Today, it’s the educational materials day in Sweden – in Swedish: Läromedlets dag! It’s a theme day initiated by The Swedish Association of Educational Writers. I’m one of their 1,700 members. (Besides, I’m also a member of The Association of Finnish Nonfiction Writers, which has 3,300 members, including many writers focusing on the production of educational materials.) However, besides writing educational materials by myself, pedagogical resources are slowly becoming an object of study on my research agenda.

Namely, last spring, I and my colleague, professor Boglárka Straszer at Dalarna University, wrote an application for initiating new research on learning resources, and we got a grant from the foundation Riksbankens Jubileumsfond. The research initiation project The Production of Learning Resources on, for and by the National Minorities (LärNatMin) – in Swedish: Lärresursproduktion om, för och av de nationella minoriteterna (LärNatMin) – is about examining the production of learning resources within the knowledge ecology of the national minority of Sweden-Finns. Learning resources reach far beyond the traditional pedagogical textbook used at school; the category also encompasses materials produced by a number of different actors ranging from authorities to NGOs with a pedagogical purpose to digital learning materials generated by learners themselves.

We are interested in discovering which actors are producing educational materials on the national minorities, using Sweden-Finns as a case. We intend to explore how these materials are used and circulated in the knowledge ecology producing conceptions about Sweden-Finnishness. The project is interdisciplinary and seeks to combine theories and concepts from social sciences, in particular studies on media and media literacies, as well as educational research and linguistics. Here is a summary of the intended project LärNatMin:

The development project LärNatMin deals with identification, mapping and conceptualization of the production of learning resources on, for and by the national minorities in Sweden, with a focus on the national minority language Finnish. The production of learning resources spans from literature produced by established publishers to the curation and generation of learning materials by educators, and from self-publishing to learner-generated content (LGC). Research on the sociological structures and conditions of the production of learning resources contributes to an increased understanding of the knowledge ecology of the national minority languages and cultures. Research also contributes to the analysis of learning materials and didactic development and sheds light on the production context that has remained without attention in both research and methodology of education. LärNatMin aims at initiating theoretical research on the production of learning resources through three workshops that focus on (1) production, (2) didactic uses and (3) LGC. The workshops will bring together researchers from existing newly established networks in Sweden, with invited keynote speakers and participants from different knowledge fields, including children and young people with national minority backgrounds. In the workshops we apply methods of co-creation to work on the forms, theoretical questions and practical challenges for the production of learning resources in the contexts of formal, non-formal and informal learning. As a result, theoretical insights and conceptualizations of learning resources production will be formed, as well as a roadmap for further international research.

More information on this project will follow as soon as we have set the programme for the spring term 2024 and are ready to open a website for the project. I’m looking forward to our research collaboration, which will surely produce valuable by-products such as a website collecting research, new methodologies and concepts to explore learning resources and a roadmap for further research on this topic.