Writings published in 2021
On my first full year of PhD research I was working around 50% of the time with international affairs in a vocational college, and advancing my PhD project for the other half of the time. I revised my research plan for various funding applications, presented in conferences, read theoretical and methodological texts and went through data (educational policy documents), but also wrote texts. Some of the longer academic writing started last year will hopefully be published this year, but many shorter, personal or collaborative writing projects were already out last year.
This blog post is a compilation list of writings published in 2021. I shortly describe the process of coming up with the ideas for different texts and share my thoughts about them now.
Writings are listed in the order of their date of publication.
May: Global dimension of sustainable development (in Finnish) — section in an online guidebook for educators
In 2020, I was asked to write for an online guidebook on sustainable future published by the Finnish National Agency for Education. I remember thinking then why me? I did not feel yet like someone accomplished enough to write about such a wide topic, and for such a wide target group: educators and professionals on all levels and fields of education. Although I had more than 10 years of practitioner experience within global citizenship education and international cooperation, I was only at the very beginning of my PhD.
Of course I still accepted the invitation, figuring that this could also be a chance to clarify my thinking around the concept of global citizenship, and to share some of the high-quality teaching resources already produced by Finnish non-governmental organisations. The request was to write in common sense language without academic references and share activities that have taken or could take place in formal education environments.
In my text, I summarise the idea behind the concept of global citizenship education, describe practical examples and provide links to resources on bringing e.g. themes such as human rights, responsible consumption or anti-racism in teaching. Reading the text now, more than one year after submitting it — let’s just say that I still can stay behind the text, although I can notice how my thinking and understanding has developed in one year.
June: Bodily learning of global citizenship in adult education — column in an online magazine
Another challenge came from the Elm Magazine (European Lifelong Learning Magazine) published by the Finnish Lifelong Learning Foundation KVS. They were making a theme issue on adult learning outdoors and asked if I could write an assertive column on this topic. My own research is not really focusing on adult nor outdoors learning, and I was struggling to find anything to write about. Then I remembered an online training on transformative learning in global citizenship education organised by the EU-supported Bridge 47 project. The fascinating training exercise called “entanglement walk” transformed my thinking. Read more from the column!
The text is strongly influenced by everything else I was reading at the time of its writing in May 2021, including many essay books by Rebecca Solnit. Besides starting to learn more on posthumanism in education, I was also reading a lot of feminist classics and recent literature as I was enrolled in a PhD course Feminist Theories on Science and Knowledge by the Malmö University. Again, it felt like writing the column was a great opportunity to organize different theories and writers with my own emerging thoughts.
October: Humanity and Bildung in Finland (in Finnish) — book review in an academic journal
I worked with Nina Hjelt, project manager at the Finnish Lifelong Learning Foundation KVS for a joint book review of the re-edition of the classic work Ihminen ja sivistys [“Human and Bildung”] (1982/2021) by the late Finnish philosopher Reijo Wilenius. The new edition of the book included a foreword by his son, professor of future studies Markku Wilenius and an afterword by philosopher Eero Ojanen. The book review was published in the open access academic journal on adult education (Aikuiskasvatus, in Finnish only).
We titled our book review as “Bildung at the core of humanity”. This was my first book review in an academic journal, and I read earlier book reviews in the journal to understand better its style and content requirements. It was helpful to write the review together with Nina. We held periodic Teams meetings to jointly reflect on our understanding of the core content and what we should focus on in the limited space.
Wilenius was especially interested in the human growth through the educational philosophy of Rudolf Steiner, but also in societal questions around the meaning of work/labour. We summarised Wilenius’ view on Bildung as the ability to approach societal problems from different perspectives, to have empathy towards other worldviews and readiness to change one’s own perceptions. This definition might sounds very familiar to practitioners and scholars of global citizenship education!
November: Concrete utopias as a means to promote youth civic engagement (in Finnish) — paper in an academic journal
A team working on a larger research project called “Pedagogy of concrete utopias: Fostering youth agency and climate activism in formal education” wrote this review article. The first author doing most of the work was Antti Rajala, the research project leader and one of my PhD supervisors. I had a very minor role in writing and editing the text, but it was great to be part of the team and see how the manuscript came together.
The paper was published in a Finnish academic journal Kasvatus & Aika which deals mainly with historical research, philosophy and sociology of education. This article was published in a massive theme issue on democracy and education, comprising of 21 peer-reviewed articles and four review articles, in total more than 400 pages of reading in Finnish.
The aim of the article was to present the pedagogical model on using the concept of concrete utopia to promote actions for sustainable development in upper secondary education. We also provided some examples of student projects and reflected on the limitations around youth civic engagement within formal education. There will be more publications coming around this research project in the future, so stay tuned and follow the project on Twitter: @ConcreteUtopias!
December: Handbook of Global Education and Learning — book review for the GERIF network blog
Global Education Research in Finland (GERIF) is a network for researchers and practitioners to share information about academic events and publications, and advance discussion on the position and objectives of global education in Finland. The network was founded in 2018, and I have been part of its coordination team since 2021. Among other tasks, the coordination team ensures that one of the important communication channels, the GERIF blog remains active.
The book under review in my blog post, The Bloomsbury Handbook of Global Education and Learning (2020) edited by Douglas Bourn from the University College of London, is a huge collection of global citizenship related research from all over the world. I decided to write about this particular book after seeing Douglas Bourn and other authors presenting it in two different online conferences I attended last year. In the post, I highlight a few chapters from the book and propose some potential ways to use the book in practice, teaching, or self-study. Finland features in several chapters, but overall the 33 chapters of the book represent widely the diversity of global citizenship education in terms of geographical location, purposes, and educational environments and levels of education.
This was it for 2021! Looking forward to what this year will bring in terms of learning, writing, and collaborating.
