Traditionally, feedback is regarded as crucial in the context of learning and teaching public speaking. In the current course, we analyzed the feedback provided to students by an artificial intelligence (AI) coach and students' learning experiences in developing public-speaking skills via this tool. The MySpeaker Rhetorich speech coach application…

Finland is widely said to have the best, or one of the best, educational systems in the world. This debatable view hides a lot of weaknesses and shortcomings, especially regarding issues around racism and discrimination. In Finland, issues of race, racism and other forms of discrimination are often hidden, silenced and ignored. This makes it…

In this conceptual paper, the affective intensity of joy is approached as becoming. Following a relational ontology, joy is attended to both as performed in relation to others (human and more-than-human) and as a performative agent. This paper is based on an empirical exploration of the remarkableness of young children's everyday lives in a…

The importance of engaging students with complex societal challenges has led to the adoption of various interdisciplinary teaching and learning practices in both K-12 and higher education. However, interdisciplinary learning is one of the most complex domains of contemporary educational practice, and, despite its significance, remains…

The inability to respond to the environmental crises has been argued to stem from the crisis of imagination that underlies modernity. In response, the potentials of speculative approaches have been explored. This article presents a speculative worldmaking project conducted in a secondary school with young people. The project involved three…

In this article I share student and teacher experiences of forest walks (in Finnish: Metsäkävely) as a form of outdoor education in a Finnish special education school in a hospital setting. I was the teacher of these students in the hospital school setting, and so was an insider researcher, and teacher as researcher, undertaking…

Over the past 9 years, we have implemented, developed, and refined a novel student-centered teaching method called Extreme Apprenticeship in university mathematics context. In this paper, we report the theoretical orientation behind the method, as well as its practical implementation. We also reflect on our experiences gained from using it in our…

Calls for increased monitoring and evaluation of education policies and practices have not, so far, included widespread and consistent assessments of the inclusiveness of education settings. Measuring inclusion in education has proven to be a challenging exercise, due not only to the complexity and different uses of the concept, but also to its…

This article describes three key principles learned while visiting schools in Finland in May 2017. Specifically, the article explores how trust, collaboration, and well-being contribute to the foundation of student-centered school cultures. The use of trust-based responsibility over test-based accountability allows for greater teacher autonomy and…

There were two projects at the National Defence University of Finland (NDU), which both ended by the end of 2022. One of them tried to find the answers to the main question: How artificial intelligence (AI) could be used to improve learning, teaching, and planning? The other tried to find the answer to the main question: What new skills do…

The integration of artificial intelligence (AI) topics into K-12 school curricula is a relatively new but crucial challenge faced by education systems worldwide. Attempts to address this challenge are hindered by a serious lack of curriculum materials and tools to aid teachers in teaching AI. This article introduces the theoretical foundations and…

Success in an increasingly globalized world sets requirements for versatile communication skills and understanding about other cultures. One of the keys to success is versatile language skills, on which the European Commission spoke out as early as in 1995, recommending that every European citizen should learn two foreign languages in addition to…

For decades, teacher research, as one form of action research, has been a research methodology that combines theory, practice and improvement of practices in classrooms. However, the lack of teacher autonomy and trust in their professionalism reduces teachers' opportunities to conduct teacher research in their classrooms in many countries. Based…

Recent research and reform efforts in science education have consistently stressed the importance of coherent science instruction, in which learning opportunities are connected and contextualized by meaningful phenomena, focus on a small set of core ideas over time, and generate a need-to-know about new ideas through a set of connected lessons.…

Citizenship education played a crucial role in the 19th century transition from royal sovereignty to democracy in the Nordic region, with folk high schools (FHS) playing an important role. While established to empower the people ("folk") for active participation in society, the contemporary folk high schools have reoriented from their…