KHACHATUR ABOVYAN ARMENIAN STATE PEDAGOGICAL UNIVERSITY

Esa Törmänen, a student of the Faculty of Education, University of Oulu, recently defended his Master’s Thesis called “Professional and Organizational Learning in a Transnational Community of Practice: Case Study in a Finnish-Armenian Higher Education Context.” The thesis was co-supervised by specialists from the University of Oulu and Armenia State Pedagogical University (ASPU).

The research was conducted within the framework of cooperation between the two sides in the system of higher education. The paper also examines the ASPU-Oulu cooperation project from a learning-oriented perspective to understand and describe the different aspects and processes of professional and organizational learning in the Armenian-Finnish higher education (HE) context. It also focuses on key benefits and challenges of learning in a cross-cultural cooperation projects. Esa Törmänen’s Master’s Thesis is available here. 

In September 2013, Esa Törmänen traveled to Yerevan to do his two-week internship at ASPU. With the help of the International Cooperation Unit of ASPU, he was able to combine the data gathering for his thesis with the internship. During his stay in Yerevan, he interviewed a total of ten project participants in Yerevan. All the interviewees were from ASPU and were participants of the ASPU-Oulu cooperation project.

This is not the first research [carried out as part of cooperation] between ASPU and the University of Oulu. Within the framework of close cooperation between the two universities, Mariam Tumanyan, a graduate student of the Faculty of Psychology and Sociology, ASPU, travelled to Finland to participate in Summer School 2014 at the University of Oulu.

She studied perceptions of gender roles by young Fins, depending on the psychological characteristics of ethno-cultural or gender identities - masculinity, femininity, or androgyny. 

Mariam Tumanyan later presented the results of the study in her Master’s Thesis.