According to Väinö Jalkanen, a student at Aalto University, the perception of the world is narrow if you only familiarize yourself with research and material in English.
Aalto University student Väinö Jalkanen recently did something that is exceptional in the Finnish university world.
He did his bachelor's thesis without using any English-language sources.
Contrary to what one might think from the initial assumption, the thesis is still very international. It uses sources published in ten other languages: Finnish, Estonian, Swedish, Norwegian, Danish, French, Italian, German, Hungarian and Polish.
Jalkanen is studying in the built environment degree program, and his bachelor's thesis dealt with how the reopening of discontinued passenger train traffic develops working areas.
Tongue tip You can find it on foot. He says that in addition to English, he knows Swedish, German, Italian and Hungarian very well.
He says that he can read Norwegian and Danish fluently on the basis of Swedish. In French, he is not very fluent, but can hear and read it.
He says he understands Estonian a little with the help of the Finnish language, but sometimes he used a translator to understand it. He translated the materials in Polish with a translator.
Jalkanen is convinced that he has understood his material correctly, even though he is not fluent in all languages. According to him, the main focus is on those materials in which languages he is good. For example, he picked only details from the Polish-language materials for his thesis.
At issue was not originally an ideological statement, says Jalkanen.
“It didn't start with me doing something like this. But along the way I noticed that the material published in these other European languages is actually more relevant to Finns.”
While searching for scientific articles, statistics, news and other materials, he noticed that the English-language material often dealt with big cities in the United States, for example. Their transport systems or population numbers did not relate well to the Finnish communities that Jalkanen wrote his thesis with in mind.
On the other hand, the material dealing with Nordic and Central European societies compared better with Finland.
In the end, it seemed natural to adopt the principle of avoiding English-language sources.
A foot has thought a lot about the position of the English language in Finnish society and the world of higher education.
In his opinion, the government has a belief that all essential information can be accessed in the English language. Therefore, there is no need to follow conversations in other languages. Monitoring conversations is considered almost a waste of resources.
A basic understanding of the world will remain empty if university students are directed to read material only in English. In this case, the students learn from him how things look through Anglo-American glasses.
He considers his own master's thesis as an example of the fact that a lot of essential information for Finnish society would have been missing if he had not used materials in other languages.
at Aalto University Jalkanen's bachelor's program has been largely in Finnish. The university's master's programs are mainly in English, which he questions.
When Jalkanen studied another field in Berlin, Budapest and Italy, he studied in whole or in part in local languages. According to him, it helped to become a part of the local society.
He points out that Finland also needs experts who can work in Finnish or Swedish.
He would like a public discussion about whether it is the right line that many master's degrees at Aalto University are in English. In addition to that, we should also discuss various incentive models that would, for example, enable university staff to learn Finnish or Swedish.
What added value do Finnish universities offer to international students if the language and course contents are copied from the English-speaking world? In that case, they are in a way colonies of the English-speaking world, Jalkanen reflects.
Quite Jalkanen is not yet a bachelor, because the degree is still missing a couple of achievements. However, the biggest effort is behind us.
Right now, he believes he is doing his diploma thesis on a similar topic. He thinks that even then the main focus will be on sources other than English.
He hardly does his thesis just as “purely”. A few English-language sources can get lost in it.
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