The students have voted researcher Rani Lill Anjum the semester's best lecturer in spring 2023 for her teaching on interdisciplinary and controversies in sustainability.
NMBU's students have voted researcher Rani Lill Anjum the semester's best lecturer in spring 2023 for her teaching in the course MINA321 Interdisciplinarity and Expert Disagreement on Sustainability - English Option.
"This award is highly regarded," student student Eirik Mathias Rummelhoff said.
"There were many nominees and the committee has done a thorough preparatory work before making its decision."
He represented the students' committee for best lecturer. It is the Student Parliament's Labor Committee at NMBU that awards the award.
Engaged and facilitating
The students describe Rani as engaged and highly competent.
"Lectures and evaluations are of high quality," Eirik Mathias said.
The nomination further reads as follows:
"[Rani]shows a great interest and zeal for her course, and for the students' learning. Her great commitment rubs off on the students, which is reflected in the students we have spoken to.
What sets Rani Lill Anjum apart from the other lecturers is her commitment both inside and outside the lecture hall and her forward-looking attitude towards assessment of students at NMBU. By assessing through individual tasks and collaborative projects, with written guidance along the way, a constructive learning environment is created in the student group.
Rani adapts the teaching to the students' needs and adapts the course content based on the students' feedback. She shows an inner motivation to develop MINA321 into as good and educational a course as possible for the students, not only in the lectures, but in all implementation stages of the course."
Impressed dean
"I don't think Average Joe knows how challenging it is to teach interdisciplinary topics," Dean of Education, Tone Birkemoe said.
"It's so easy to fall into the trap where you don't please anyone, and everybody is dissatisifed."
"But you do it in an exemplary fashion - that is super impressive!"
In the course MINA321, the students analyse real cases of scientific controversies, expert disagreement and diverging value judgements related to sustainable solutions. They meet diversity of partly conflicting professional perspectives on sustainability. Hardly any topic within sustainability research is free from controversies, political conflicts or paradoxes in terms of values, and considerations of the environment, society, economy and politics often pull in different directions.
What appears as a sustainable solution for someone and something, here and now, can have negative consequences for other groups, areas, places or times. Although there are no unequivocal answers to how we can solve complex problems, such as the climate crisis, the loss of natural diversity and the transition to renewable energy, we depend on experts being able to collaborate across disciplines for common solutions.
The courses MINA320/321 (Norwegian/English version) are mandatory for all master's students at the Faculty of Environmental Sciences and Natural Resource Management (MINA).
