We miss our UNIS colleagues already!
Is there a better way to celebrate the loosening of covid restrictions than an impromptu visit to Svalbard? The answer is NO. Several of the UiB-based crew (along with the new iEarth coordinator, Thea Krossøy) joined our northernmost colleagues for the UNIS Learning Forum the 5th and 6th of October. This, the 8th offering of the Learning Forum, included two days of plenary talks, faculty and student-focused workshops, discussion sessions, and a poster session. bioCEED was a formidable presence those two days, with UNIS and UiB bioCEEDsters leading workshops and discussion sessions and presenting several posters. For example, Ruben Thormodsæter, with considerable creative assistance from Jonathan Soule, modified his escape-room activities into a series of puzzles. We then used those puzzles in a student workshop (“What can escape rooms teach us about effective group work?”), a faculty discussion, and the poster session. Lars Martin Myhre presented a poster on behalf of biOrakel, and that led to further discussion about a northern version of biOrakel…stay tuned! Jonathan Soulé shared information on bioWRITE and bioSTATS. And of course, there was much more.
This was my first visit to UNIS in my new role at bioCEED, and it was exciting to meet with so many people that are clearly dedicated to doing the best they can for their students. There are a lot of inspiring projects going on, and the field-based teaching at UNIS makes for an exciting laboratory for learning about evidence-based teaching. For example, through Pernille Eidesen’s FieldPass project, we are learning about how to maximize the benefits of high-cost field courses, through strategies such as Virtual Field Guides and skills certifications. The general tone of the meeting was collegial, enthusiastic, and practical. I was impressed by the attendance, with faculty darting in and out of teaching commitments to attend sessions at the Learning Forum. And student involvement was great! I loved my discussions with students and through them, I learned a lot about teaching at learning at UNIS.
We concluded the visit with a half-day bioCEED meeting on the 8th. Topics ranged widely, but there was an overarching interest in bioCEED sustainability, and what bioCEED will look like in a few years. Will it be better, for example, to focus on building bridges between bioCEED UNIS and bioCEED iEarth, than to focus on the connections between UiB and UNIS? At UiB, we hope to forge new, local interdisciplinary collaborations…maybe that should be prioritized at UNIS as well. But several times, we assured ourselves that our cross-institutional work will continue regardless. This visit made it clear to me that each institution has a lot to learn from the other.
And did I mention that we also saw polar bears?! POLAR BEARS, people!