Visiting Kauriala upper secondary school

On last April 14 we went to Kauriala Upper Secondary School to do a visit. It was a very good and profitable experience for me.

The picture above shows the school principal giving us welcome, explaining the basics about the school and also answering our questions.

After that Sakari Salonen, teacher of advanced Mathematics of the school, presented to us his experience of project based learning, which approximates ballet, physics, math and literature. It's been more then ten years, the students of third year develop their studies on this basis. They consider the marvelous ballet movements as a theme demanding explanation and comprehension. So these different disciplines work together as resources of knowledge to the pupils. For example, they use slow motion video to help analyzing certain ballet movements, identifying speed, angles, and so on. Here goes a picture of that.

A good example of enduring success of PBL in basic education.

The next presentation was of another project, equally interesting, involving an interdisciplinary discipline. It has been done fore a couple of years now, with good engagement of the students. They use Phenomenon Based Learning, which consider a theme of the students' experience as the moto of their study. Last year the subject chosen was time. The students developed their studies after an aim of their choice and the groups registered the process on blogs. We got to know two of these projects and to one of them was give more attention. The first chose to study time by the changes on clothing. So they collected the clothes and did a fashion show, of which we saw pictures. The second group could receive much more attention because it was actually there. Three students attended our meeting and explained by themselves their project. It was particularly impressing to see their resourcefulness and maturity, considering their youth. They did a theatre script about the sense of time and also developed the actual play. The play shows differences in the sense of time of members of a family, depending on their moment in life or generation. Following are two pictures. The first was taken on class and the second on April 22, during the theatre show on the parents' day at school, which I was fortunate enough to attend.

At the end, we had a presentation did by the vice-principal about the national exams in Finland and the role of school in it.

This visit was one of the higher moments in my stay here in Finland so far. It was possible to actually see the process of PBL, be it problem or phenomenon based, since planning, gathering the teachers, doing and assessing. And, needless to say, with that admirable Finnish simplicity and effectiveness. A lot to think... And to do...

About the intersections between applied and basic science

The distinction between basic and applied sciences is as operational today as historically controversial. Educational institutions had been created after this differenciation, also courses and forms of reseearch.

Physics is normally considered the basic science and for example Engineering is the applied science. Engineer applies physics, as simple as that. Ok, but what came first in history? The fact that a knowledge is used as base to other means that it exists first? No, usually it´s just the opposite.

Society needs practical solutions to guarantee good life standards and then people start to propose these solutions. Agriculture was invented before botanics (basic). Building was invented before geometry (basic). 

Nevertheless, basic science,  doesn´t necessarily comes to justify what is being done. Under this point of view, basic science could be seen as an abstraction of practices, not necessarily naive, but not yet strictly scientific.

What I want to state is that there is a circularity between basic and applied science. Those are interdependent, as much as are complementary. Basic science came from something practical, "applied", and will influence it again. Applied knowledge gives a beginning to basic investigations, a basic landmark. And so on.

So what I'd like here in Finland, during my stay, is located at this intersection between basic and applied. My aim is applied - to empower teacher education in the Federal Institutes -, but my means are basic - to comprehend the meaning(s) of Finnish education, especially teacher education. This hermeneutic task of course demands the effort towards comprehending Finland, if I can say so, of course an endless task. Nonetheless, whatever I achieve during this internship period, will surely be a sufficient beginning! It already is. I was expecting for some time the opportunity of coming to Finland, I am glad it came and the difficulties are part of the process.