How to design educational settings to promote collaborative inquiry: Pedagogical infrastructures for technology-enhanced progressive inquiry

Strategies of scientific, question-driven inquiry are stated to be important cultural practices that should be educated in schools and universities. The present study focuses on investigating multiple efforts to implement a model of Progressive Inquiry and related Web-based tools in primary, secondary and university level education, to develop guidelines for educators in promoting students collaborative inquiry practices with technology. The research consists of four studies. In Study I, the aims were to investigate how a human tutor contributed to the university students collaborative inquiry process through virtual forums, and how the influence of the tutoring activities is demonstrated in the students inquiry discourse. Study II examined an effort to implement technology-enhanced progressive inquiry as a distance working project in a middle school context. Study III examined multiple teachers' methods of organizing progressive inquiry projects in primary and secondary classrooms through a generic analysis framework. In Study IV, a design-based research effort consisting of four consecutive university courses, applying progressive inquiry pedagogy, was retrospectively re-analyzed in order to develop the generic design framework. The results indicate that appropriate teacher support for students collaborative inquiry efforts appears to include interplay between spontaneity and structure. Careful consideration should be given to content mastery, critical working strategies or essential knowledge practices that the inquiry approach is intended to promote. In particular, those elements in students activities should be structured and directed, which are central to the aim of Progressive Inquiry, but which the students do not recognize or demonstrate spontaneously, and which are usually not taken into account in existing pedagogical methods or educational conventions. Such elements are, e.g., productive co-construction activities; sustained engagement in improving produced ideas and explanations; critical reflection of the adopted inquiry practices, and sophisticated use of modern technology for knowledge work. Concerning the scaling-up of inquiry pedagogy, it was concluded that one individual teacher can also apply the principles of Progressive Inquiry in his or her own teaching in many innovative ways, even under various institutional constraints. The developed Pedagogical Infrastructure Framework enabled recognizing and examining some central features and their interplay in the designs of examined inquiry units. The framework may help to recognize and critically evaluate the invisible learning-cultural conventions in various educational settings and can mediate discussions about how to overcome or change them.

Words as Events : Cretan Mantinádes in Performance and Composition

Words as Events introduces the tradition of short, communicative rhyming couplets, the mantinádes, which are still sung and recited in a variety of performance situations on the island of Crete. The local focus on communicative economy and artistry is further examined in an in-depth analysis of the processes and ideals of composition. Short genres of oral poetry have been widely neglected in folklore research; however, their demand for structural and semantic coherence as well as their dialogic nature appeals to very different human needs from those of the longer poems. In contemporary Crete, poems also appear in written contexts, they are submitted to modern mass media, and people widely exchange them as text messages. By striving to understand the tradition during a period of change, this study analyzes the larger principles that ground the communication, self-expression and creativity in the genre. The aim of this research is thus twofold: to present this specific register of dialogic oral poetry as well as to create a theoretical approach sensitive to the creativity of such short registers. The study is based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Crete between the years 1997 2009. An important aspect of the methodology was to create long-term ties with a number of key-informants who composed mantinádes. The interdisciplinary theoretical and methodological basis for this analysis is in the contemporary Finnish and international research on oral poetry and on anthropological research on communicative speech genres. These theoretical insights are extended by addressing questions of spontaneity and individual agency. Since mantinádes are at the same time a model for composition and a reserve of poems in fixed form, the aesthetics and objectives of performance and composition are also plural. In a traditional singing event, the basic motivation for the singers is to provide a meaningful contribution to a selected theme, which is the shared topic of the poetic dialogue. Consequently, similar topics giving rise to poetic associations can be encountered during various moments of everyday life: the dialogic nature is embodied in the tradition to such degree that it also arises in the performances and composition of single poems and outside of any institutionalized performance arenas. Therefore, as this study discusses in detail, even the apparently non-contextualized poems recited between locals or occurring in the contemporary mass media arenas, are understood and evaluated as utterances that provide an individual perspective within a certain dialogue.

Vain hätapua? : Taloudellinen avustaminen diakoniatyön professionaalisen itseymmärryksen ilmentäjänä

Financial Help Alone? Financial help as an exponent of professional diaconal work One essential form of helping people in the Evangelical Lutheran Church s diaconal work is providing economic aid. It can be seen as work which is in accordance with the spirit of the Church Order (4:3). One of the tasks of diaconal work, determined by the Church Order, is to help those whose distress is the greatest and who have no other source of help. This financial support has become a permanent and essential working method, which has also created tension of various kinds. Financial support has been criticized, especially when the support has been used to fill a gap in the social services provided by the government. It has been argued that diaconal work has been forced to take on responsibility for tasks that belong to the welfare state. The tensions involved in the financial support of diaconal work do not only concern the patching up and supplementing of the deficiencies in the welfare state s services but also the question of diaconal workers self-understanding of financial support and how it relates to their professionalism. In this thesis, I examine the experiences and visions diaconal workers have concerning financial support in their work with clients. The viewpoint of my work is the diaconal workers own experiences and interpretations of the meaning of financial support in customer service. In the articles of my thesis, I examined the meanings that diaconal workers gave to financial support in the aspects of work motivation, empowerment, expertise and tensions. The research material of my articles consists of three different data, which are theme interviews from diaconal workers, a survey from diaconal workers of Espoo and a diaconal barometer of 2009. I have analysed the theme interviews and the survey using qualitative content analysis. The results of my articles showed that diaconal workers motivation in tasks concerning economic aid was sustained by the nature and spiritual aspects of support activities. Work that supported empowerment through financial assistance meant influencing the client s personal life, community and local ties and structural circumstances of the surrounding society. Diaconal workers expertise in financial support work can be characterised as horizontal, which means that the expertise was built on acknowledging the client s dignity, the uniqueness of the client s life situation and listening to the client s own voice. Diaconal workers were also experts in community and area-based work. The tensions in financial support work are linked to its unofficial and undefined role in the field of social welfare and the inability of other aiding parties to respond to their duties. The results of my thesis on the experiences and visions of financial support reveal that it is multilateral and multidimensional. Diaconal workers used financial support to help the clients, taking into account their individual, communal, social and spiritual context. The professionalism of this financial support is reflectively related to the client s need of help and the spontaneity and unexpectedness of the situation. Support work was deeply bound to diaconal workers experiences of spirituality as the basic value in their work, the foundation of their idea of humanity and their method of helping others. In different tasks of financial support diaconal workers balanced between traditional, individual client work based on caritas and working methods which are based on supporting the individual s empowerment and active citizenship, as in postmodern social work. Diaconal workers experiences of financial support illustrated the transition or turning point in the professionalism of diaconal work, which involves finding one s own, stronger and clearer professional identity than earlier with respect to other helpers in society. Creating a unique identity is part of the empowerment process of diaconal work, in which it must define its professional role by itself. In postmodern pluralism and the fragmented context of diaconal activities, the question arose as to whether the spiritual traditions and traditional values of diaconal work support the modifications and adaptations needed in new, unpredictable situations. Diaconal work is said to be fast to react, able to predict changes and adapt to those changes. To preserve its sensitive reactive ability, also in the complex postmodern world, it must retain its own views and orientations. Otherwise, the distinctive values and traditions of diaconal work might sustain static diaconal work, employee-centeredness and a smug attitude when defining beneficiaries and needs, which highlights the paternalism of diaconal work. Such paternalism may complicate the progress of working methods which are based on empowerment and citizenship.