Troublesome knowledge

Troublesome knowledge with Lena Håkansson & Anders Ahlberg

This workshop will focus on three questions; 1) geoeducation course contents that are difficult for students to learn (troublesome knowledge), 2) on parts of the curriculum that are blocking (threshold concepts), and 3) on teaching strategies that geoscience teachers use in order to overcome such difficulties (signature pedagogies for geoscience). We will also share ways how to stay in tune with your students’ understandings and misunderstandings of geoscience concepts during a course. One underlying question is, do we focus enough on the difficult parts of the curriculum, and sometimes overly much on easy parts? Our initiative is an extension of a iEarth project based at UiT that involves staff and students at Arctic University of Norway: Troublesome knowledge, threshold concepts and signature pedagogies in Earth Science – a possibility to re-focus teaching and learning. The aim of the project is to analyze and disseminate examples and teaching strategies.