Brazilian guests learn about Innopeda®
A couple of weeks ago a few visitors from Paraiba, Brazil visited TUAS to learn more about Innopeda®. José Antônio Coutinho de Rezende – the owner of ISO Colégio e Curson in Brazil and Stellio Silva Mendes – School coordinator, spent one week in Turku to learn more about Innovation Pedagogy.
An Innopeda Intensive training will be held in Paraiba,Brazil in December by Senior Lecturers Marjo Joshi and Milla Järvipetäjä. In addition, another Brazilian Higher Education Institution will be arriving in Turku in November for a 3- day Innopeda Intensive Training.
Innopeda®
What is Innopeda®? A concept of innovation pedagogy developed at Turku University of Applied Sciences. It contributes to the development of new generations of professionals, whose way of producing, adopting and utilizing knowledge make innovative thinking and creating added value possible. Innopeda® focuses on activating learning methods, internationalization and entrepreneurship, and is working life oriented and multidisciplinary. At the end, students who graduate from TUAS are innovative and oriented towards various kinds of development tasks, which means that they have acquired – in addition to the expertise on their own field – innovation competences required by all working life environments.
“We are really impressed”, says José Antônio Coutinho de Rezende. “We look forward to learn more and to implement those methods in our school. The whole education structure in Finland is very special.”
Implementing Innopeda® methods in Brazil
“Innopeda definitely can be applied in Brazil. What we need there is a ‘shock’ in the education system. Lately the level of Brazilian education has been going down, so maybe after implementation of the Innopeda approach in our school, we will understand what we need to change. In a bigger scale, we need to prepare students for the future and innovation pedagogy is aiming for that. Applying Innopeda is not going to be easy, but we look forward to start with it.”
Learning from each other
“Brazilians are very humble with all of the challenges that we have in front of us. We have corruption, poverty, and other problems, so Brazilians always have to work a little harder than for example Finns. We have to reinvent ourselves all the time. And we can’t give up, cause if we do, we will lose the chance to be someone in our lives. We just have to work a little bit harder.“
text: Agnieszka Olenska, trainee at Communication Services