– Which teaching program would you like to highlight for your colleagues at the faculty right now?
– The TIK master’s program, obviously. The students find it interesting because the themes we work with are very current, which makes it easier for them to see the relevance of the conceptual frameworks we use.
– I teach Science and Technology Studies in this program, a field that seems to have become popular among bachelor’s students too. They want to know more about how knowledge, technology, and politics relate to one another — and I am happy to teach that.
– Who do you collaborate with?
– In the courses I teach in this program, I primarily collaborate with other teachers at TIK. We also have some guest lectures included as part of the regular courses, not many. In our courses we also interact with organizations out of academia. The courses include visits in which the students get to discuss with people working in those organizations about topics that we teach in the courses.
– For instance, the introductory course includes a lecture on infrastructures. Together with it, there is a visit scheduled to the Kampen recycling station. This station is an infrastructure to manage waste, and it is part of a larger system in Oslo. It an amazing infrastructure! The visit makes very easy to grasp the concept.
– Another example is the regular visit to the Norwegian Board on Technology. This visit creates the opportunity for the students to reflect on parliamentarian politics and controversies regarding new and emerging technologies, and to learn about how policy advice is made and how the law is informed.
– In your opinion, what are the three most important factors for achieving good teaching in this field?
– It is important to be able to trigger curiosity among the students. STS is not necessarily the easiest field conceptually. It is important to show its empirical relevance in the beginning to get the students on board. Once you have managed that the teaching can get very pleasant.
– If you were to give one piece of advice to new teachers at the faculty, what would it be?
– We need more collective reflection on the impact of AI on both learning and research, even if that point is now somewhat commonplace.
– I also think we should reconsider how we practice critique in the social sciences. Critique must be realistic and well grounded, but a consistently negative mode of critique may be unhelpful, as it can leave students with the impression that there is no future anyway. We need forms of critique that are still mobilizing — critique that shows how the social sciences are important for social change.
– More broadly, this concerns rethinking the role of the university and higher education in society. We could incorporate elements of that discussion into the curricula of our courses..