Researchers

Minna Uitto is the principal investigator of the RELA and NAVI-projects. Her research focuses on teachers’ work. Significant perspectives in her research are relationality, emotions, micropolitics and multi-professional co-operation. She has also studied peer groups organised in pre- and in- service teacher education and the narrative methods used in the groups in the context of teachers’ professional development. She is a professor of subject teacher education and responsible for university pedagogy.

Sonja Lutovac works in the RELA- and NAVI projects as a CO-PI and university researcher. Her research focuses on the professional development and teacher identities of students and teachers. Her research places attention on the ways in which personal experiences, beliefs, emotions, and relations shape and are being shaped by the process of becoming a teacher and how teacher education can prepare teachers for their profession. Sonja is also a teacher in university pedagogy courses for university staff.  

Virve Keränen works in the RELA-project as a postdoctoral researcher collaborating with NAVI-project. She also works as a university teacher. Her research interests include childhood studies, feminists’ theories, teacher studies and embodiment. In her doctoral research she focused on touch in the context of early childhood education.  

Anniina Kettunen (née Holappa) worked in the RELA-project as a research assistant. Alongside RELA- and NAVI-research projects, she is working on her doctoral research, in which she explores narrative identities of student teachers from the perspective of emotions. She uses arts-based methods in her research, especially photographs. 

Minna Körkkö works as postdoctoral researcher in the NAVI-project and collaborator in the RELA-project. Her research interests include teacher work, teacher professional development, teacher competence and student teachers’ reflection. Especially, she is interested in using a video and other technologies as tools in teachers’ and students’ learning and competence development.

The researchers in RELA and NAVI-projects work in the University of Oulu at the Faculty of Education and Psychology. They belong to the Living Relations research community. More information can be found at www.oulu.fi/livingrelations/