Fil. dr Tahani Aldahdouh received a 58 000 euros grant from Post doc pool for her research in Palestine.
Back to all articles
Grants
The results from the Säätiöiden post doc –pooli’s spring application round – increasing number of applicants
23.4.2021
On 23rd April 2021 the Säätiöiden post doc -pooli foundations awarded some 1.38 million euro to 29 post-doctoral scholars.
Altogether 133 post-doctoral scholars from around Finland took part in the spring application round. Thus a grant could be awarded to 22 % of the applicants. The number of applications increased by 13 percent from the previous year. You can find all the Cultural Foundation's Post Doc pool grantees here. Choose Post doc pooli from "Erillishaut" section.
Säätiöiden post doc -pooli has proven to be an important instrument of research funding which has enabled young scholars with families to finance research periods at top universities abroad. The grants awarded by the Pool are determined flexibly in accordance with the applicant’s needs and they often include their family’s moving expenses and children’s day care or school fees.
The Pool has a role in making Finnish research more international. After twenty-three application rounds over 630 scholars have already received funding through the Pool for at least a one-year research period abroad. One third of the grantees have received a two-year funding.
The Pool’s next application round will take place from 15 August until 15 September 2021, when some 1.7 million euro will be given in grants. The results of this round will be published by December 2021.
Teachers develop their teaching and learning skills also in distressed situations
Tahani Aldahdouh arrived Finland 7 years ago as a grant researcher to pursue her doctoral study in Education at Tampere University. She defended her dissertation in 2020 after which she worked as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow on the digitalization in higher education project. Her work started just on the same time as COVID-19 has become a global pandemic. The focus of her research was to investigate how university teachers in Finland manage to develop their online teaching expertise during this tough period.
– While conducting the research, I realized how COVID-19 has troubled Finnish universities even though they have already prepared plans for digitalization. Finnish universities have invested a great of their efforts and resources to support teachers with all technical and pedagogical solutions to smoothen their transition to digital teaching. Even though, we have some scientific evidences that university teachers have stumbled with difficulties related, for example, to fostering their students’ engagement, and working at home with children. Please note that we are talking about a context where teachers are enjoying all that supports and capabilities; that kept me wondering, how can ever teachers living in a context lacks even the basic needs of life survive in such harsh situation, Aldahdouh wonders.
The idea sprang from the fact that she have lived the both contexts. Before coming to Finland, she was a teacher in one of the stricken and distressed areas in the world, Gaza city in Palestine. Gaza has been subject to several wars, long-lasting and drastic blockades, and has experienced a severe electricity and fuel crisis. The poverty and unemployment rate are among the highest records in the world. All of these factors have resulted in hundreds of casualties and also have hurt the physical and functioning capacity of all higher education institutions in Gaza.
– What is surprising is that despite all these challenges, scientific evidences indicated that higher education continues at deprived contexts. But how? Thus, in this mobility period, I want to extend the topic of online teaching expertise running at Tampere University to conduct a comparative study between two highly variant contexts. I am heading to the Islamic University of Gaza in Jan 2022 to closely interact with teachers there and investigate how teachers manage to learn and develop their online teaching expertise.
The Pool’s next application round will take place from 15 August until 15 September 2021, when some 1.7 million euro will be given in grants. The results of this round will be published by December 2021.
The Säätiöiden post doc -pooli was set up in the autumn of 2009. During the fourth three-year-period 2019-2021 there are thirteen foundations involved, allocating altogether 3.2 million euro annually to the pool. The Pool’s foundations are Emil Aaltonen’s Foundation, Alfred Kordelin Foundation, the Foundation for Economic Education, the Paulo Foundation, Päivikki and Sakari Sohlberg Foundation, Finnish Academy of Science and Letters, Finnish Cultural Foundation, the Finnish Medical Foundation, Swedish Cultural Foundation in Finland, the Society of Swedish Literature in Finland, Finnish Foundation for Technology Promotion, Jenny and Antti Wihuri Foundation and the Ulla Tuominen’s Foundation.
Further information:
www.postdocpooli.fi, info(at)postdocpooli.fi or from coordinator Mikko-Olavi Seppälä, tel. + 358 400 868 006
