Activities

We organise seminars and workshops in order to discuss and share thoughts concerning difficult issues and topics such as democracy, human rights and critical thinking in teaching in Higher Education.

In our project we proceed in three phases:

1. Phase: The team systematically collects already existing methods of discursivity, problem-solving, creative learning and deliberative pedagogy (Longo, 2013) from practicing teachers of social sciences and from non-academic actors, nationally and internationally. From this dataset, we develop new syntheses and new methods that are revised to meet the special needs of social science educators. We also carry out the first tests on Finnish students and recalibrate our methods based on the feedback. We prepare for the collaboration by studying the target countries’ society and culture.

2. Phase: We initiate new teaching co-operation in Belarus, Azerbaijan and Turkey to test these new methods on local students. We gather information on a) the new methods applied, and b) on democracy-related substance of the delivered courses. In this process we involve also Finnish students since they as peers gain invaluable knowledge that teachers cannot access. We organise methodological workshops for teacher-colleagues from the target countries to learn from their experiences.

3. Phase: We analyse the feedback and fine-tune the methods. It is important to discuss our results with Finnish colleagues who could use our methods in their work. We also aim to learn how to operate with different political systems and generate new research on inter-systemic communication and changing perceptions of democracy. Ultimately, we disseminate our findings world-wide.

References

Longo, N. V. (2013). Deliberative Pedagogy in the Community:
Connecting Deliberative Dialogue, Community
Engagement, and Democratic Education. Journal of Public Deliberation, 9 (2), Art 16, 1-18. Available: http://www.publicdeliberation.net/jpd/vol9/iss2/art16