National Language Centre Days at Uniarts Helsinki on the 4th and 5th of December.
The teachers and the education designer of language and communication studies on the Open Campus will organise a national Language Centre Days conference in cooperation with the National Defence University at the beginning of December. Nearly 300 language and communication teachers from all Finnish universities will participate in the event. The purpose of the conference is the joint pedagogical development of language and communication teaching in higher education institutions.
On Monday the 4th of December, the conference guests will gather at the Sörnäinen campus for the morning. Guests will explore the facilities of Kookos and Mylly on guided tours. In addition, they will be offered a guided tour of the Hommage à Lauri Anttila exhibition and a performance tour by TeaK alumni and students, Real Earning Starts Here. Lunch will be served at TeaK Square from 10.45 a.m. to 11.30 a.m., after which the conference will continue in Santahamina, on the premises of the National Defence University. Monday’s keynote speeches will deal with changing security trends in relation to language skills requirements (Jarno Limnéll) and art-based, embodied language learning (ELLA project: Meri Anna Hulkkonen, Johanna Lehtinen-Schnabel, Eeva Anttila and Mariana Siljamäki).
The Language Centre Days will continue on the premises of the Helsinki Music Centre and the R building on Tuesday the 5th of December. The day’s keynote speakers are Merzi Rajala, who deals with non-verbal interaction; Janne Saarikivi, whose presentation focuses on supporting multilingual interaction, and Johanna Enser-Kananen, whose speech deals with decolonial language teaching. In addition to keynote speakers, language and communication teachers present the results of recent research, teaching experiments, projects and projects and organise workshops to support pedagogical development.
The Language Centre Days are organised approximately every two years, and the responsibility for organising them lies with each university’s Language Centre. Uniarts Helsinki’s language team is organising the Language Centre Days for the first time. This great effort has opened new perspectives for the team members to develop language teaching.