Anne-Kathrin Peters

I am a Docent and Associate Professor at the Department of Learning, one of the leaders of the research cluster Transformative REsearch in Education for Sustainability (TREES). My interest lies in the role of education and technology in transformations towards more just and sustainable ways of living. I am particularly interested in how what is referred to as social sustainability (equality, equity, justice, democracy) and environmental sustainability are related. I am researching norms, values, and identities in education and how they are produced in power relations in education. Emotions and care ethics in education have been important topics for me. I have moved between different research communities in the past years, including computer science education, science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education, education for sustainable development (ESD) or environmental and sustainability education, gender research (feminist technology studies), science and technology studies (STS), and futures studies.

Current projects and roles

I coordinate the focus group “education for sustainable development” within the Swedish Higher Educations' climate network (Klimatnätverket). I share this role with Cecilia Enberg from Linköping University. Our task is to promote and support change in higher education so that higher education addresses our sustainability challenges and predicaments. I am also a member of the Advisory Board at the Excited Centre at NTNU in Norway, the Center for Excellent IT education, advising especially on the topic of “IT education for sustainability and a digital future”.

At KTH, I am a member of the faculty board of the School of Industrial Engineering and Management (ITM). 

At the Department of Learning, I am leading the research cluster ”Transformative REsearch in Education for Sustainability” (TREES) together with Anders Rosén and Björn Hedin.

I am supervising two PhD students, Maria Joebnius and Sofia Strömqvist. Maria Jobenius is a part of TREES and an industrial PhD student working with sustainability transitions at Scania. Sofia Strömqvist's research focuses on accessibility in IT education. Her main supervisor is Jan Gulliksen.

Together with Jan Gulliksen, I have led the project Digitalisation and education transformation: improving the conditions for students and teachers with cognitive impairments, which is funded by Digital Futures at KTH. 

I am also working on a project Teaching natural science and technology in the Anthropcene financed by Universitets- och Högskolerådet (UHR). Here we develop higher education for sustainability in a team of 15 teachers in the fields of natural science and technology from Stockholm University and KTH and six education researchers / education developers (Leif Dahlberg and myself from KTH and Veronica Flodin, Iann Lundegård, Eva Österlind, Miriam Huitric from Stockholm University).

I am involved in various other initiatives to develop higher education at KTH. For example, I have been collaborating with Elina Eriksson, Daniel Pargman and Minna Laurell Thorslund at the Department of Media Technology, on sustainability education. We are exploring emotions such as anxiety, dread, and hope and practices for hosting transformative conversations like Art of Hosting and harvesting conversation that matter.

I coordinate a collegial network on equality, diversity, and equal opportunities in education (priU JML) at KTH. 

My teaching is in higher education courses, offered to teachers at KTH and beyond. I am currently course-responsible for the basic course "Teaching and Learning in Higher Education”, which is compulsory for teachers to take before becoming a docent. Other courses I am involved in are listed below.

Background

Before I joint KTH in 2021, I worked at Uppsala University (2011-2021), at the Department of Information Technology. I coordinated the Climate Change Leadership (CCL) Initiative, one of five sustainability initiatives at Uppsala University. In this role, I supported cross-disciplinary research collaborations and project proposals on societal transformation and climate action. I have taught at the IT department and at Cemus, the centre for environment and development studies. I was also a member of the gender equality group at the IT department for several years.

I have a computing and teaching degree from Germany. Before moving to Sweden in 2011, I worked as a mathematics and computer science teacher at a high school in Berlin. I also worked with IT at Philips Medical Systems for several years during my studies.

Selected Publications

1. Grande, V., Kinnunen, P., Barr, M., Peters, A.-K., Sabin, M., Sánchez-Peña, M., Tshukudu, E. (forthcoming) From disciplinary enthusiasm to soulless tasks: Norms behind computing educators' emotion display. European Journal of Engineering Education
2. Peters, A.-K., Capilla, R., Coroama, V., Heldal, R., Lago, P., Leifler, O., Moreira, A., Paulo, J, Penzenstadler, B., Porras, J., Venters, C. (2024) Sustainability Education in Computing: A Systematic Literature Review, Transactions in Computing Education (TOCE) (fulltext)
3. Grande, V., Lennerfors, T., v. Hauswolff, K., Peters, A.-K. (2023) The Virtuous, the Caring, and the Enabler of Freedom: Ethical Theory to Understand Teachers as Role Models in Computing Education. European Journal of Engineering Education. (fulltext)
4. Barrineau, S., Mendy, L., Peters, A.-K., (2022) Emergentist education and the opportunities of radical futurity. Futures. (fulltext)
5. Eriksson, E, Peters, A.-K., Pargman, D., Hedin, B., Thorslund, M., Sjöö, S., (2022), “Addressing students’ eco-anxiety when teaching sustainability in computing education”, in Proceedings of the ICT for Sustainability (ICT4S) conference 2022 (Best Paper Award) (download)
6. Mendick, H., Peters, A.-K. (2022) How post-Bologna policies construct the purposes of higher education and students’ transitions into Masters programmes. In special issue Ulriksen, L. and Holmegaard, H. (Eds.), ”Student transition patterns from bachelor to master’s level in post-Bologna Europé” in European Educational Research Journal (download)
7. Peters, A.-K., (2018) Student Experience of Participation in a Discipline – A Longitudinal Study of Computer Science and IT Engineering Students, in ACM Transactions on Computing Education (TOCE), 9(1) (download)

Work in progress:

• On the role of the educational developer in sustainability transitions
• Dread, hope, and the politics of emotions in engineering education
• Identity as queer and political in computer science education
• A systematic review of social sustainability in education