Everyday Creativity

I have contributed to an international in-service teacher education program Everyday Creativity – Boosting the internal creative resources of European schools with Finnish models of education for creativity (Erasmus+ KA2 project, December 2017 – November 2019). The team of the University of Jyväskylä was responsible for developing a teacher education program, its materials and a Teachers' Handbook which is built on the tasks, workshops and participants' course work. I have led the Jyväskylä team and co-developed the course with Kristóf Fenyvesi. Later Gomathy Soundararaj and Tea Kangasvieri joined us in editing the Handbook which will be published soon, in October, in the participants' working languages: English, Hungarian, Romanian, Italian and Dutch.

Comparative studies on teacher education

With Katarzyna Kärkkäinen, I published a co-authored paper on the system of Finnish teacher education in the Hungarian journal Pedagógusképzés ['Teacher Education']. The publication is part of a special issue of the journal which presents the main features of teacher education systems in different countries: Austria, Germany, the Netherlands, the UK and Singapore. Beyond presenting the administrative structure, each paper in the special issue highlights good pedagogical practices, current challenges and innovative initiatives which contribute to the renewal of the system.

New publication on translanguaging

Our paper discussing translanguaging in classroom interaction has been published by Springer last fall. I wrote it with my colleagues from the University of Jyväskylä: Teppo Jakonen (first author) and Petteri Laihonen. The abstract below informs about the main goals and results of the paper.

New publication on co-located schools

Our co-authored paper about co-located schools has just been published. Earlier I wrote about co-located schools in this blog; briefly, co-locatedness means that schools that are administratively separate institutions share premises. Sharing space often leads to increased cooperation but might also trigger conflicts.

The abstract of our paper summarizes our findings:

New publication on Hungarian and Finnish schoolscapes

Recently I published a chapter in an edited book on sociolinguistic research entitled On the Border of Language and Dialect. As I write in the intro, most of the authors of the volume (e.g. Preston, Palander & Riionheimo, Laakso, Koivisto, Kunnas) "organize their studies along geographical borders vis-à-vis perceptions of dialects" while

this article elaborates on a spatial approach to language practices in educational settings, investigating how teachers establish relationships between languages, states, and speakers. The focus is on ways in which they co-construct geographical and political formations while reflecting on school spaces and institutional language policies in conversation with the researcher.  

New publication on language aware multilingual pedagogies

In the turn of November and December I presented a paper and a poster with my colleague Josephine Moate with whom we co-ordinate the development of a new study programme LAMP – Language Aware Multilingual Pedagogy (in Finnish: KiMo – Kielitietoisuutta ja monikielisyyttä tukeva pedagogiikka), a project shared between the Department of Teacher Education, the Department of Education and the Department of Language and Communication Studies at the University of Jyväskylä.

In our paper with Josephine, we discuss different entry points to the study of language awareness and multilingualism

New publication: Special issue on schoolscapes for Linguistics and Education

I happily announce that our new Special Issue entitled Studying the visual and material dimensions of education and learning has been published as Vol. 44 (2018) of Linguistics and Education. We edited it together with Petteri Laihonen.

Our editorial summarizes what we consider the main contribution of this publication:

In this special issue we offer an extensive exploration and conceptualization of the visual and material dimensions of education and learning, bringing together a cluster of emerging scholarly ventures that investigate how people create, explore, interpret, negotiate, adjust, contest, transform and envision learning environments. This edited collection of research papers shows the versatility of the growing field of schoolscape studies and the high potential of recent theoretical and methodological innovations to investigate the visual and material dimensions of education and learning. The studies share the view that premises designed for education as well as other spaces can equally serve as sites of teaching and learning. Among others, the papers ask what the environment offers and how images, multimodal texts and artifacts can be used to enhance (language) learning and communication. The empirical case studies apply a wide range of theoretical and methodological approaches, bringing innovation into the generation, presentation and analysis of data from varying educational institutions and mundane settings covering geographical sites from Europe and North America.

New publication: Inclusive ethnographies

As a continuation of our previous study on representation and videography in linguistic landscape research, with Robert A. Troyer we published a paper on linguistic landscape oriented ethnographic work. This contribution is part of the special issue Methodology in Linguistic Landscape Research, edited by Robert Blackwood for Linguistic Landscape.