Conference “Teaching for learning” focused on pedagogical wellbeing

On 14–15 January, the conference “Teaching for learning 2026: anxiety and excitement of teaching” took place at the University of Tartu. The focus of the two-day event was on shaping an academic culture that supports learning and pedagogical wellbeing.

On the first day, the teaching staff could take part in workshops that invited them to reflect on supporting students’ learning, teachers’ self-compassion, digital accessibility, artificial intelligence and the role of feedback in the learning process. The workshops were led by facilitators from Sweden, Ireland, Finland and Estonia.

In his opening address on the second day of the conference, Rector Toomas Asser noted that anxiety is inevitable in academic work, yet it can be transformed into constructive excitement. Student representative Anet Ilustrumm explained that students initially perceive subject-specific knowledge as a large puzzle, so the lecturer’s task is to help them recognise patterns and create a coherent whole. She also emphasised that students are highly supportive when they sense that the teaching staff member is making an effort to reduce learningrelated anxiety.

Keynote speaker Liisa Postareff from Häme University of Applied Sciences discussed higher education teachers’ pedagogical wellbeing and its relationship with both student wellbeing and the quality of teaching. She argued that a strong teaching culture is built on valuing teaching, collaboration between teaching staff and students, team teaching, allowing room for mistakes, and shared responsibility.

In her presentation “Wellbeing and personality at work”, Kätlin Anni, UT Lecturer in Clinical Psychology and Research Fellow in Welfare Research, added the role of personality to the discussion on job satisfaction and wellbeing. She pointed out that personality profiles differ systematically between professions; for example, higher education teaching staff tend to score higher in openness – curiosity, intellectual interests and creativity.

The presentations on the second day of the conference emphasised that teaching is not merely the transmission of knowledge but a deeply human activity influenced, among other things, by the lecturer’s own wellbeing, relationships and working environment. Another key message was that high-quality teaching, pedagogical wellbeing and a supportive academic culture are inseparably linked, and that their conscious development is a shared responsibility of both individuals and the institution.

The conference was organised by the UT Centre for Learning and Teaching. The recording of the keynote speeches is available on UTTV. Workshop slides and poster presentations are available on the conference’s Moodle page (in Estonian).

The conference took place within the framework of the activity “Higher education quality and internationalisation” of the intervention “Higher education quality, internationalisation and doctoral schools” under measure 21.4.4.2 “Links between education, society and the labour market” of the Education and Youth Programme and the Cohesion Policy Funds Implementation Plan, and was cofunded by the European Union.