Fiktiivisen kirjallisuuden maailmasta monikulttuuriseen Suomeen. Ennakointikertomus kirjallisuudenopetuksen ja monikulttuurisuuskasvatuksen välineenä

From the world of fiction literature into multi-cultural Finland. Anticipatory story as an educational tool in teaching of literature and multiculturalism The research clarifies the relationship between reading fiction literature and multicultural value education in basic education. The research focuses on the subject didactics of mother tongue and literature and on the literature teaching in particular. The objective is to develop a method that is easily transferable into a teaching context so as to intensify the educational discussion based on fiction literature. In essence, understanding fiction literature and the ethical and moral thinking resemble one another, because both of them aim at empathizing with the thinking of a person or with a situation foreign to oneself. For this reason fiction literature is ideally suited for the discussion on ethical and moral values within a subject entity in the basic education. The empirical unit of the research consists of two parts. The first part explains how youth novels published in the years 1993 – 2007 describe multiculturalism in Finnish society. Books on multiculturalism are still few in number within youth literature, and people with a foreign background are mainly minor or background characters in such literary works. Nevertheless, youth novels serve well as a starting point for an educational discussion about multicultural issues. More often than not characters in youth novels are stereotypes and even opposite to each other. The juxtaposing makes a young reader question the stereotypes associated with immigrants. Besides the stereotype, reference to a prototype or a model is possible. The second part tests the usefulness of an anticipatory story based on a fictive text for an educational discussion about multicultural issues. The empirical material was collected from the eighth-grade teaching groups in basic education as follows: one teaching group was an immigrant group, the second one a group of Finns with experience of immigrants while the third group of students had hardly any experience of immigrants. The anticipatory stories were written on the basis of extracts from youth novels with multicultural themes. The material collected for a total of 120 anticipatory stories was analysed by using meaning cue analysis. Using the meaning cue analysis, the anticipatory stories were divided into three groups: stories with predominantly positive meaning cues of interculturalism, ambivalent stories with both positive and negative meaning cues of interculturalism and the stories with predominantly negative meaning cues of interculturalism. The meaning cues produced by girls and boys differ from one another, in particular, by the negative meaning cues of interculturalism. For girls, the predominant meaning cue is fear whereas for boys, it is that of violence. It would also seem that the students, in particular, boys with little experience of immigrants produce more negative meaning cues of interculturalism than do immigrants or Finnish students with experience of immigrants. Further still, it seems that active reading of fiction literature affects the meaning cues of interculturalism in an ambivalent direction. In the way of youth novels this is understandable, because youth novels in general are made up of opposite characters and meaning cues. The less the student takes an interest in reading, the more he used meaning cues from outside the parent text for his anticipatory story. No doubt it would be possible to use fiction literature in the literature education to a much higher extent than it is being used today whereby the literature could be used in basic education for reviewing subject entities or study contents of other study subjects. By way of an anticipatory story and the meaning cue analysis, it is possible to intensify the educational discussions based on fiction literature. However, using fiction literature in the literature education requires consideration of the specific genre of fiction literature.

Becoming a "practising muslim" : : reflections on gender, racism and religious identity among women in a Swedish muslim youth organisation

Artikkelit

Intercultural bridges in teenagers' theatrical events : performing self and constructing cultural identity through a creative drama process

The overriding aim of this drama educational case study is to deepen the understanding of meaning making in a creative intercultural youth theatre process and to examine it in the context of the 10th European Children's TheatreEncounter. The research task is to give a theoretical description of some key features of a creative drama process as the basis for theory about meaning makingin physical theatre. The first task is to illuminate the culture-historical connections of the multilayered practice of the EDERED-association. The second taskis to analyse and interpret theatrical meaning making. The ethnographical research site is regarded as a theatrical event. The analysis of the theatrical eventis divided into four segments: cultural contexts, contextual theatricality, theatrical playing and playing culture. These segments are connected with four research questions: What are the cultural contexts of a creative drama process? How can the organisation of the Encounter, genres, aesthetic codes and perception ofcodes be seen to influence the lived experiences of the participants? What are some of the key phases and characteristics in a creative practice? What kind of cultural learning can be interpreted from the performance texts? The interpretative question concerns identity and community (re)construction. How are the categories, `community´ and `child´ constructed in the Encounter culture? In this drama educational case study the research material (transcribed interviews, coded questionnaire answers, participant drawings, videotaped process text and performance texts) are examined in a multi-method analysis in the meta-theoretical framework of Dewey's naturalistic pragmatism. A three-dimensional research interest through a combination of lived experiences, social contexts and cultural-aesthetical practices compared with drama-educational practices required the methodological project of cultural studies. Furthermore, the critical interpretation of cultural texts is divided into three levels of analyses which are called description, structural analysis and theoretical interpretation. Dialogic validity (truthfulness, self-reflexivity and polyvocality) is combined with contextual validity (sensitivity to social context and awareness of historicity) and with deconstructive validity (awareness of the social discourses). My research suggests that itis possible, by means of physical theatre, to construct symbolic worlds where questions about intercultural identity and multilingual community are examined and where provisional answers are constructed in social interaction.

The Cellular Oxygen Sensor PHD2 in Cancer Growth

Adequate supply of oxygen is essential for the survival of multicellular organisms. However, in several conditions the supply of oxygen can be disturbed and the tissue oxygenation is compromised. This condition is termed hypoxia. Oxygen homeostasis is maintained by the regulation of both the use and delivery of oxygen through complex, sensitive and cell-type specific transcriptional responses to hypoxia. This is mainly achieved by one master regulator, a transcription factor called hypoxiainducible factor 1 (HIF-1). The amount of HIF-1 is under tight oxygen-dependent control by a family of oxygen-dependent prolyl hydroxylase domain proteins (PHDs) that function as the cellular oxygen sensors. Three family members (PHD1-3) are known to regulate HIF of which the PHD2 isoform is thought to be the main regulator of HIF-1. The supply of oxygen can be disturbed in pathophysiological conditions, such as ischemic disorders and cancer. Cancer cells in the hypoxic parts of the tumors exploit the ability of HIF-1 to turn on the mechanisms for their survival, resistance to treatment, and escape from the oxygen- and nutrient-deprived environment. In this study, the expression and regulation of PHD2 were studied in normal and cancerous tissues, and its significance in tumor growth. The results show that the expression of PHD2 is induced in hypoxic cells. It is overexpressed in head and neck squamous cell carcinomas and colon adenocarcinomas. Although PHD2 normally resides in the cytoplasm, nuclear translocation of PHD2 was also seen in a subset of tumor cells. Together with the overexpression, the nuclear localization correlated with the aggressiveness of the tumors. The nuclear localization of PHD2 caused an increase in the anchorage-independent growth of cancer cells. This study provides information on the role of PHD2, the main regulator of HIF expression, in cancer progression. This knowledge may prove to be valuable in targeting the HIF pathway in cancer treatment.