The newest member of the Listiac team is University of Jyväskylä (JYU) in Finland. The partner officially joined the project at the beginning of 2020.
University of Jyväskylä has a long tradition in teacher education – the first teacher seminars were arranged in Jyväskylä already in the 1860s – and learning and teaching are one of the core fields in the university’s profile. Jyväskylä itself is a lively city in the heart of Finland, and almost a third of its 140 000 inhabitants are pupils and students studying at different educational levels. Beside Finnish, the city offers an education stream in Swedish and English, and nowadays 66 different languages are spoken in the schools.
The Listiac team in Jyväskylä is led by Dr. Josephine Moate, who works as a senior lecturer in the Department of Teacher Education. Her expertise is in teacher development and she is particularly interested in the role of language, culture and different modalities in education. Pauliina Sopanen (MA) is working as a project researcher for the Listiac project at JYU and is currently working on her dissertation on language policy in a bilingual kindergarten. Pauliina’s interests lie in languages, policies, society and education.
The project nicely coincides with the re-development of the JYU teacher education curriculum to address the increasing linguistic and cultural diversity in Finland today. In addition, including both Åbo Akademi University and University of Jyväskylä in the project means that Listiac now targets both the Swedish and the Finnish medium teacher education in Finland.
