Workshop: Exploring changing educational environments and organizational cultures

I'm one of the organizers of this seminar. Welcome!

Exploring changing educational environments and organizational cultures

An international workshop on 16–17 November 2017

Venue: University of Jyväskylä, Agora Building, Lea Pulkkinen hall

Just like many other organizations, educational organizations also undergo extensive change processes due to broader changes in contemporary working life, changes in the curriculum, money cuts and the ways in which knowledge, human subjects and communities are understood in an increasingly technologized and globalized world. These changes manifest themselves in schoolscapes, i.e., the material environment of education.

We invite you to discuss novel research designs and participatory methods that facilitate the application of research results in work-life contexts and create opportunities for various co-designed projects between academia and society. We focus on ways in which participants’ perceptions of learning environments enhance processes of change.

A workshop on co-located schools

I am the postdoctoral researcher of the Jyväskylä Language Campus project Multilingual schoolscape – Multilingual learning environment which organized a workshop on co-located schools on 2 December in Jyväskylä. Co-located schools (kieliparikoulut/samlokaliserade skolor) are cases where a Finnish and a Swedish medium school have moved together. Currently there are 35–45 such schools in Finland, and their number is growing. In co-located schools, a multilingual environment is given, but the potential of such cases has only recently been recognized for language learning and practice. 

Our team

8th Linguistic Landscapes International Workshop, Liverpool

I attended the 8th Linguistic Landscapes International Workshop from 27 to 29 April 2016 at the University of Liverpool. The workshop was organized around the keywords regeneration, revitalisation and re-territorialisation. The event included more than forty presentations so I decided not to report on all of them. Rather I focus on issues that seem to be the most relevant to my own research: agency in the linguistic landscape and methodological developments in linguistic landscape studies. In brief, I am interested in what, who and how contributes to the creation and interpretation of linguistic landscapes in various societal settings, including research encounters and academic discussions.

Liverpool's Albert Dock as seen from the Ferris wheel

Exploratory Workshop for Participatory Visual Methods

I was among the organizers and presenters of the first Exploratory Workshop for Participatory Visual Methods at our university. The full-day workshop was held on 13 May 2016 as a cooperation of researchers from the Department of Arts and Culture Studies, the Centre for Applied Language Studies and the Department of Languages. Six papers, three exhibitions and 77 registered participants were included in discussions of societally engaged scholarly work. By the end of the day, the significance of the relationship between researchers and participants was underlined. That is, visual methods do not only explore stories about the people investigated, but also reflect on the researcher's position.

An attractive poster invited the attendees to the venue

Ten days in Norway. Part 1: before the workshop

I feel privileged that I could spend ten inspiring and refreshing days in Norway. First I spent a week in Tromsø and then a couple of days in Oslo. This visit gave me a great opportunity for summarizing what I’ve already done in my Marie Curie project, and I also could make some plans for the future. The visit was focused around a two-day international research workshop ‘Contextualizing linguistic diversity in institutional settings’ I organized together with Prof. Hilde Sollid and Florian Hiss at the University of Tromsø – the Arctic University of Norway. In the first part of my post I share what happened before the workshop. In the second part I will write about the topics and discussions of the workshop, and I will write about my Oslo experience as well.

Tromsø harbor

Back to Norway!

Yesterday I arrived to Tromsø for a week. As I mentioned in another post, we organize a two-day workshop with my colleagues, Prof. Hilde Sollid and Florian Hiss on 8–9 October. I'm happy to be here again!

The first morning view of Tromsø from my hotel

Contextualizing Linguistic Diversity in Institutional Settings

I am pleased to announce that we are preparing a workshop with two colleagues in Tromsø. In 2013, I presented a paper in Tromsø at the Tromsø International Conference on Language Diversity. There we had very illuminating discussions with Prof. Hilde Sollid who invited me next year to a panel on language ideologies in the classroom at the 20th Sociolinguistics Symposium. As a continuation of our cooperation, I will spend a week in Tromsø this October. The visit includes lectures, a data seminar and the two-day workshop 'Contextualizing Linguistic Diversity in Institutional Settings' that we have just announced and organize together with Hilde and her colleague, Florian Hiss.

Please consider our call for papers that follows after the image!

As I saw Tromsø during my first visit in 2013