STEP Research

The purpose of doing research within STEP is on developing the Subject Teacher Education Programme to fit an international context while preserving the strengths of Finnish teacher education. The goal is to develop a coherent, intercultural and interdisciplinary subject teacher education programme.

When STEP became part of regular operations in January 2011, a PhD student was hired to do research in the programme.
In the beginning, research activities focus on teachers’ and students' perceptions of coping with English as a lingua franca and teaching and studying in a multicultural group. Students’ and teachers' feedback has been collected since the first pilot courses in 2010 and data collection is continuous during the developmental process.

Data are collected through online questionnaires, interviews, learning diaries, and video recordings of sessions. STEP basically began as a translation of the traditional Finnish programme and, thus, the participants’ feedback provides valuable information on the benefits and challenges of starting the new programme and directs improvement efforts. Besides the multicultural student group, one of STEP’s unique features includes studying didactics in interdisciplinary Arts or Science groups instead of subject-specific groups, and this requires much coordination and collaboration between different teacher educators.

The results of a small-scale study, Finnish Student Teachers’ Perceptions of Intercultural Learning in Subject Teacher Education in English, were presented in the meeting of SIG10 and SIG21 Moving through cultures of learning that took place in Utrecht, Netherlands on 2–3 September 2010.