People

About me

I work as part-time senior lecturer at Tampere University (TAU) and lead this research project funded by Kone Foundation, (Un)making Knowledge: students’ relationship with knowledge from Modernity to AI (2025-2029). I co-lead the research group Higher Education in Transition (HET) at TAU. My main position is a research professor at the Finnish Institute for Educational Research, University of Jyväskylä, and there I co-lead a research area ‘Higher education as a pedagogical and societal phenomenon.’

I have a title of Docent, in the field of teaching in higher education, at the University of Turku, and have a role as Associate professor II (20%), iEarth Research Group, Department of Earth Science, University of Bergen, Norway (2024-2026). I acted as an associate editor in a leading journal in the field, Studies in Higher Education (2022-2024), and currently I am a member of journal’s editorial advisory board.

My research focus is on higher education; particularly on three themes: research on 1) knowledge in curriculum in higher education, 2) teacher’s work, agency and academic communities and 3) student engagement and experience. I have interest to study how educational and curriculum changes transform the idea of university education and academic communities in the long run, what are the special features when universities with different traditions are approaching each other in curriculum and teaching, and what is the meaning of these changes to academics and students.

More information:

TUNI profile page: https://www.tuni.fi/en/people/johanna-annala

Tunicris research portal: https://researchportal.tuni.fi/en/persons/johanna-annala

Orcid: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6531-9627

Research group HET: https://research.tuni.fi/het/

Contact information at Jyväskylä: https://www.jyu.fi/fi/henkilot/johanna-annala

Higher education as a pedagogical and societal phenomenon, University of Jyväskylä: https://www.jyu.fi/en/fier/research-at-fier/higher-education-as-a-pedagogical-and-social-phenomenon

About me

Docent (University of Helsinki, Finland) and researcher at Södertorn University (Stockholm, Sweden), Alexandra Urakova is a literary scholar and cultural historian with a specialization in the 19th-century. She is the author of two monographs including Dangerous Giving in Nineteenth-Century American Literature (Palgrave, 2022) and co-editor of six volumes including The Dangers of Gifts from Modernity to the Digital Age (Routledge, 2022). Her research interests traverse American, Russian, and comparative literature and culture, economic criticism and gift theory, the fields of gender and sexuality, and the study of modernity. She is interested in epistemic sharing, knowledge as a form of property, and the cultural history of knowledge at the crossroads of literary studies and intellectual history.

About me

I am a higher education researcher and a university instructor at the Faculty of Education and Culture, Tampere University. My research interests include a variety of topics in the field of higher education research (higher education studies): teaching and learning, knowledge and curriculum, pedagogical development, academic communities, internationalisation, organisational cultures, digitalisation and online education. As a member of the UnMaking Knowledge research team, I explore student-knowledge relations and discourses on knowledge and competencies in higher education.

More information:

TUNI profile page: https://www.tuni.fi/en/people/vesna-holubek

Tunicris research portal: https://researchportal.tuni.fi/en/persons/vesna-holubek

About me

I am a postdoctoral researcher in educational sciences. I work at Tampere University, in the UnMaking Knowledge – Students’ relationship with knowledge from Modernity to AI project, funded by the Kone foundation. I also work at the Finnish Institute for Educational Research (FIER), University of Jyväskylä, in a project Tracing Knowledge: Universities and the Risk of Empty Education, funded by the Research Council of Finland.

I am particularly interested in the sociology of education and research on learning, teaching, and student guidance. My research focuses on sociocultural perspectives in higher education teaching and learning, pedagogical development of higher education teachers, higher education student’s agency, and students’ meaningful learning experiences.  Currently, my research focuses on the nature of knowledge in higher education, how educational policy is reflected in education, and students’ relationship with knowledge.

About me

Juliene Madureira Ferreira is an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Education and Culture at Tampere University and currently leads the subgroup Child and Learning Ecologies within the ECEPP research group. She received her PhD in Psychology (Developmental Psychology) from São Paulo University in 2017 and her PhD in Education from the University of Tampere at the end of 2018, followed by a two-year postdoctoral fellowship also at Tampere University (TAU). Before arriving at TAU, she worked at the Department of Educational Psychology of the Teacher Training School of the Federal University of Uberlândia, Brazil (2010-2017). During this appointment, she also served as the school's vice dean of the unit and coordinated the administrative, academic, and research activities in the areas of Early Childhood Education and the First years of Elementary Education (2012-2015), and was directly involved in the reconfiguration of the early childhood education curriculum. At the Federal University of Uberlândia, Brazil, Juliene Ferreira also coordinated one of the Programs for Teacher Education in Special Education in the National Network for Teacher Education in Inclusive Education, organised by the Ministry of Education in Brazil (2009-2014). 

In her research, Juliene has investigated students’ sociability in challenging social interactions/contexts (e.g., when group members have significantly different developmental paths, including children with intellectual disability), analysing how diverse ways of establishing intersubjectivity influence peer learning (2013-2019). Her research has also focused on understanding material affordances for action in learning situations, advancing our understanding of neurodivergent social cognition and developing inclusive practices in special support. In collaboration with colleagues for the USA, China, Taiwan, and Brazil, Juliene has also investigated learning and teaching of (inter)relational processes of care, building on moral education, ethics of care, and developmental psychology to investigate how care is conceptualised, learned, and taught across different ages and cultures. The results provided insights into how learning to care for others, across cultures, is grounded in embodied and affective social experiences. 

More recently, her focus has shifted to understanding how we (human beings at different life stages) think in digital environments, including the relationships we may establish with AI. The approach continues to explore embodied cognition theories, this time bringing more focus on extended, distributed and enactive perspetives. 

Professionally, Juliene is also interested in improving teacher training to help pre-service teachers become more aware and equipped to support social interactions and collaborative learning in these challenging situations.  

Research topics

My research spans different topics in educational psychology. More recently, I have focused on the applications of embodied cognition theories (5E cognition) in the learning processes and contexts, examining, for example, the implications of the embodied shift in autism studies. My research interests vary across the following: 

• Learning and development in formal education,
• Embodied learning,
• Intersubjectivity (social cognition) in learning,
• Materiality in learning
• Inclusive and special education,  
• Autism research (focus on communication and learning processes)  

Research unit

Faculty of Education and Culture

Research fields

Educational Psychology

About me

I am a higher education researcher currently working on my PhD research related to the impact of AI in higher education. As a PhD candidate in the Doctoral Programme of Education and Society (Faculty of Education and Culture, Tampere University), I research the role of AI as a non-human mediator of knowledge in higher education learning processes. My PhD research focuses on how AI shapes cognitive processes in learning, influences students’ conceptualization of knowledge, and redefines the student’s role in independent learning. I conduct the PhD research with the support of the Kone Foundation’s grant (2025-2027), which is part of an interdisciplinary research project ‘(Un)making Knowledge: students’ relationship with knowledge from Modernity to AI’ funded by the Kone Foundation (2025-2029).

My research interests include a variety of topics in higher education and educational psychology, including cognitive processes in learning, AI as an extension of the mind, student-AI interaction, knowledge construction, and the recontextualization of educational knowledge.

Previously I have assisted in organizing the 2nd and 3rd International Symposiums on Social Interactions in Inclusive Educational Settings and was employed as a research assistant to conduct interviews and code data.

In my research, I work closely with Higher Education in Transition (HET).

In 2022, I graduated from the Master’s Programme in Learning, Teaching and Media Education, and obtained a M.A. in Education from Tampere University. I am a member of Tampere University Association of Researchers and Teachers TATTE.

Research topics

• AI as a non-human mediator of knowledge
• Knowledge construction in AI-supported learning
• Cognitive processes in AI-assisted learning
• AI as an extension of the mind in education
• Student-AI interaction and learning dynamics
• Reconceptualization of knowledge in AI-integrated education
• The role of AI in independent learning processes
• Students’ self-perception as learners in AI-driven environments
• Collaborative interactions
• Joint attention in collaboration