Teachers play a key role in building a more sustainable society and world. TeacherMind studies teachers as agents of cultural sustainability transformation, and develops tools and practices to support teachers and teacher education.
TeacherMind team: Inkeri Rissanen (PI), Raili Keränen-Pantsu, Elina Vilenius, Essi Aarnio-Linnanvuori
Funding: Research Council of Finland, 2024-2028
MOTI – Towards professional class tutoring and a motivating school community addresses challenges faced by young people and schools by developing the pedagogy of class tutoring. The project supports both the well-being of adolescents and their class tutors (also known as homeroom teachers or form tutors). Combining science and art, the interdisciplinary and multi-method MOTI project brings together research traditions from studies on life purpose, youth research, and school pedagogy.
MOTI-team: Elina Kuusisto (PI), Merja Viljanen, Virpi Järvelä, Elina Wolff
MOTIart-team: Jyri Siimes (leader), Mirka Hietanen, Leena Tanhua at Tampere Upper Secondary School of Performing Arts (Tampere yhteiskoulun lukio, TYK)
Funding: Kone Foundation (2024-2027), Tampere Institute for Advanced Study (2024-2027)
BIP – Ethics Education for Future Teachers The Erasmus Blended Intensive Programme (BIP) on “Ethics Education for Future Teachers” aims to enhance ethical literacy and intercultural competence among future educators through a collaborative, international learning experience. The course brings together 24 students and 8 university teachers from Tampere University (Finland), Palacký University Olomouc (Czech Republic), Tallinn University (Estonia), and Comenius University Bratislava (Slovak Republic). The programme was held in Olomouc in 2024 and in Tampere in 2025. In spring 2026, it will take place in Bratislava.
PI’s: Elina Kuusisto (Finland), Blanka Babicka (Czech Republic), Kadi Georg (Estonia), Stefania Ferkova (Slovakia)
Funding: Erasmus+ Blended Intensive Programme 2024, 2025
VOITTO – Support and Integration of Students Transitioning from Preparatory Education to Mainstream Education aims to explore how the integration of a newly arrived student into the school community can be comprehensively supported. The research is carried out by researchers specializing in the integration of students with an immigrant background, school engagement, and multilingual school teaching arrangements, in collaboration with participating secondary schools.
We investigate the models of language support that facilitate the student’s transition from preparatory education to grades 7–9. Additionally, we are interested in the kind of school operational and leadership culture that supports the integration of immigrant students. This research project is conducted as a consortium between Tampere University and the University of Jyväskylä.
Mervi Kaukko (PI), Iida Kallio, Maria Petäjäniemi, Riikka Jaatinen
From University of Jyväskylä: Mirja Tarnanen, Eija Aalto, Elisa Repo, Tuomo Virtanen, Karita Mård-Miettinen, Ella Kopra, Raisa Harju-Autti
And from Åbo institut: Berndt Schauman
Funding: Ministry of Education and Culture, 2023–2025
PREVIOUS PROJECTS
CORE (Implicit Beliefs of Malleability as the Core of Teachers Intercultural Competencies) explores how teachers’ implicit beliefs of the malleability of individuals, groups and cultures shape their pedagogical thinking and practice.
PI: Inkeri Rissanen
Funding: three-year post-doctoral research funding from the Academy of Finland, 2019-2022
Drawing Together: Relational Wellbeing in the Lives of Young Refugees in Finland, Norway and Scotland combines art and research in a four-year project with young adults, who have arrived in their new home countries as unaccompanied minors. We will follow a small group of participants in each country, and invite them to create art to describe their relational wellbeing and important social networks.
PI’s: Mervi Kaukko (Project manager); Ravi Kohli (University of Bedfordshire, UK, Project leader), other MTT members Fath E Mubeen and Nick Haswell
Funding: NordForsk 2020-2024
What enables refugee background students’ educational success? ‘Zooming in’ on the practice architectures of multicultural learning environments uses child-collected video material to understand how recently arrived refugee children start to succeed in school, considering ‘success’ open-endedly as consisting of academic and social achievements as well as more invisible factors that make them feel positive in school, and how they view moments when they felt successful.
PI: Mervi Kaukko
Funding: Academy of Finland 2020-2023
CCC-CATAPULT (Challenging the Climate Crisis: Children’s Agency to TAckle Policy Underpinned by Learning for Transformation) examines children’s climate agency, value-action gap and means to exceed the gap. The international research project is carried out in collaboration with four universities: University of the West of England Bristol (United Kingdom), University of Galway (Ireland), University of Genoa (Italy), and Tampere University (Finland).
PI in Finland: Inkeri Rissanen
Other MTT members: Essi Aarnio-Linnanvuori
Funding: JPI Climate transnational call SOLSTICE. The Finnish case study is funded by Academy of Finland, 2020-2023.
CIVIC PURPOSE (Democratic civic purpose among higher education students) explores civic purpose among higher education students. This Finnish-Dutch research project was conducted at the Tampere University and Tampere University of Applied Sciences in Finland and at the University of Humanistic Studies and Hanze University of Applied Sciences in the Netherlands.
Elina Kuusisto (PI) and Inkeri Rissanen, Tampere University, Tampere, Finland
Isolde de Groot and Doret de Ruyter, University of Humanistic Studies, Utrecht, The Netherlands
Ingrid Schutte, Hanze University of Applied Sciences, Groningen, The Netherlands
Project period: 2019-2022
EMERgenCeS (Merging Refugee-Educators Competencies and Skills) is Erasmus+ project collecting Good Practices of integrating refugee-educators. It aims to set up communities of practice to develop cross-cultural content, pedagogical approaches and socio-emotional responses and to build bridges for teachers with refugee background to integrate the host countries educational systems to support refugee learners academic and holistic well-being.
Maija Yli-Jokipii, Nicholas Haswell
Funding: Erasmus+ 2019–2012