Master's in Education for Global Futures and Leadership
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.
Education for Global Futures and Leadership (EdGloLead)
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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.
Bringing together educational research, futures thinking, and leadership development, the programme supports students in not only analysing complexity but also in leading informed and responsible change.
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.
Studies, specialisation, and practice
In EdGloLead, students build their studies around evolving areas of expertise shaped collaboratively by the Education for Global Futures (Edglo) of the University of Oulu and by Educational Innovation and Leadership of the Tallinn University.
Rather than fixed majors or minors, the programme offers flexible specialisation pathways, allowing students to focus more deeply on a particular direction or combine perspectives to develop a broader, integrated understanding of education and leadership in global contexts.
Students engage with courses offered by both institutions through a combination of on campus, online, and hybrid teaching. While teaching takes place primarily in person within the local academic environment in Oulu, the programme also includes shared courses and collaboration across the two universities.
Students can study with the partner institution during the programme, either through online participation in joint courses or through a mobility period that typically takes place during the second year. This cross-institutional structure expands academic perspectives while fostering international networks and collaboration.
The programme includes opportunities to apply learning in practice in different ways, including through a course focused on internships or collaborative projects. Students may choose to work with organisations locally or internationally, including NGOs, intergovernmental agencies, and educational institutions, or engage in a project developed in collaboration with the university.
Students are responsible for identifying and arranging their own internship placements. These experiences support students in connecting research-informed knowledge with practical contexts and exploring real-world challenges in education.
Graduates are Masters of Arts (Education), which provides eligibility for doctoral studies. While the programme does not lead to a teaching qualification, it prepares students for a wide range of expert, research, and leadership roles in education and related fields.
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.
Key courses
We combine research training, ethics, leadership, and an orientation towards global futures, with studies progressing from orientation and foundational perspectives toward more advanced leadership and research‑focused learning. Students learn within a critical, collaborative learning community, engaging with decolonial, antiracist, and sustainability perspectives while developing leadership capacity across educational contexts.
Programme structure and courses
Please note, that the link below does not fully reflect the programme content for academic year 2027-2028.
For detailed information about courses and the programme structure, look at the study guide:
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.
Are you a great fit for EdGloLead programme?
You want to re‑imagine education with a strong commitment to social justice, decolonial thinking, and ethical reflection. You are interested in how leadership operates within educational change and transformation, you value collaboration, and you thrive in diverse, research‑intensive environments. You enter the programme with purpose, ready to shape your learning and use EdGloLead to support your goals beyond the degree.
Rethinking education
Become actively involved in the process of challenging the status quo and thinking about alternative ways of doing education by contributing to our EdGlo journal, participating in academic publishing and building projects that work towards educational reworlding.
