Experiencing Finnish Education Through International Encounters: Humboldt Professor Waldow Launches Joint Research with JYU
At the centre of the visit is a joint research project between Humboldt University and JYU focusing on how international educators experience and interpret “Finnish education” during study visits. While Finland is frequently referenced in global education debates, such encounters are rarely studied systematically from the perspective of visitors themselves. This project addresses that gap through close empirical work.
The collaboration is already moving forward on several fronts. Joint academic publications are in preparation, and further data collection is planned through continued cooperation. At the institutional level, the visit also contributed to the groundwork for an Erasmus agreement between Humboldt University and JYU, enabling sustained exchange of students and researchers. For FIER and ILE, this kind of cooperation strengthens comparative research capacity and connects local educational practices to broader international perspectives.
What follows is Florian Waldow’s own account of his visit:
I spent four weeks as a guest researcher at FIER, financed by JYU’s Visiting Fellow Programme. The main objective of my stay was to kick off a joint research project aimed at studying how educators from abroad experience and make sense of ‘Finnish education’ on study visits to Finland. The project is carried out by myself and a doctoral student at Humboldt, Sebastian Brehl, in collaboration with Josephine Lau, Kristóf Fenyvesi and OrsolyaTuba at JYU. As part of my stay, I was able to shadow a group of German students on a two-week study visit to Jyväskylä.
In addition to interviewing members of the group, I was able to be a participant observer throughout the group’s whole study visit. Observing the encounters between the German study group and Finnish educational institutions, educators and students was absolutely fascinating. Being a participant observer rather than just interviewing group members proved a major asset and provided insights that would have been hard to get otherwise. By being present also during break times and at the reflection sessions the German students had in the evenings with their teachers, I was able to observe and study at close quarters how the students made sense of what they saw and to get an impression of what they liked and were impressed by, and also what they did not like or found hard to understand.
One of the most interesting aspects for me was how these encounters threw into sharp relief the German students’ and their Finnish counterparts’ differing preconceptions of what they considered ‘normal’ and what they did not. This manifested itself in many areas. For example, both the German students and their Finnish hosts agreed that children in day care and primary education should develop ‘independence’ and autonomy. However, it turned out that notions of how and when pupils were expected to be ‘independent’ differed widely. E.g., the German students were surprised by the amount of time Finnish primary school pupils are supposed to spend on their own, while on the other hand they had not expected that in a day-care centre they visited children were not allowed to go to the toilet independently or play unsupervised.
Our research project is in its early stages, so it is too early to present any more far-reaching results beyond the kinds of observations just mentioned. At this stage, the focus is on honing our analytic framework and research questions, and my visit certainly provided a wealth of input in these regards.
Besides starting the project on foreign educators’ views of ‘Finnish education’, a second objective of my visit was to get to know the colleagues and research environment at FIER better and to explore the possibilities for future cooperation more generally. As part of this, I gave a couple of lectures, both on the new project and on other aspects of my research such as the role of utopianism in education policy-making at FIER. I also had many lunch meetings with individual members of the institute, resulting in many interesting conversations and the discovery of multiple shared areas of interest.
With regard to both of its main objectives, my visit turned out to be a roaring success, largely thanks to my fantastic hosts at JYU, Josephine Lau, Kristóf Fenyvesi and Orsi Tuba. I was very impressed by the vibrant and stimulating research environment at FIER, and I am very happy that we were able to lay the groundwork for an ERASMUS-agreement in education between Humboldt University and JYU during my stay. This should provide for easy, low-threshold visits of both students and researchers in the future. Which is great in many ways, not least since I am certainly planning to come back!
