Speaker

Kaisu Rättyä (docent in literary education) works at the Faculty of Education and Culture at Tampere University. She has a large network in the field of education due to her membership on various boards like Finnish Educational Research Association (FERA, 2018–2021) and Finnish Research Association for Subject Didactics (2012–2018). She has acted as the chief editor of the peer-reviewed publication series Studies in Subject Didactics. Rättyä is the current co-leader of the research group Subject Matter Didactics at the faculty and is in charge of the team for L1, L2 and literature education. These research connections are related to her position as a university lecturer in language and literature education since 2009 in teacher education programmes at the University of Helsinki, the University of Eastern Finland and the University of Tampere. Kaisu Rättyä’s doctoral thesis (2017) on educational studies focused on developing teaching methods for grammar education. In her research, she has especially focused on the areas of literature education, grammar education and assessment. The teaching and assessment methods in line with constructive alignment have been important to her research. In literary studies, Rättyä has analysed picture books and young adult literature, and her doctoral thesis (2007) in literature dealt with themes and narration in young adult novels. Her latest English article in the field of literature studies focused on ecocriticism and was published in the book Ecocritical Perspectives on Children’s Texts and Cultures. Rättyä’s international networks include different research societies like Association for Research on Language and Literature Education (ARLE) and its special interest group (SIG) EDULing. She is also a member of ARLE’s Research on Literature Education SIG. As a member of the EDULing SIG, she has organised SIG symposiums (Bialystok, 2018; Tallinna, 2017) and published a special issue in L1-Educational Studies in Language and Literature together with Xavier Fontich and Elżbieta Awramiuk. Before her academic career, she was the director of the Finnish Institute of Children’s Literature (1999¬–2009), which functioned as a national archive, library and research centre. Her responsibilities were to lead projects on Finnish children’s literature, to organise projects promoting children’s literature and to develop the publication series.