During my adolescence, I worked as a drummer, a keyboard player, and a singer in dozens of bands in the pop/rock scene of Joensuu, my hometown. Eventually one of those bands got a record deal from a Finnish indie record label in 1997. Five years later I signed a record deal with Universal Music for two albums as a solo artist. I have also written songs for various Finnish mainstream artists.
After I graduated from the Department of Music Education at the University of Oulu in 2001 I worked as a music teacher in secondary schools. Given that songwriting and producing had been at the centre of my personal self-expression as a musician it has been natural for me to include creative music-making such as composing in my teaching. By 2009 when I started my doctoral studies at the Sibelius Academy, I started to systematically develop and test the practical and theoretical principles for a novel approach, I term `Learning Through Producing´ (LTP).
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Currently, I work as a music lecturer at the University of the Helsinki. Today, my special interests both as a lecturer and as a researcher include posthumanism, critical pedagogy, collaborative learning and blended learning. I have held presentations related to my research interests in numerous international conferences and published my research in academic peer-reviewed publications. I am also one of the four convenors of the International Society for Music Education’s Popular Music Education Special Interest Group that aims to provide a home for a scholarship, practice, and discussion of Popular Music Education from around the world.
