A Bermudian researcher found a home away from home when she took part in an exchange trip to Sweden.Joni Charles was a guest lecturer in the economics division at Mälardalen University in the city of Västerås last month.Dr Charles, who has taught at Texas State University for almost 35 years, took the trip as part of a faculty exchange programme.She explained: “It’s a very old city and has lots of history but, almost like Bermuda, it was very tight-knit.“One of the weekends I was there in Västerås, they had a culture night — it was like Harbour Nights in Bermuda.“Everybody came out, shops were open, there were museums, art shops and lots of dance, theatre and music.”She said the “exciting opportunity” to work in Sweden offered a chance for her to expand her teaching style and work with students from different backgrounds.Dr Charles taught an upper-level course in microeconomics, which she explained deals with how consumers and companies make decisions.She added: “Their course is fairly rigorous, fairly analytical, meaning they use a lot of maths and it’s more directed to the theories behind economic concepts.”Dr Charles said: “In some respects, the students I have and the students there were the same, in the sense that they’re looking for their coursework to have particular applications, which is what I try to convey to them. “So even though I’m teaching theory, I try to bring in as many everyday applications as I can.“From what I gathered, some of the students that I had might have been engineering students or come from other areas in the university, whereas my students at Texas State tend to be primarily in the areas of management, marketing or accounting.”The researcher explained that the course at Mälardalen encourages international business students to study in English, so professors and guest lecturers are often invited to teach there.Dr Charles said: “The students were an international mix from all over the world, so I think they got exposure to a guest lecturer who could provide insights from a different part of the world, they get a diversity of teaching experiences.“I got a chance to frame the way that I teach in a different way. Sometimes you get used to presenting the material in the same way or using the same examples, here I was really challenged to find ways of making what I was teaching applicable to them.”It was the first time she had visited Västerås, which is about an hour away from the Swedish capital Stockholm.Dr Charles graduated from Howard University in Washington and completed her master’s degree and PhD at Purdue University in Indiana.As well as microeconomics, her teaching interests at Texas State include environmental economics and management.She said: “I’ve never had any Bermudian students, but I would love to because I think we have a wonderful college of business and wonderful programmes.“I try to represent Bermuda well.”