OSAILE

Sai Väyrynen [Ph.D.(Ed.), MA (Ed.), MA (Special Ed.)]
Sai has been involved in the development of inclusive education since 1993.

She has a teaching career as a primary school teacher in Helsinki, Finland, where she developed learner-centred approaches in pedagogy in order to cater for a range of learning needs in her classrooms. She has also worked as a special needs education teacher in Helsinki and Rovaniemi, Finland. As a special needs education teacher she has been involved in developing practices through which segregated special education tradition could be transformed towards more inclusive approaches. At the University of Lapland she is responsible for the special needs education studies.

Sai has more than a decade of service in international education as an adviser to a number of Ministries of Education in developing countries through different assignments. She has also experience in Inter-Agency collaboration within the UN through her work as a programme specialist at UNESCO where she was responsible for the conceptual and practical development of inclusive education, and training and support material production. Sai has trained teacher educators and teachers, made presentations in international fora, as well as written and edited a number of articles and resource materials. She has working experience from several African countries, and countries in transition in Eastern Europe and Central Asia. She has lived and worked in Zimbabwe, France, South Africa and Tanzania, and studied in the UK.

In Finland, Sai has worked as a ‘critical friend’ or mentor in a pre-school development initiative in a municipality in Southern Finland. She also gives continuous professional development courses in inclusive education for practicing teachers, and her students have appreciated her ability to translate theories into practice. She has explored the processes of inclusion and exclusion in her doctoral thesis on two different schools in Finland and South Africa, and her research interests are related to development of inclusive education, ethnography and critical theory.

Sai works in Finnish, English and French.