Education for Global Futures and Leadership (EdGloLead) is a two-year international degree in partnership with Tallinn University. It combines educational research, futures thinking, and leadership development to critically explore and reimagine education in a rapidly changing world.

Grounded in social justice and decolonial perspectives, the programme explores the contingencies of local and global contexts while fostering research-informed innovation. Students develop the skills to influence change, work across cultures, and contribute to more equitable and sustainable educational futures. 

Top reasons to study Education for Global Futures and Leadership

• Study with both the University of Oulu and Tallinn University, benefiting from a broadened course catalogue, and expanded academic, professional, and peer networks across both contexts.
• Engage in a transformative learning experience where you collaboratively question dominant ideas, reflect on your own assumptions, and develop the capacity to lead meaningful educational change.
• Critically appraise education in a time of rapid global change through transdisciplinary, research-based studies that equips you with analytical skills and practical knowledge to influence and improve educational systems and practices.
• Explore your interests within a diverse, tight‑knit international learning community, grounded in student-centered learning. Participate in academic dialogue, collaborative projects, and publications, critically bridging theory, policy, and practice.
• Develop into an adaptable, independent, and reflective educational expert, capable of re-imagining education across contexts leading into more sustainable and peaceful futures.

Rethinking education and its futures

Education today unfolds amid accelerating global transformations shaped by technological change, migration, ecological crises, and growing inequalities. These conditions challenge inherited ways of understanding education and call for deeper, more critical engagements than quick policy fixes or technical solutions.

The EdGloLead programme engages directly with these challenges through a research-based approach to rethinking education and policy in ways that advance social justice, intercultural understanding, and peace, including attention to the contested concept of inclusion.

We approach global futures as plural and contested, recognising that education plays a key role in shaping possible worlds. Through social justice and decolonial perspectives, students critically examine dominant assumptions while reflecting the responsibilities and positionalities of Nordic and European contexts within global education.

Students will study in an intercultural, student-centered environment where diversity is not only our reality but a vital resource for learning. Through dialogue and collaboration across perspectives, students develop new ways of seeing, knowing, and acting - preparing them to contribute to more just and sustainable educational futures. 

Core skills and competences

EdGloLead is grounded in shared values of Critical, Open, Active, Caring, and Humble (COACH) engagement. It develops competences that combine critical understanding with the capacity to act in complex and diverse contexts. Graduates are equipped to question, reframe, transform and contribute to change in education systems and practices.

Key competences include:

• Ethical and reflective practice, including awareness of positionality and global inequalities

• Critical global and comparative analysis of education systems and policies

• Educational leadership and policy engagement oriented towards equity and sustainability

• Intercultural communication and collaboration in diverse environments

• Research competence and the ability to generate and apply knowledge in practice

• Transformative thinking and problem-solving, moving from diagnosis towards action

• Understanding of education, development, and social change in interconnected contexts

Across these areas, the programme emphasises developing new ways of seeing and knowing that enable students not only to understand global challenges, but to participate in the ongoing re-imagining - or reworlding - of education.

Careers of our alumni

Our graduates pursue diverse professional and academic trajectories shaped by their own goals, rather than a single predetermined career path.

The programme does not train for specific careers but equips students with transferable expertise they can leverage in education, research, policy, development, and civil society, in national and international contexts. Many continue into doctoral studies, while others work as educators, project coordinators, consultants, and advisors engaged in educational change.