Building Brazilian Teachers’ Professional Communities in Tampere

This blog post presents ongoing development and research project which have started in August 2021. This research has its roots in long-term collaboration with Brazil and Finland.

Dr. Sheylla Chediak from Instituto Federal de Rondônia (IFRO) and members of Contextualizing Hybrid Communities (CHC) research group in Tampere University of Applied Sciences (TAMK) are working on a research project called “Teachers’ formative experience in a short-term course in Finland and technology transference at IFRO”. The research aims to study the experiences of Brazilian teachers taking part in a university teachers’ professional development program organized in conjunction with IFRO and Professional Teacher Education in TAMK.

The goals of the research project

The research project aims to identify convergences and divergences between the pedagogical approaches that the teachers learn about in Finland and the institutionalized practices in IFRO, investigate challenges and perspectives taken towards the transfer of pedagogical methodologies and techniques after the development program in Tampere, and analyze the teachers’ training experience abroad based on their own perspectives.

Forming a professional learning community

Although the main focus of the development program is for the Brazilian university teachers to engage with Finnish pedagogy specialists in TAMK and other schools in the Tampere region, it has been interesting to notice that this contact with different approaches to education is not the only significant factor in the impact of the study abroad experience. What the study abroad period enables for the Brazilian teachers is time outside their everyday professional context with its practice culture, norms, and assumptions, coupled with opportunities for engaging in dialogue about the goals and methods of education with their colleagues, while engagement with Finnish education specialists provides base material for those dialogues. It appears that this kind of opportunity for engaging in dialogic conversations with peers without the immediate experience of being constrained by one’s own work context becomes an essential factor in building teachers’ professional learning communities. This study may help institutions to support and maintain this learning community built in a rich and meaningful context.

What we are learning from Brazilian university teachers in this project may well provide insight into how we build teachers’ professional learning communities also in Finland and how we can better enable university teachers to engage in dialogue without their thinking being immediately constrained by the practice cultures and norms of their institutions.

Timo Nevalainen
Contextualizing Hybrid Communities (CHC) research group
Tampere University of Applied Sciences

Dr Sheylla Chediak
Instituto Federal de Educação, Ciência e Tecnologia de Rondônia

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About Contextualizing Hybrid Communities research group

Contextualizing Hybrid Communities (CHC) research group, which will start operating at TAMK at the beginning of 2022, studies, through action research taking multiple perspectives, the activities and interactions within hybrid communities that operate in both online and face-to-face modes. Our research aims to improve these communities’ capability to create sustainable value for organisations, society as well as their clients and customers.

The article on which the research is based.

Professional learning communities as a leadership strategy in the 21^st century school management