Multilingual Early Language Transmission (MELT) - Mercator ...

Swedish speaking culture. It is also important for the pre-service teachers to learn how they
can strengthen bilingual children’s language skills and especially for those children who live
in a completely Finnish dominated environment and where the early childhood center is the
only Swedish environment. This kind of education would not automatically be part of the
Finnish program.
However, since it is important that the pre-service teachers also become bilingual they will in
most cases take their minor subject matter courses in Finnish. Hence, the program will in
practice be in two languages. Interestingly it is not housed in the department of teacher
education which is an environment where all programs are in Finnish. Instead we have
housed it in the Institute of Behavioral Sciences where there are two programs in Swedish
from before. This department has a long tradition of Swedish speaking programs since the
Swedish speaking professor of education position is the oldest in the Nordic countries. With
three Swedish programs in the department the Swedish students will have a larger Swedish
speaking peer community, more Swedish speaking educators and more administrators who
know at least some Swedish. By connecting the three programs we are also able to have one
Swedish speaking student coordinator. In other words, we have created a small Swedish
speaking university community within the Institute of Behavioural Sciences, which also
makes it easier for everybody to use Swedish as a daily language.
A concrete challenge to creating a teacher education program in a minority language is that
it also requires qualified teacher educators. Since there is no prior history of early childhood
tertiary education in this region there are very few with doctoral degrees in early childhood
who are eligible to work as teacher educators. Hence, the program is like a puzzle created in
collaboration between two universities and a polytechnic in order to have qualified teacher
educators. Adding to this the fact at the University of Helsinki the two early childhood
teacher educators are located in two different departments. The program is at times an
administrative headache. However, without this kind of collaboration the program would
not either have been politically possible to accomplish.
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