Tour Leader: Steve Soderlind

Steve Soderlind has taught at St. Olaf since 1980. He has a B.A. with majors in mathematics and economics from the University of Minnesota and a Ph.D. in economics from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. He began work in Norway while preparing a dissertation on Norway’s regional policy as a graduate student and guest scholar at the University of Oslo in 1976-77. His working paper “The Ascent of Regional Policy in Norway, 1945-1980” was published in 1999 by the Norwegian Institute for Urban and Regional Research.

His current research focuses on the Baltic States and their recovery from almost five decades of exploitive occupation. Over the past decade Steve has lead many International and Off-Campus Studies programs for students in Asia and Europe.

This photo shows Steve with his wife Ann in front of the lake in Voss, Norway.

Tour Leader: Nancy Aarsvold

Nancy Aarsvold has taught Norwegian for more than 20 years. She has a B.A. degree with majors in English and Norwegian from Pacific Lutheran University and an M.A. in Scandinavian Studies from the University of Minnesota. In 1980-81, she studied at the University of Oslo and then returned to Norway every summer for the rest of the 1980s. During that time, she attended the Oslo International Summer School twice and worked as a teacher for American students in a Norwegian summer language program in Sandane in western Norway. In more recent years, she has traveled to Norway almost every year to collect materials for her textbook project, record audio from native Norwegian speakers, and lead study tours.

With specialties in curriculum development and instructional technology, Nancy has been involved in developing a variety of Norwegian language materials, including the NorWords Norwegian lessons via e-mail, the KlikkNorsk CD-ROM, an online workbook for the novel Naiv.Super by Erlend Loe, and most recently Sett i gang I: An Introductory Norwegian Curriculum (textbook / workbook / glossary). Currently Nancy is exploring the use of social software, such as weblogs, to document events and instruction in the St. Olaf Norwegian department (Hva skjer?), to create electronic student portfolios in her courses (Skriveverkstedet), and to develop online listening exercises with audio clips of Norwegian daily news (Ukas lydklipp).

This photo shows Nancy with her daughter Tina on the top of Mount Fløyen in Bergen, Norway.