– Which teaching program would you like to highlight for your colleagues at the faculty right now?
– I’d like to highlight a course we started in spring 2025, which we’ll continue in spring 2026. The course lay dormant for a few years, but has now returned in a new guise. It’s a theory specialisation course for master’s students called Gender, family and the life course (Kj?nn, familie og livsl?p).
– We’ve designed it a bit differently from the traditional lecture-based format. The teaching consists of nine sessions in which, for the most part, the students themselves are responsible for what happens. They’re divided into groups, given a theme, and then asked to create presentations for different audiences.
– This can be anything from lecturing new sociology students to giving a presentation to The Standing Committee on Family and Cultural Affairs at Stortinget. In that way they’re challenged to adapt to different target audiences. Each student gives four or five such presentations during the semester.
– We combine this with assigning each group a position to take. Sometimes they act as communicators of sociological knowledge and speak generally about what we know on a topic; at other times we ask them to argue for a specific view, such as ‘The nuclear family was a historical mistake’. One group then gives an academically grounded presentation drawing on the set readings to argue for that view, while another group argues the opposite: that the nuclear family is still necessary today. This trains them to see things from different perspectives. At times, there’s a great deal of learning in inhabiting a particular argument and perspective, even if it’s not your own opinion. The feedback has been that they really enjoy precisely this kind of exercise.
– Those of us who aren’t presenting act as the audience, asking critical questions. If a student is presenting to the Family Committee at the Stortinget, someone in the audience might raise a hand and say they represent a particular party and pose a question from that standpoint. We take a playful approach to learning, and the students’ feedback has been positive. They really appreciated the learning that comes from immersing themselves in a topic they’re to present on.
– Who do you collabotate with?
– I run this course together with my colleague Torkild Lyngstad at ISS. We’ve done a lot of research on the same themes but with slightly different approaches and research questions, which makes this a stimulating collaboration.
– I’m also involved in other courses and collaborate widely. I actually find it most rewarding to co-teach. Sometimes that also means giving lectures together.
– On a project proposal course in the master's programme I collaborate with Kjell Erling Kjellman. Over the semester we give three joint lectures. We talk about research questions, methods and theory.
– His research is more qualitative, while I primarily work quantitatively. That gives us many fruitful exchanges along the way.
– In your opinion, what are the three most important factors for achieving good teaching in this field?
– From the students’ perspective, it’s important that they see and understand why we’re doing what we’re doing, and that they participate in the arrangement. If students don’t buy it and don’t involve, there won’t be much learning. But when they understand what we’re trying to do, they tell us they learned a lot. That’s one key factor.
– The next is, from our side, a classic. We need to be involved too. I believe our enthusiasm rubs off on the students, and I think we have to bring ourselves into it. A lecturer who opens up, who shares things and not only conveys theory but also experience – for example my experience as a researcher, as a teacher and as a person. If you dare to share that side of yourself, my experience is that you get a great deal of positive feedback.
– Third, students need to see that what they’re doing is useful. I mean that the knowledge I disseminate to them, and what they learn, is something they can actually use – not just something to learn because it’s on the syllabus. They should recognise that they can apply much of the knowledge I share, and that it gives them a stronger basis for reflecting on these themes. When that happens, it’s something they can bring along.
- If you were to give one piece of advice to new teachers at the faculty, what would it be?
– I’d say to a new lecturer: solve the tasks in your own way. Don’t think you have to do it like this or that professor; focus on doing it your way! There’s no single right or wrong way to teach, as long as it comes from you and from the heart, from who you are. We’re all different. You don’t need to try to be anything more than who you are.