Programme director with three R’s

To many, SLU is synonymous with forests, hiking and general “outdoor life”. And even the truth is more complex than that, there’s some truth to the prejudices.

Emanuel Erlandsson, programme studies director for the Industrial Wood Supply Management masters programme, chuckles as he admits to fitting the description perfectly.  

- Yeah, I pretty much tick all the boxes. I come from a small family-owned farm in the south, with an emphasis on forestry. So I was very much a typical SLU student in most ways, says Emanuel.

Could have become a scribe

His interests, however, are much broader than just farming and forestry. Emanuel always had a humanities streak; he claims he’s an “involuntary natural sciences” guy. If it hadn’t been for military services, he might have ended up in a newsroom instead of in the forest business.

- I obviously have the forestry background, but I grew tired of that as a teenager. I was going to be a journalist or something – working with words is more my thing. But when I did military service, I had some time to reflect and I started missing the forest again. I understood I was somehow meant to do this.

Emanuel ended up studying to jägmästare at SLU and worked for a few years in the forest sector. He then became a Ph. D. at SLU. During his doctorate years, he became an adjunct and started teaching alongside his research. That fit him really well and when the Industrial Wood Supply Management programme started a few years later, Emanuel was offered the position as programme director of studies (PSR).

- I really liked teaching. I was always trying to shake some more ketchup out of that bottle. When the previous lecturer quit, I took over and got the whole bottle at once, so to speak.

Teaching is not only fun, says Emanuel. It also comes with great freedom. While many academics prioritise research and see freedom in that, Emanuel feels the same about teaching.

- It’s very free, contrary to what many think. You have your budget and your subject, but within that framework you’re free to create. Research can be more constrained a lot of the time.

The three R’s

Teaching takes a lot of time. Especially in the beginning, when you’re new to a course or module. Emanuel Erlandsson sees is as a step ladder, when the third year is the “peak” from a teacher’s point of view.

- It’s extremely taxing at first, when everything’s new. The second year, you start to understand and the third year is when you can start to change things a little. Your fourth and fifth year it’s almost easy, because you know everything. Then you have to start thinking about renewing things, so you don’t get lazy and comfortable.

A good university teacher knows about renewal. Emanuel also lists three things – three R’s – that he thinks are the keys to good teaching. It’s about things being

1. relevant,
2. reasonable and
3. fun (SWE: roligt).

- If I’m bringing in a new teacher I want someone who knows the subject. But what’s even more important is involvement. Because the students can tell right away if you’re involved and engaged with what you’re teaching, or not. But it’s not enough being involved, you have to be able to make others involved, too. If you want to be able to do that, your teaching needs to be relevant, reasonable and fun.

Tough demands, difficult challenges

Industrial Wood Supply and Management (IWSM) is a young programme: the first batch of students will graduate in 2026. The future for them looks bright, with plenty of job opportunities.  

Since IWSM is such a specialised programme, developed in collaboration with the industry, the entry requirements are quite high. The good thing about that is that the teaching can start from a pretty high level straight away. The bad thing is that it makes it more difficult to fill positions:

- We demand a lot from our students, no doubt. We want them to have a forest background, some sort of previous experience with the subject, and so on. But we also need new students. We need to tread a line there, and that’s a challenge. Especially today, when fewer and fewer students are opting for the natural sciences programmes in high school, says Emanuel.

To broaden the student intake, the programme is offered not only on-site in Umeå but also remotely. That’s a fairly popular alternative, with about 30 percent of all students being remote during the last year.

When it comes to attracting more students to not only IWSM but all of SLU, Emanuel Erlandsson doesn’t have a perfect solution. But he believes in addressing new groups of people.

- What I’ve noticed is that students are very much the same no matter what we do. The question then becomes: how do we reach all the other people? The big city crowd, people with a foreign background, more women perhaps? Can we talk about SLU from a new perspective? Hunting or sitting around campfires isn’t for everyone, but you can study at SLU and pretty much never set your foot in a forest once you start working. There’s a lot we can do, and many people we’re not currently reaching. That’s our challenge going forward.

Text and photo: Henrik Persson

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