Johanna Annala

Erik Allardt Fellow, SCAS.
Senior Lecturer in University Pedagogy, Tampere University

Johanna Annala is Senior Lecturer in University Pedagogy at the Faculty of Education and Culture,
Tampere University, and a co-leader of the research group Higher Education in Transition
(https://research.tuni.fi/het). In 2019, she was a Visiting Scholar for four months at the University
of Melbourne. She has the title of Docent (Adjunct Professor) in the field of teaching in higher
education, at the University of Turku.

She received a Master’s degree from the Faculty of Social Sciences, Department of Sociology and
Social Psychology, Tampere University, in 1994. After working 13 years outside academia, in 2007
she received her PhD in Education from Tampere University. In 2009, she was recruited to work
there on a research project, which marked the beginning of a new career in research.

In her research on higher education, she combines approaches from curriculum studies and social
sciences. Her research focus is on curriculum change, the research-teaching nexus and student
engagement as socio-cultural phenomena. Among her publications are, ‘Communities of Practice
in Higher Education: Contradictory Narratives of a University-wide Curriculum Reform’ (2017; with
M. Mäkinen), in Studies in Higher Education and ‘The Role of Curriculum Theory in Contemporary
Higher Education Research and Practice’ (2017; with J. Lindén & K. Coate), in M. Tight & J. Huisman
(eds.) Theory and Method in Higher Education Research. Recently, she has written about agency and
structure in curriculum change.

At SCAS, she will investigate the nature of knowledge in a so-called ‘hybrid curriculum’ – in initiatives
where a curriculum or parts of it are united in a research-intensive university and a university of applied
sciences – and teachers’ role in making decisions about knowledge in a curriculum of this kind.


This information is accurate as of the academic year 2020-21.