students to talk about this and offer opportunities where they can exchange thoughts so that they feel they are not alone in their experiences. At the conference, we specifically talked about two mandatory workshops during semesters 1 and 2, where students discuss the difference between high school and university, and work through five scenarios with challenging situations they might encounter during their studies. In the workshops, students discuss how these situations can be resolved and what teachers or students could potentially have done differently.
What was the response to your presentation?
It was well-attended; the room was completely full, and we received many questions! Many also wanted to see the materials we have developed, and it was clear that many teachers from various programs experience the same challenges as we do. I also participated in a roundtable discussion later, which was about materials and a manual for teachers at Umeå University to integrate similar elements into their teaching.
What did you find most interesting during the conference?
A major takeaway was seeing that other teachers struggle with similar challenges, and I got a lot of inspiration for my own teaching. I also found the keynote with Katrice Horsley, a "narrative consultant and storyteller," to be very thought-provoking. Katrice was an excellent speaker, and her presentation clearly demonstrated the importance of being aware that everyone has different perspectives and experiences that shape how they view things. I took away that we need to dare to talk more about this and talk more with our students about how they perceive things, so that we can better understand each other and be more or less on the same wavelength.
Why is it rewarding to participate in the NU Conference?
It was great to have such a clear focus on pedagogy, and I got inspiration and fresh ideas for renewal from all the presentations I attended and posters I viewed, both in my role as a teacher and as a program coordinator! It was good that the conference theme was broad enough to encompass everything from how we, as teachers, can think about AI to how we can consider submission assignments in group work. I also appreciated the program elements such as a coffee discussion in smaller groups, where you could meet other teachers you had not spoken to before.
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Christopher Robin Samuelsson
Postdoctoral researcher in Physics Education at the Department of Physics and Astronomy.
What do you primarily teach?
I teach within the educational science core of the subject and primary teacher programs, and on the introductory course on physics education for physics teacher students.
What did you present at the conference?
I gave a presentation on how generative AI can be used to prepare PhD students for their defense. AI can simulate a member of the examination committee and ask relevant and challenging questions based on the thesis, which has been fed into the AI model. Together with my colleagues Giulia Polverini and Bor Gregorcic, I have started a study where we ask PhD students who are about to defend their theses to anonymously evaluate questions generated by the model regarding their dissertations.
What was the response to your presentation?
Many people are interested in AI and how it can be used for educational purposes, and there were many questions from the audience as well as considerable interest in getting a copy of our slides. I also connected with a researcher from Luleå University of Technology with whom we might collaborate in the future.
What did you find most interesting during the conference?
There were many interesting contributions, and several were about AI. The keynote "What Does It Mean to Know with Generative AI" by Thomas Hillman, Professor of Applied IT with a focus on Educational Science, was good because it provided a fundamental overview and introduced important concepts. I also attended an interesting presentation on in-school placements (VFU) in teacher education. The presenters discussed how it is not only the students who learn from their mentors, but that the mentors also learn from the students they meet. Therefore, from the students' perspective, it is important that school principals are also engaged in the in-school placements. I also learned about e-portfolios for teaching portfolios, which are used at Karolinska Institutet.
Why is it rewarding to participate in the NU Conference?
I think there has been a good mix of research presentations and pedagogical development projects carried out by teachers. It was almost difficult to choose between the different contributions! It has been inspiring to learn from ideas and pedagogical and didactic research from other subjects. The conference is large and a meeting place for many actors in higher education, such as teachers, educational developers, administrators, and student representatives. It has been exciting to meet people from other universities, and the experience has given me new perspectives and unexpected insights!