THE CITY OF OULU
Pohjankartano school is situated near the city centre in Oulu. It is the biggest upper level school in the city of Oulu, altogether we have 13 upper level schools. Oulu is the biggest city in northern Finland, about 120 000 inhabitants. If you count the surrounding towns, we have about 206 000 people living in this area. Oulu has developed dramatically in the past 50 years. In the 1950s Oulu was a rural town with some heavy industry. In 1959 the University of Oulu was founded, which really has had a great impact on the city and its surroundings. It has enabled the rapid growth of high technology, which we are well-known for. We now have more than 10 000 people working in different branches of high technology, which sells its products throughout the world. You can find more information in http://www.ejournal.fi/finnindia05/, where some students have gathered information about our home town. There are pictures and links to some web pages and even a link to a web camera. There are also articles about our school, Finland and Finnish cultural personalities; just click the folders at the bottom of the first page.
POHJANKARTANO SCHOOL
Pohjankartano School has about 515 pupils altogether. There are about 420 pupils in grades 7-9, which are the last three years of the 9-year Finnish comprehensive school. Pupils in grades 7-9 are 12-16 years old. We are the only upper level school in Oulu which offers teaching in the optional grade 10. The 10th grade is for those pupils from all the upper level schools in Oulu that didn’t get into the school where they wanted to go after finishing grade 9. They stay with us for an extra year and try to improve their grades. Another speciality is that half of our classes are music classes, which means that they have 5-6 music lessons every week compared to the 1-2 lessons the rest of the pupils have. All the pupils in music classes play in an orchestra, either in a symphony orchestra or a guitar orchestra. Most of the pupils in the music classes are girls although there are some boys in every class. In the “normal” classes about half of the students are girls and half boys.
There are 38 teachers working full-time at our school and some teachers who only have a few lessons a week with our pupils. All of our teachers are “subject teachers” which means that they are specialized in teaching certain subjects. In primary school (grades 1-6) we have class teachers, who may teach all the subjects to their group.
THE SMART SCHOOL PROJECT
Over the years Pohjankartano School has taken part in many development projects. In 2006-2007 we were part of the “Developing the Learning Environment - Project” where we created projects for all the grades 7-9. In spring 2007 our application to be part of the Smart School Project in the city of Oulu was accepted. There was only one other upper level school in Oulu that was taken into this project – altogether there are 10 pioneering schools. The Smart School Project in the City of Oulu was inspired by the fact that Ritaharju School (grades 1-9), which is going to be built near the University and the Technology Village of Oulu, was accepted into the world-wide Microsoft School of the Future Project. Ritaharju School is the only school in Finland that was accepted into the Microsoft project - altogether there are 12 schools from all over the world. The idea of the Smart School Project in Oulu is that we really try to think about what kind of skills pupils need in the future and what school should be like to give the pupils these skills. When Ritaharju School was accepted into the world-wide programme, the school officials in Oulu thought that it would be a shame if only one school in Oulu was concerned with issues of key-importance like this, and that’s why they started a project of their own in the city of Oulu. We are now one of the schools developing the ideas and trying them out in practise, and later on we will inform all the other schools of what we have done and how it went.
The Smart School Project in Pohjankartano has two “lines of action” so to say. The first one is to develop the projects in all the grades 7-9 further, and the other one is to develop the sense of community in our school. The idea is to make our school feel like a village, where people enjoy being, where all the school property is treated with care and where the work of the students is clearly seen. The projects in the grades 7-9 are integrating in character, which means that the same theme is taken up from a different aspect in several subjects, and the timetables are planned so that this happens in the same period of time. In every project some of the work is done on computers. We have 6-7 parallel classes in every grade (= e.g. classes 7A-7G) and all the classes in the same grade carry out the same project, so you can see that this requires a lot of co-operation. To achieve this you need meetings; e.g. in the migration project the teachers involved had a meeting at the beginning of the project, another one in the middle, and the last one at the end of the project.
The 7th Grade: Migration
This is a project which was originally created for the School Library Project a few years ago. So we had the basic idea ready and now it was just modified a bit, and all the 7th grade classes carry it out instead of just one project class. Also more subjects have joined in.
The migration project concentrates on Finns’ emigration to the USA at the beginning of the 20th century, and it starts with history. First pupils interview their parents and grandparents about whether anyone from their family has emigrated from Finland. In the history lessons they get the basic information about what life was like in Finland at that time, why the people left Finland and so on. The pupils then use the computer classroom and go to the Finnish Migration Institute’s website. There they look up real Finns who emigrated to the USA, get some basic information about them (e.g. name, time of birth) and follow their route from harbour to harbour. In religion the topic in the 7th grade is foreign religions. As it happened, some Jews who fled from Russia for religious reasons travelled on the same boats as the Finns did. So this is when the religion teacher takes up Judaism, their habits and attire. It takes him about 2 lessons to do that.
The facts of the emigrant’s life are then used as a basis for creative writing in the Finnish lessons. The students look up a few more facts for their stories, e.g. about fashion at the beginning of the 20th century and what the silhouette of New York looked like then. The pupils use their imagination and write a story about the emigrant, the trip and the arrival in “the New World”. When doing this they use process writing techniques, meaning that they read each other’s stories and comment on them constructively. They even use drama and make up small scenes of e.g. a Finn leaving home for good and the poor crying mother fetching the only hymn book of the family to give her daughter/son. Not all the scenes are this sad: there are also ones of e.g. a Finn coming to the customs or seeing his/her first orange.
The emigrant’s story is taken up in other subjects as well. In music they make a blues and in home economics they make an American meal complete with an apple pie. In the English lessons we have a look at the language of the people who had lived for a couple of decades in the USA: their Finnish is full of words they have taken from English. In the 1960s a lot of Finns moved to Sweden, and this is talked about in the Swedish lessons.
All this takes place when the school starts right after Christmas. Now we are thinking about how to maybe publish some of the students’ stories and ask some groups to perform their scenes to the whole school.
The 8th Grade: Jazz, Rock, Bits…
The 8th graders start their project in the music lessons. At first they are given the basic information about some music genres (e.g. jazz, rock, country, disco, reggae, psychedelic, heavy, punk, blues and progressive music). Then they are divided into groups of three or four people and every group is given a musical genre to work on. They use computers to find out what the musical characteristics and most important groups / artists of their genre are. Then they choose one artist/group, and further one album by them. They make a questionnaire with 5-7 questions to their own class about their genre of music, e.g. how often, if ever, they listen to that kind of music. The results of the questionnaire are analyzed in mathematics and used as material for an exercise in statistics. They use the Microsoft Excel - program when doing this. And finally the groups present their work to the whole class.
In Finnish the point of view is how to write a review, i.e. a text where you give your opinion on something and you also give your reasons for thinking that. This starts with one of the reporters from the local newspaper coming to our school and presenting the job of a reporter to all the 8th graders. Then the non-music classes take one song from the album they have chosen and write a review on it. The music classes write the review on the whole album. Again, the texts are read and commented on constructively in the Finnish lessons. This year we English teachers are going to join in and have the students read a review on a piece of music in English. Our goal is to make them familiar with the vocabulary used in such a text.
The timetable is basically the middle period of the autumn term (late September – beginning of November), but they have already started in music at the beginning of September, because “normal” classes only have one lesson music in a week.
The 9th Grade: Energy
The energy project starts right when the school starts in August. There are two texts about environmental issues in our book and we start with them in the English lessons. Otherwise they would be studied some time in April. We take the environmental texts first, because we want to give the pupils the vocabulary to use English sources when they work on their project in the physics lessons.
In the physics lessons the students do a pair work on energy. Each pair in a class is given a different kind of energy to work on: nuclear power, wind power, hydroelectric power, peat, coal, solar power, bio energy and gas. They find information about their topic in books and on the internet. Their task is to describe the history and future of their particular way of producing energy, what the process is like, what the environmental implications are, how the energy is stored, where the nearest power plant producing that kind of energy is and how much energy it produces. At the end, as always, they list their sources of information. They make a PowerPoint presentation of the information they have found and present it to the class. Some of them also make one frame in English, but this is optional, because it is too difficult for some pupils. However, many students sum up their work very well in English. The 9th graders also visit a couple of power plants situated in the city of Oulu. Environmental issues are of course an essential part of teaching biology and they are discussed there too.
Enhancing the Sense of Community
The school spirit in our school is pretty good as it is, but you can always develop it further. What we are going to do this year is to enhance the role of the student body. Every class chooses a pupil to represent them in the board of the student body, and this year we wanted to pay special attention to what kind of pupils are chosen. We had a meeting for the whole school where we wanted the pupils to think about what a good representative is like, and the students who have been active in the student body told the others about their work. Then every class had a meeting, chaired by a pupil but supervised and guided by a teacher, where at first the qualities of a good representative where gathered in a mind map and after that an election was held – complete with voting tickets. Now the board will start their work. One of the main tasks we want them to help us with is making the hall and the classrooms cosier. One idea is to have some sort of facilities in the hall so that we can put the pupils’ work on display more often. We are also gathering new ideas for developing the sense of community, in addition to the ones we already carry out every year.
THE EJOURNAL PROJECT WITH AN INDIAN SCHOOL
We started the eJournal project last spring with Mr Kelkar and Mr Gaynor from St Peter’s school. We had two on-line meetings: at first one for us teachers and then another one where Indian and Finnish students talked to each other. Our students read the text about the eco-trip and had a look at St Peter’s website. Four of my groups wrote articles in http://www.ejournal.fi/finnindia05. One group presented our school and the city of Oulu, one group wrote general articles about Finland and two groups from the 9th grade presented some Finnish cultural personalities. These were themes that we would have been studying in any case, so now we just did it a bit differently.
The eJournal project started in our school with two interested teachers: I (Ms Taina Salmivaara) and Mr Jukka Holmala. Jukka has attended a LIP course a couple of years ago and learned how to use eJournal. We had a project with a Brazilian school in German, but in the end they wrote only a few articles. Jukka is very interested in the project and he came to one of my groups to teach the pupils and me how to use the programme. However, he teaches German and Swedish, so he wasn’t able to actually carry out this project in his lessons. Now many other teachers have got interested in the project, for instance both of our biology and geography teachers. One of them moved to our school only this autumn, and he has previous experience from an international project on environmental issues.
What we would like to do is to broaden one of the Smart School projects we already have so that it has an international dimension to India. The 9th graders’ project seems like a good one. We could
e.g. start with getting to know each other. Then we could present the environment we live in to each other, say by letting students take photographs of themselves in their immediate surroundings, e.g. in a forest, and adding a text to the photograph saying what it is. After this we could measure our “ecological footprints”, i.e. how much of the Earth’s surface we take up to live the lives we do, and compare them. And because we would know each other’s living conditions pretty well by then, we would understand things like why we Finns need so much energy for heating. There are clear instructions available on how to measure the ecological footprint. We have also talked about how interesting it would be to try out the interactive forms Ilpo Halonen told us about, e.g. can they be used to compiling a questionnaire about what the pupils do in their everyday lives to protect the environment? These are of course initial thoughts; what is needed is a clear, simple plan of action to make the project successful.
Another theme could be the 8th graders’ project; we could e.g. compare, what kind of music the pupils listen to. But what interests us most at the moment is broadening the project on energy and environmental issues. Above I presented some initial thoughts. The project will of course be planned and agreed on in co-operation with your school. We are open for your suggestions.
There is one thing we have to remember: English is a foreign language to both us Finnish teachers and our pupils. All the rest of the lessons in our school are given in Finnish. Most of the pupils learn English very quickly and can understand all sorts of texts in English, but not everybody is able to do that. In every foreign language you can understand a lot more than you can say or write yourself. So what some of our pupils are able to write may look pretty simple to you and your pupils. I hope this does not become a problem. I’m sure the Finnish pupils won’t find it difficult to accept the fact that your students are more advanced in English, but I am not sure how your students will react.
All in all, we are looking forward to starting a project with an Indian school, to visiting Panchgani and your school and having someone from your school visit us here in Oulu!
