A School on a Sailing Boat

In June 2016, the Meretniemi family is beginning a six-year sailing voyage around the world. The children of the family will have lessons on the sailing boat by making use of digital learning possibilities. The Sail for Good project that has grown around the sailing voyage is now bringing experts together to discuss different learning methods and the possibilities offered by digitalization.

The Sail for Good – Global Classroom event is the starting signal for a learning and education export project built around the six-year-long sailing voyage around the world. In the event, discussion will be raised about the skills of the future that a school should train children for. Is a school environment needed for learning them or can learning take place anywhere? What opportunities does digitalization offer for the education exportation of Finland?

These and many other questions will be delved into in expert discussions. Talking about individual learning will be, amongst others, Kirsti Lonka, Professor of Educational Psychology at the University of Helsinki, and the classroom teacher Maarit Korhonen, who has shaken up the school world. Other subjects are the skills of the future and how school trains children for them, digitality in learning and the global nationality.

Talking about the themes, there will be people including the mathematics teacher and innovative reformer of teaching methods Pekka Peura, the writer Sonja Ängeslevä, who is a person of influence in the technology field and has received the President’s Internationalisation Award and Maarit Rossi, who has been voted one of the world’s ten best teachers, as well as Tina Aspiala, who spent her childhood on a sailing boat, the philosopher Lauri Järvilehto and the radio personality Abdirahim Husu Hussein.

(Images: Jari Salo/ Sail for Good Project)