Since 2018, assistant professor Lena Andersson at the Department of Natural Sciences, Mathematics and Society at Malmö University and assistant professor Purna Bahadur Subba at the Department of STEM education at Samtse College of Education have been leaders of an exchange project within the SIDA-funded exchange program Linnæus Palme.
Through successful exchanges of teachers and students, the project has promoted culturally oriented learning in mathematics and natural sciences within Swedish and Bhutanese teacher and school education.
As the last teacher exchange within the project, which ends this year, we visited our two student teachers and Bhutanese colleagues at Samtse College of Education for three weeks over the turn of March–April. We arrived on a Friday in Paro and the capital Thimphu and on Saturday had the honor of hiking up to the amazing Paro Taktshang Buddhist Monastery.
After the weekend we were driven south from Thimphu to Samtse near the border with India. During the next two working weeks, we managed a lot. We observed our student teachers’ mathematics teaching at Samtse Higher Secondary School and gave presentations about Sweden at the college and a couple of schools outside Samtse.
We also held didactic seminars on how to introduce chemistry to student teachers and how to use geographic information systems in school teaching. An important purpose of the trip was to discuss the possibilities for continued collaboration between the universities.
The idea is that the focus should be on learning in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) and as it looks now, we have the opportunity to apply for an Erasmus+ International Credit Mobility grant at the beginning of next year. The hope therefore remains of being able to continue on the path taken and build on already established contact areas.
Lecturer Per Schubert and assistant professor Annette Zeidler, Department of Natural Sciences, Mathematics and Society, Malmö University.
Teaching chemistry didactics at Samtse College of Education