Common Graduate School of the University of Lapland

In 1998 the University of Lapland made an important decision concerning researcher education. The University of Lapland established the common Graduate School that plans, coordinates, and arranges common researcher education to all the faculties of the university and the Arctic Centre. The decision can be understood as graduate school ideology applied at the university level.

After the decision, researcher education has evolved as follows: Researcher education has become systematical and multidisciplinary. Strategic policies, practices, and guidelines have been created for researcher education at the university level. Researcher education and the university’s research strategy support each other. A new quality control method has become available for doctor education. The university has managed to combine its researcher education resources by offering a broad training program ranging from methodological courses to research ethics and general questions dealing with the philosophy of science. In addition, there are various practical courses related to writing, communication, and project management.

The university’s Graduate School is not part of any faculty and it is not even administratively subordinated to them. It is an independent unit of the Faculty of Social Sciences, whose services extend across the whole university.
 

Innovations and Operating Principles Related to Researcher Education

The basic idea behind the Graduate School ’s operational planning is to ensure the quality of research: Instead of traditional ‘training’ there must be operating procedures that support researchers’ proficiency, the different phases of research, and the operation of the research community.

The Graduate School ‘educates’ best by meeting the needs of research and researchers and by functioning as a committed research community. Its program aims to strengthen the researcher’s identity and know-how of postgraduate students. Thereby it also aims to forward the completion of studies and the creation of new research projects. The ideology behind researcher education has shifted from dissertations to supporting of researchers’ proficiency and research activities.

Therefore, the program of the Graduate School comprises courses that support the different phases of research (e.g. data sessions)building of professional know-how (e.g. writing courses in different languages)tailored, intensive research courses on e.g. methods, methodology, and philosophy of sciencestimulation lectures and related research seminars project hatcheries and researcher meetings.

The same idea is behind the forms of the courses included in the common Graduate School ’s education profile. The course forms are based on the idea that instead of being ‘taught’, the students are given and give systematic, professional feedback on their researcher’s skills and research progress.
Fluent integration is favored: For example, researcher’s skills and the development of writing and presentation or language skills are integrated into each other. The forms of education are partly built on the idea that the postgraduate students themselves work as a research community – as peer tutors to one another.

Perhaps the best way to summarize the model of operation is with the words functionality, interactivity, and research orientation. The emphasis on research is also evident in the recruiting of teachers. Almost all teachers are researchers with a doctor’s degree or professional researchers. This emphasizes the focus on research in educational situations.

The teaching and activities of the Graduate School systematically follow the principles of interdisciplinary research. Regardless of faculty, all the students who have enrolled in the Graduate School can join the courses. The interdisciplinary approach in teaching is observed as a part of social activities as well. The Graduate School arranges research seminars whose aim is to enable multidisciplinary research projects with reasonable contents. The aim of the Graduate School is to function as an active agent that builds and maintains a scientific community.

The Graduate School also has a systematical approach to internationalization. In other words, international teacher researchers and small-scale seminars arranged under their supervision are tailored parts of researcher education. Researchers are encouraged to participate in foreign researcher exchange and to further their understanding and production of multicultural research information. In this context ‘teaching’ in the Graduate School actually means supporting the researchers in the creating of necessary connections and in the writing of different types of applications or documents.

The scope of the Graduate School’s curriculum extends from the philosophy of science, information theory, and methodological skills to the quite practical presentation skills of a specialist. This gives the postgraduate students a genuine possibility to become professional producers of information and to function in different roles as specialists. Course-form education and the recurrence of certain courses also make it possible to choose between vary different types of careers as a researcher. In fact, the Graduate School’s operating principles include tolerance for differences and their observation in the planning of schedules, etc.

 

Graduate School and University-Level Operating Procedures

The common Graduate School of the University of Lapland can meet the overall needs of the university and react to the needs of its departments. One of the salient ideas of the Graduate School has been to create common, strategically important operating procedures assembled by a so-called Graduate School group – a planning group of researcher education that represents the various research areas and faculties of the university. The uniform principles of supervision, the structure of the PSPs and their implementation, and observation of the salient visions of the research strategy are examples of this. At present, harmonized guidelines for the doctoral defense process are being planned.

The Graduate School has a special status because it supports the faculties in their efforts to accomplish doctor’s degrees. Simultaneously, it effectively coordinates the researcher education resources of the university and maintains quality both by creating procedures and by arranging teaching. Although the main responsibility for the researcher students lies on the departments and faculties, the solution makes the quality of researcher education, and thereby also the quality of postgraduates, an issue that concerns the entire university.