Putting everything we know into perspective

Coming from a family of teachers and professors, Rohit Mishra decided the last thing he wants to be is a teacher, knowing about the challenges they face in their daily work. So, he went and studied Electronics and Communication Engineering, but the arrival of digitalisation to classrooms made him curious about education technology and how it could help teachers. He became a science educator, bringing an understanding for scientific work to schools in India. With his step into research, he hopes to be able to create a bridge between current evidence and practice. The strive for research led him to the University of Oulu and the Learning, Education and Technology (LET) master programme.

Before he came to Finland, he knew the country as the home of Linux and Nokia, but still, it seemed like a fairy-tale location with stories of Santa Claus, northern lights and frozen lakes. “After one year in Finland, I can say this is not even the tip of the iceberg. With each passing day, I am learning a new aspect about the country.”

He knows winters are long and cold, but apartments are warm and cosy. The sea is frozen and invites you for a walk on the ice while northern lights are dancing for you. Moments like this seem unreal, but the most “unreal” experience for Rohit is the midnight sun. “In science, we teach facts,” he explains. “The sun rises here and sets over there, there is day and night – but then there is midnight sun, and everything you know is put into perspective.”

For Rohit, Finland is also a country of start-ups and a place where multidisciplinary collaborations are the standard:

“Research, innovation and multidisciplinary collaboration are in the air. A perfect place to do what I am doing: Learning.”

After six years of working as a science educator, Rohit wanted to know more about learning. The reputation of the LET research unit brought him to the University of Oulu. “There are only few programmes like this, but in LET, you see the theories in practice,” Rohit says. And the theory is what he wishes to truly understand in order to make an impact as a science educator – after immersing into the theories behind learning a bit more and doing a PhD. Rohit sees himself as a researcher in learning sciences tackling “previously unexplored details of complex learning processes.” He wants to understand the why behind the way we learn with new technologies.