SCHOOLS IN LET'S SEE

Oulu University Teacher Training School lies in Northern Finland and it is known as a town of high technology. It is a part of the Educational Faculty of Oulu University and the school building is situated very near to the University and consists of two primary schools, one secondary school and one senior high school (in this last one, we have 250 students, who are 16 – 19 years old). 

The 50 members of the teacher staff are involved in in-service teacher training in northern Finland. Around 100 subject teacher trainees are practicing their teaching skills in our school every year. A part of our everyday work is to prove different kind of teaching methods to be able to teach them to the teacher trainees. 

The school arranges different kind of courses, for example about developing curricula, teaching methods and evaluation for teachers who are in service. Scientists from the university can use our teaching and learning as a target of researches. Futhermore, we belong to the Finnish Teacher Training School network which researches and developes teaching and teacher training and also publishes the results. We have also studies how to evaluate students multifaceted by using self-evaluation, group-evaluation, personal discussions between a teacher and a student etc. 

Our school follows the Unesco –program. This becomes visible by teaching about world culture heritage and taking part in voluntary work. Our teaching is based on Unesco values for example internationality, equality and tolerance. That is why the philosophy of SEE connects with the spirit of our school. Here we underline some of our necessities, which SEE could help to solve:

-      Our new curricula underlines 6 transversal competences, one of which is well-being, for it has become a very important thing to work on at schools, since the statistics tell that Finland is one of most darkest country of suicides in the whole world, and especially young people have bad feelings. We believe this well-being is related to health and responsibility towards the environment, that is why we want to include in the first part of the project a research on good practices against climate change.

-      We now have students from foreign countries, which gives our teachers a lot of challenges, for it is a new reality for us.

The activities about migration we will share in SEE enhances our perspective about the work in favour of interculturality in the classroom.

The Erasmus group of the school is coordinated by Katrimaija Lehtinen-Itälä (Social Sciences) and Aune Lassila (Physical Education), and it is composed by all the teachers who form the UNESCO team: Mika Vähäkuopus (English teacher), Heli Heino (German teacher), Laura Leppänen (Art teacher) and a group of Maths teachers (some of them teach Physics as well): Ari Heimonen, Hellevi Kupila, Katri Pietäilnen, Merja Holappa and Erkko Saviaho. They are permanent teachers, which ensures the sosteinibility of the project.  

Our school is located in Corsico, in a suburban area within the Greater Milan, and just a few kilometres from the city. It’s

quite a big school with 180 teachers (including SEN teachers) and 1320 students. Besides a course of study in

Marketing and International Relations, our school offer also includes a course in Business Information System, one in

Business and Law, plus some more courses in Biomedical Science and Industrial Technologies. Our main goal has

always been to stimulate and reinforce key skills, such as learning how to learn, how to plan, to communicate, to

cooperate, to act autonomously and responsibly, to be able to pinpoint correlations, to gain and interpret information by

using technological devices. We have put the traditional hierarchical teaching methodology (teacher-student) aside,

favouring instead the more spontaneous from peer to peer learning process, in order to elicit the transfer of knowledge

and skills, emotions and experiences among students. We have finally accomplished to create a networking model, from

many to many, in which every one can learn from everybody else, to such an extent that even teachers have learnt from

the pupils, who have sometimes even stood in for the teachers. However, it was after joining in some intercultural

initiatives that we have set out to undertake new teaching concepts and to re-think our educational vision. The change in

the school management has also been a key factor in creating a supporting and motivating ethos at school. Such broad

range of experiences have been highly motivating for our school staff and have been the springboard for learning new

topics both for pupils and teachers, by using new methodologies, procedures as well as new forms of work in which

technology is essential. Furthermore, our pupils’ and teachers’ confidence in speaking English, or other foreign

languages, has been enhanced. Especially two previous Erasmus+ KA2 projects have seeded enthusiasm and opened

up our school stakeholders’ mindset towards the improvement of the school European dimension. What we feel we

need now is a steady change in terms of updating our educational approach, as required by the many challenges our

students may face that affect their education. By providing a quality education for our increasingly diverse student

population, we wish to create a favourable learning environment, as well as to avoid marginalization due to disability,

gender, socio-economic status, cultural background and language. A project manager, in charge of the internation

alization process of the school education and of students’ mobility projects will run this project together with the

administration office and other participant teachers involved in the planned activities with their students. We also plan to

monitor and assess this 3-year project with the help of other teachers grouped in focus groups, who will eventually

disseminate the resulting positive outcomes and practices.