The Writing Pauses, but the Learning Continues

An Epilogue to the Turning Values into Visible Actions Essay Series

When I published the first essay in this series, I began with a photograph: standing on a football field, holding a ball in three colours.

The image carried a simple idea. Values matter only when they become visible in the way we act—on a football field, in a school or within a community.

Over the following months, that idea grew into a series of six essays and one continuing question:

How can communities turn the values they already express into visible action?

The three colours first gave visible form to a simple question: how do shared values become part of everyday action?

What the essays revealed

The essays gradually revealed a reinforcing cycle:

Shared Values → Shared Understanding → Visible Actions → strengthened Shared Values

The arrows show movement, but the cycle is not a rigid sequence of stages. Communities may enter it from different places, move unevenly and sometimes lose the connection between values, understanding and action.

At its centre is Shared Purpose: the question of why a community exists and acts together. A stated purpose is not yet a shared purpose, just as stated values are not yet lived values. Purpose becomes shared as people interpret it together, test it in everyday life and allow experience to deepen or reshape what it means.

Shared Values help people recognise what matters. Shared Understanding connects those values with local realities. Visible Actions bring them into everyday life. When those actions are recognised and reflected upon, they return to strengthen the shared value base and give the next turn of the cycle a deeper starting point.

When people can see that their contribution matters, feel that they belong and assume real responsibility, Shared Ownership may gradually grow. It is not another stage in the cycle. It develops across repeated, meaningful turns of the whole cycle.

Each ring represents one complete turn of the cycle. When experience is recognised, reflected upon and carried forward, Shared Values become more deeply lived and Shared Ownership may gradually grow.

The annual-rings image matters because growth is cumulative but never perfectly even. A new ring is not created by repetition alone. It grows when experience is recognised, reflected upon and allowed to shape what happens next. Difficult and incomplete periods remain part of the community’s history, just as they remain visible in a tree.

When an introduced idea becomes our idea

At CETis 109 in Mexico, a short Fair Play Peace Circle did not remain a single event. Teachers and students began developing their own ideas around it—from a Peace Tree and Wall of Peace to music, competitions and student-led activities. The most important change was not the number of activities, but the gradual shift in ownership.

What began as an introduced idea was being interpreted, adapted and carried forward by the school community itself. The visible actions did more than express values: they helped people experience that their participation mattered and that they were part of something larger. That experience gave energy to the next turn of the cycle.

The Fair Play Peace Circle on the CETis 109 sports field became a starting point. Teachers and students then carried the idea forward through activities of their own—turning an introduced action into something the school community began to own.

A mirror rather than a scoreboard

This is why communities also need a way to pause and look at themselves.

A Community Mirror helps people recognise what is already visible, where connections are weakening and what the community could strengthen next. It does not rank communities or prescribe a universal solution. It invites them to look honestly at their own situation:

See. Reflect. Act.

• What is already visible?

• Where is the connection weakening?

• What should we strengthen next?

A mirror is not a scoreboard. Its purpose is not to judge, but to help a community see itself more clearly. And this is the point at which the central idea of the essay series now meets my next piece of work.

The next work begins with listening

I had originally planned to continue directly from the essay series towards a book. Then I was selected for a new two-year role as an expert in basic education, working with all thirteen municipalities in North Karelia and the University of Eastern Finland Teacher Training School.

Questions that emerged through writing will now enter the everyday life of schools: classrooms, staff rooms, long distances, local strengths and the countless practical decisions through which a shared future is built.

The work begins with listening. I will visit schools, meet the people who shape their daily life and learn what is already working—especially in places facing change. Together, we can explore how schools learn from one another, share what they know and make distance less of a barrier.

This is where the Community Mirror becomes more than an idea in a book. Before proposing something new, we first make visible what is already there: the knowledge, relationships, values and quiet acts that too easily remain unseen. Only then can we ask what might grow from them together.

We are not starting from nothing

This matters deeply to me. I am not entering this work with a new set of values for others to adopt. I am entering a landscape that already has roots. Those roots have grown through years of shared work—through earlier turns in which values have been interpreted, tested and made visible in the everyday life of schools and municipalities.

The national curriculum gives Finnish education a common and binding value base. North Karelia’s regional curriculum, shaped through years of cooperation between municipalities, names learning, wellbeing and responsibility as shared educational values. Municipal strategies bring their own priorities, histories and local identities. The North Karelia Strategy 2045 looks towards a renewing and resilient region, while the University of Eastern Finland and its Teacher Training School connect research, teacher education and classroom practice.

When these different voices are brought together, a shared direction begins to appear: learning together, acting responsibly and embracing renewal. The same thread can be followed from the individual pupil and the school community to the regional network and North Karelia as a whole. It is not a new message brought in from outside. It is something that was already present, scattered across curricula, strategies and years of cooperation—and can now be made visible.

The first task is therefore not to invent something new, but to look more carefully at what already connects us: how it is lived in everyday life, where it has grown strong and where the connections still need care.

National, regional and municipal value statements form the real starting point: not values brought in from outside, but a shared landscape that can be made visible, discussed and lived more fully.

North Karelia is also a fitting place for this next stage. For me, Karelianness is not merely a regional identity. It is a way of meeting others: drawing people into the circle, helping one another through difficulty and building the future without asking anyone to leave their own roots behind. It can connect municipalities without making them the same.

The work will bring the questions of the essay series into a real situation. What happens when Shared Values meet different interpretations, local realities and everyday decisions? How can people feel genuinely involved rather than merely informed? How can a common direction emerge without erasing local difference? And how can the work become something that communities themselves are able to carry forward?

I do not yet know the answers. That is precisely why the book should not be completed too quickly.

The essays were born from more than thirty years of experience. The next phase will allow their ideas to be tested, questioned and deepened through new practice. The future book may therefore become less theoretical and more truthful—not only a description of a framework, but an account of what happens when it meets real communities.

The essay series ends here. The writing pauses, but the question does not. The next rings will be formed not on these pages, but in the work now beginning—with others.