Christmas greeting from Dean Sten Ludvigsen

To everyone at the Faculty of Educational Sciences

Welcome to the Christmas holidays and to the celebration of all we have achieved together this year.

In recent years, the Faculty of Educational Sciences has become an international community of scholars, including students and professors from almost every continent in the world.

After four years as dean, I will be giving the Christmas talk in English this year. Maybe you will hear my Pittsburgh accent, since I learned English at the University of Pittsburgh as a PhD student back in the 1990s.

First, I would like to thank you all for your dedication and hard work during the last nine months – it has been a time with many small and large challenges. To be locked down and living under a plethora of unusual restrictions for over nine months is socially, cognitively, and emotionally very demanding. We all know that the challenges of communication in teaching and research are even more complex in digital environments. Both research collaboration and teaching tasks often demand detailed coordination and clarity. Digital environments limit the nuance needed to repair functions and achieve aims.  

Our surveys show, however, that collaboration at the faculty has increased in our teams working with  planning of teaching and the actual performance.

After nine months, we know the vaccine is coming, but we also know that the spring term will be very demanding and that we will need to meet the challenges with creative solutions, both with regard to teaching design and student follow-up.  

Again, thank you for all your efforts; we have been tested as faculty, and we have more than passed the test.

When we - Helge, Magne, and myself - were elected as deans, we set goals and defined tasks we wanted to realize, but before we launch into these, just a few facts about the faculty.

Since the economy is strong, and we have good overview and control, it gives us opportunities to create incentives for specific efforts that can increase the quality of research, expand the ways that we do research and how we collaborate with other institutions in the society.

The number of  publications at the faculty in general is stable and keeping pace with the humanities and social sciences, while the volume of high-level publications in particular has continued to grow. Reaching this stable level of publications helps legitimize the faculty at the University of Oslo, among other institutions and internationally in the research field in which we contribute.

We are performing better in our study programmes; more students complete their programmes, and the quality of their work has improved. However, I think we can still raise the bar.

Here are some other highlights from the last four years:

CEMO has become a permanent unit at our faculty, at the same level as the other three departments. It has also expanded and transformed the methodological expertise at the faculty over the last years. This can be seen together with the advancement in methods and methodology that characterizes all units.

As a permanent unit, CEMO affords great potential for further advances to connect methodological expertise to several knowledge areas and disciplines at the faculty.

Over the last three years, the faculty has established the FIKS center for research, innovation, and competence development in schools. FIKS provides a research-based programme for the development of practice in schools through partnership. FIKS opens up a new bridge – boundary zones - between the faculty and practice and has become a broker for mediating knowledge from several of the faculties at the University of Oslo and school practices through the partnership model.

The faculty has three research labs, our goal for this part of the faculty has been to further enhance their capacities by investing in additional resources. We think that enhancement of these labs create new and better conditions for innovative studies with new types of research designs. 

It has been difficult to transform our teaching methodologies into a digital format (from Fronter to CANVAS), let alone to implement the General Data Protection Regulation. Such transformations involve us all and it’s demanding and necessary – when we use it for improving our study programmes. 

In our research education programme - the PhD programme - a number of changes have been made to the structure and the course load. The doctoral programme represents the future of the faculty, the ambition and aim of which is to empower all PhD students to contribute to the frontiers of research in their field. High expectations, support, and collective work are needed to achieve such ambitions.

Through the transformation of research groups back in 2017, new research leaders have been developing their capacities for leadership and for research activities. This is important for the faculty as such.

And a new programme for our young scholars has been established in order to increase the number of grant applications with high quality. This new programme grew out of the faculty’s efforts to improve our applications to the European Research Council and the Research Council of Norway.

The faculty has sent two center-of-excellence applications: one application led by CEMO with participants from all the departments including an international partner (Thematic Focus; Equality in Education); and one application from the Department of Teacher Education and School Research, with national and international partners focusing on quality in teaching and learning. 

Recently, the faculty has won several prizes at the University of Oslo (in research, Sigrid Blömeke, in teaching, Lisbeth Brevik), and two colleagues (Kristin Vassbø and Lisbeth Brevik) received merit recognition for excellence in teaching over a three-year period.

When a four-year period comes to an end, it is important to recognize the work of a number of colleagues and co-leaders.

First, I would like to recognize Helge Strømsø and Jon Magne Vestøl for their dedicated collaboration. We embrace a variety of perspectives and voices at the faculty, and we hope that together we have guided the faculty well through both routine matters and days of crisis. Thank you for collaboration, for your valued input, hard work, and thoughtful decisions during this time.

Ola Erstad has led the Department of Education for six years now through changes large and small. The department carries a long and proud history, and Ola has led it with wisdom and balance.

Rita Hvistendahl has chaired the Department of Teacher Education and School Research for eight years with impressive growth and renewal to show for her leadership. Her work as leader also contributes to extensions of other fields of knowledge, such as educational leadership, supervision and of quantitate analysis in education (EKVA). I think that Rita’s ambitions for the department are more than fulfilled.

I also want to thank Ona Bøe Wie, head of the Department for Special Needs Education, and Sigrid Blömeke at CEMO for our  collaboration. Ona has provided her department with a clear profile and work to re-establish and renew its connection to the fields of practice the department needs to engage. And Sigrid Blömeke not only accepted the move to the research park, but more importantly made CEMO a top international research center in the area of measurement in education.

Last, but not least, I would like to thank Bård Kjos and the faculty administration for their professional work and all their efforts in our four years as deans. The faculty administration is also going through changes to increase the capacity for research-based communication and all the functions that need to work well in a high-performing faculty.

I personally like to walk the corridors of the third floor and talk with my colleagues about what we can and should do. It has increased my understanding of all the work that is part of the faculty’s duties and efforts.

It has been a privilege to serve as dean with all of you and to represent you all in our collective efforts at the University of Oslo and elsewhere.

I will now pass the responsibility of leading the faculty over to a very experienced leader, Rita Hvistendahl, who, as I mentioned, has been leading the Department of Teacher Education and School Research through a period of eight years with tremendous growth and numerous achievements. She leaves the department as a transformed unit both in research and in education. Her leadership experiences in the department are valuable assets for taking on the challenge of leading and governing the faculty together with her team—which brings its own expertise to this collective enterprise.

I wish you all - as socially possible as can be under the circumstance - a merry Christmas and a happy new year.