How do students learn? How do we learn with students?

Teaching by research, or research-based teaching, integrates active scientific enquiry into the curriculum, encouraging students to become active producers of knowledge rather than passive consumers. It promotes critical thinking through collaborative, hands-on research activities. It serves as a way to socialise students into the scientific process and its values by engaging them in well-designed research projects together. This certainly involves more preparation and follow-up work for the teacher, but it is a very rewarding learning experience!

I have been teaching by research in recent courses with Bachelor’s students, especially in Environmental Psychology, in which students engage in empirical research in collaboration with Neuchâtel city museums. For example, in 2023 and 2024, we collaborated with the Botanic Garden of Neuchâtel to contribute to the museum design of their new exhibition called Business Plantes, and analyse how individual visitors perceived it. In 2026, we will collaborate with the Natural History Museum in Neuchâtel on the cognitive, affective, and imaginative dimensions of visitors’ experiences of their Kssss – Bestiaires utopiques exhibition, applying the Talking Aloud for Museum Studies methodology developed by Prof. Colette Dufresnes-Tassé to gain a better understanding of visitors’ relationships with insects.