Search

Background: Developing a school as a learning community is a complex process necessitating active engagement from the entire school community. This paper reports on a study from Finland that focused on exploring learning community development grounded in a shared vision. Purpose: We sought to investigate the development of a school community with a separate primary and lower secondary school as it progressed towards becoming a unified comprehensive school. The research involved close school-university collaboration to support the community's transformative journey. Our particular interest in this paper is the relationship between the shared vision and learning community development. Method: At the conclusion of the development project, seven semi-structured interviews were conducted with members of the school management team. Thematic analysis of the interview data was undertaken to identify their perceptions of how the shared vision was linked to learning community development. Findings: The in-depth analysis revealed five major themes: (1) communication of the shared vision and transparency; (2) present and absent themes in the shared vision; (3) tradition and innovation; (4) the long-term nature of school development; and (5) the role of the vision in everyday school life. The analysis drew attention to how a school's past and present influence a shared vision and school development. Conclusion: This study provides insights into how the preconditions of a school community contribute to the implementation of a shared vision as a catalyst for change. Recognising the distinct needs and starting points of schools is crucial, emphasising the importance of understanding the pre-existing context in school development.

How parents spend time with their children, what they teach their children and how they raise them in the early years have again become topics of policymaking and public debate. There is an intensive discussion about parental involvement in early childhood education and care (ECEC). The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development's Starting Strong series provides ECEC policy guidelines for national governments that include guides for parental involvement. With inspiration from the sociocultural policy approach, this paper suggests that there has been a shift in the Starting Strong series from underlining policy ideals for parental partnership to focussing on the learning environment. This paper examines how these transnational ideals (re)appear, transform and shift in the ECEC policy documents released in the first two decades of the 21st century in two Nordic countries: Denmark and Finland. Both Nordic countries have been involved in the Starting Strong series since the turn of the millennium. The paper also outlines how transnational ideals have become entangled in policy documents in these Nordic contexts in varied ways and how parental involvement is politicised across each of the two countries. We argue that this politicisation not only marks an intensification in parenting but also attempts to institutionalise the ECEC--family relationship, implying that the parent as well as the child must be enlightened. Thus, we seek to question the process of problematising the parent and the child's home in the policies and to enable new thinking and action to address this issue.

A major admissions reform was carried out in Finnish higher education at the end of the last decade. This paper focuses on three main policy papers connected to the reform and examines the use and production of evidence therein. Drawing on bibliometric research and research on educational policy, we aim to provide insight into how to utilize citation analysis when examining evidence in educational policymaking. In the three policy papers, domestic legislature was cited the most frequently, and research from higher education institutions was cited the least. Affirmational citations were the most prominent; perfunctory, assumptive, conceptual, persuasive, contrastive, and negational citations were found to a lesser extent. When cross-examined in relation to citation types, sources were mostly cited as affirmational, with the exception of research from higher education institutions, which was cited as conceptual information. We also found that the writers cited their own previously written ministry-affiliated policy brief as central information in one of the policy papers connected to the reform. Our study is in line with the earlier literature showing that certain sources, such as domestic publications, are favoured over others. It also illustrates the different citation strategies experts employ to substantiate and legitimize educational policymaking.

We examine private supplementary tutoring within the context of Finnish general upper secondary education. Specifically, we focus on profit-driven private preparatory course providers who cater to individual students and their families, aiming to improve applicants' prospects of gaining access to higher education. We examine this during a time when a recent education policy reform has renewed seeking admission to higher education in Finland, consequently impacting the private supplementary tutoring market associated with it. We draw on Bourdieu's concepts of field, capital, and habitus as a starting point for discussing the complex dynamics between public and private actors in the field of Finnish general upper secondary education and the role of economic capital. The ethnographic data analyzed for this paper consist of field notes and interviews (n = 58) from three general upper secondary schools, produced in 2019-2020. The study aims to investigate the negotiations between the public and private spheres of education within the everyday practices of Finnish public upper secondary education during an educational policy reform. We conclude that the fields of public and private education are not separate but rather intertwined, and they can become blurred in the everyday life of schools through both temporal and spatial overlaps.

Purpose: Empirical evidence on how supervisors have perceived the changes and the implications of the COVID-19 pandemic on their supervision is scarce. This paper aims to examine how the changing landscape of doctoral education has affected supervision from the supervisors' perspective. Design/methodology/approach: This survey addressed change, challenges and impact in supervisory responsibilities due to COVID-19 pandemic. The survey was completed by 561 doctoral supervisors from a large multi-field research-intensive university in Finland. Findings: Results show that supervisors estimated that their supervision had been negatively affected by the pandemic, but to a lesser extent than their doctoral candidates' progress and well-being. In the changed landscape of supervision, the supervisors grappled with challenges related to recognising doctoral candidates' need of help. Supervisors' experiences of the challenges and the impact of changed circumstances varied depending on the field and the position of the supervisor, whether they supervised part- or full-time candidates, and the organisation of supervision. Practical implications: The slowed-down progression and diminishing well-being of doctoral candidates reported by supervisors is likely to influence supervision in a delayed way. Supervisors may be anticipating some issues with stalled studying and stress, but the question is the extent to which they are prepared to handle these as they emerge in supervision encounters. The fact that the experiences varied across field, position, organisation of supervision and the type of candidates (full or part time) suggests that support provided for supervisors to overcome challenges needs to be tailored and engineered. Originality/value: This study contributes to the literature on doctoral supervision by exploring the impact of transitioning to online supervision and the rapid changes in doctoral supervision as a consequence of the recent global pandemic.

This paper explores the work of a particular document in issuing educational values. The document is the report "Embedding Values and Attitudes in Curriculum": "Shaping a Better Future", launched in 2021 and published by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). Inspired by a practice-oriented method of document analysis and the concepts of modifying work and contexting, we show how the issue of values is modified and transformed through the text. We illustrate how different data is used in the transformation with examples from the Nordic countries. Our analysis revealed five modifications that transformed the issue of values from a global societal issue embedded in international and national regulations to an issue defined by the OECD's Learning Compass and its nine competencies. The report gives prominence to the individual learner and competencies needed to navigate towards a future of well-being. Hence, the issue of values is reduced to universal competencies, and the report can manoeuvrer its argument to avoid issuing values as something controversial. Finally, we argue that the ways in which values are issued implies a curriculum design that is not compatible with the traditional curriculum format based on "didaktik" and Nordic ambitions.

This paper presents a novel process perspective on educational equality policies by examining the relationship between gender equality discourses and gender binary inequalities in the deliberative design process of the Finnish Basic Education Core Curriculum 2014. The analysis applies Nancy Fraser's theory of three-dimensional justice to feedback comments (n = 73) and the equality statements included in the draft and final core curricula. The study demonstrates how gender equality discourses affirm or transform gender binary inequalities and how they changed statements between curriculum versions. The findings show that transforming gender binarism was possibly a challenge to promoting equality in the curriculum design process: No discourse alone was able to transform binarism, and only discourses affirming binarism changed the final curriculum. This paper argues that a combination of redistributive and recognitive equality discourses can contribute to the transformation of gender binarism to make it a core element of educational equality discourses.

Problems encountered in top-down school reforms have repeatedly highlighted the significance of teachers' agency in educational change. At the same time, temporality has been identified as a key element in teachers' agency, with teachers' beliefs about the future and experiences of the past shaping their agentic orientations. However, research on teachers' future orientations is typically limited to short-term trajectories, as opposed to long-term visions of education. To address this, we draw on a futures studies perspective to give more explicit attention to teachers' long-term visions of their work. We argue that the method of future narratives, already well-established in the field of futures studies, is a fruitful methodological framework for studying these long-term visions. In this paper, we first show that the futures studies approach is theoretically compatible with the ecological model of teacher agency. We then outline the method of future narratives to point out the possibilities it offers. Finally, we illustrate our approach with an exploratory analysis of a small set of future narratives where teachers imagine a future workday. Our analysis reveals that the narratives offer a rich view of teachers' longer-term visions of education, including instances of reflecting on the role of education in relation to broader societal developments. Our study suggests that this novel approach can provide tools for research on teacher agency as well as practical development of teacher education, addressing long-term educational issues and policies.

The managerial transformation of higher education often means implementing novel modes of teaching and learning, including experiential and collaborative teaching. University teachers' agency is crucial for managing and enacting changes in higher education. Collaborating as part of these changes requires a specific kind of agency, namely relational agency. The aim of this paper is to conceptualise relational agency by studying the relational agentic orientations of university teachers towards a reorganisation of higher education. The data come from a novel mass course at a faculty of education in a Finnish university, which emerged as part of a major university-wide reorganisation of study programmes. The course is organised and taught collaboratively by a group of teachers, and has no predefined content. A typology of the agentic orientations in the teachers' interviews was constructed on the base of the intersections between the expansions of different objects of activity (one's own, others', partially shared) and the teachers' evaluation of these expansions (pragmatic-adaptive, critical, developmental-transformative). The teachers focused primarily on student learning and on expanding the object of student learning activity, which extends the focus of relational agency to not only seeking resources in others but also being a resource for others.

The Times Higher Education World University Rankings 2018 list top 1,000 universities in the world which represent only 5% of the 20,000 higher education institutions of the world. Out of these world countries, Finnish youth were the best young readers in the world according to results from the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). Finish students also led in math in 2003 tests, and in 2006 when Finland was first out of 57 countries in science. Finland's achievements in education have other nations, especially the United States, doing their homework. Finland mania picked up more when the nation placed close to the top again in 2009 PISA scores among nearly half a million students worldwide , while the United States ranked 15th in reading, 19th in math and 27th in science. According to The Education Working Paper Series produced by the Education Unit at the World Bank, Finland's remarkable performance today springs directly from education policies and reforms (overhaul) set in motion in the 1960's and 1970's.

Despite the increasing demand for non-formal science learning activities, few studies report on practitioners' perspectives and experiences with designing and implementing such activities worldwide. This paper focuses on their challenges by drawing upon twenty-two interviews with practitioners involved in diverse science learning activities in various non-formal settings in seven European countries. By including diverse activities and settings, this study contributes to the existing knowledge base, addresses the aforementioned gap in the literature, and informs future practices. Our findings suggest that despite the existing and celebrated diversity, practitioners face similar challenges related to (a) the activities' organisation and management, (b) the competencies required to run such activities, and (c) the attitudes held by the parties involved in them. Direct interview quotes exemplify each theme, further pinpointing the interconnection of multiple factors that inform the organisation and implementation of non-formal science learning activities. The findings allowed for a deeper understanding of challenges reported in the literature and shed light on the challenges voiced by the practitioners including the multiple competencies required and the workload. We conclude with a discussion foregrounding the need to build a knowledge base of shared practices in the field of non-formal science learning.

Forty-six interviews of French and Finnish Junior High School teachers clearly show a strong will to link professional commitment to common progressive values. However, the interviewees have to adjust these political or philosophical views when confronted with the reality of their professional everyday life and to the development of widely broadcast educational debates, like the ones about the recent reforms concerning the Junior High School level in both France and Finland, conducted at the time of the interviews (2016 and 2017). These adjustments, linked either to the circumstances or to practical realities, challenge the internal coherence of their ethical choices. This paper shows that the reference principles and the practical implications of such choices are not asserted as sharply in France as in Finland. It highlights the unequal ability of the teachers of both countries to make sense of their professional experience and to appropriate the terms of the debates on the evolution of teaching.

In this paper we examine the objectives and meanings of the career guidance provided in comprehensive education as set out in discussions in the Parliament of Finland. We approach the topic through an exploration of parliamentary sessions concerning three major legislative proposals for reforming compulsory education in Finland. The premise is that the parliamentary discussions concerning guidance provided in comprehensive education reflect the rationalities that underpin guidance in different eras in Finland and elsewhere. Examining these rationalities provides a way to explore the principles which frame career guidance policy in Finland. Using the actantial model as a methodological tool, the analysis aims to discover the actantial positions in the parliamentary discussions and the interactions that emerge between these. The various actantial narratives demonstrate the way in which guidance is influenced by wider ideological trends. The actantial analysis portrays a shift from the more structural corporatist approaches of the 1960s when the object of guidance was to fulfil the needs of society, towards more third way individualism in 1990s. The current reform of 2020 to extend compulsory education and reinforce guidance may represent some return to more structural approaches.

Forty-six interviews of French and Finnish Junior High School teachers clearly show a strong will to link professional commitment to common progressive values. However, the interviewees have to adjust these political or philosophical views when confronted with the reality of their professional everyday life and to the development of widely broadcast educational debates, like the ones about the recent reforms concerning the Junior High School level in both France and Finland, conducted at the time of the interviews (2016 and 2017). These adjustments, linked either to the circumstances or to practical realities, challenge the internal coherence of their ethical choices. This paper shows that the reference principles and the practical implications of such choices are not asserted as sharply in France as in Finland. It highlights the unequal ability of the teachers of both countries to make sense of their professional experience and to appropriate the terms of the debates on the evolution of teaching. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The COVID-19 pandemic has led to an increase in the digitalisation of services that poses the risk of digital exclusion, especially among older adults. We examined the predictors of Internet use for services and its increase or decrease among a longitudinal population-based sample of 1426 older adults from Finland aged between 70 and 100 years, gathered in 2017 and 2020. High education and high income positively predicted the use of the Internet for services, and age, deteriorated health and deteriorated memory negatively. High age, low education and a change to living alone predicted a decrease in use. High education predicted the increased Internet use due to COVID-19. Thus, it seems that those older adults who have low education level are very old, whose health or memory has deteriorated and those who have changed to living alone are particularly in danger of digital exclusion. Actions targeted to these people are needed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

National curriculum reform is a complex negotiation point of how basic education should be practiced and what role it should take in society. The question of participation in this process is central to creating a coherent, responsible, and implementable curriculum—but still left for little investigation in the national level reforms. Our goal was to answer, how can participation in curriculum reform create coherent system-wide change in a complex education system? In this study, we approach the participative national Finnish Core Curriculum Reform 2014, through interviews of the reform steering group who acted as central stakeholders in the reform. We practiced a thinking with theory -oriented analysis and utilized Michel Callon's four moments of translation as a theoretical framework to examine the interviews. Results illustrate how the moment of interessement leads to enrolment—how participation adds complexity to reforms but also offers an opportunity to build more coherent and lasting system-wide change from it during the processes of learning with and from each other. The results also provide us with a practical view on why coherent, lasting change cannot be authoritatively forced in a system, such as the education system, but is by its nature networked, collaborative and shared. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The autonomy created for Åland in 1920 along with the linguistic and cultural guarantees stipulated in the 1921 Åland Agreement established Åland as a monolingual Swedish-speaking province within otherwise bilingual Finland. In particular, the Ålandic municipalities could themselves decide whether Finnish was to be taught in their primary schools. One hundred years later, Åland is still monolingually Swedish-speaking. The Finnish language, however, has been a hotly debated topic on Åland over the years. This article examines the status of the Swedish and Finnish languages that was established by the Autonomy Act and the Åland Agreement and explores the degree to which the Finnish language was present in Ålandic society during the first decades of the autonomy. The arguments and ideas presented in one particular political dispute that took place in 1968 between the speaker of the legislative assembly, Thorvald "Thusse" Eriksson, and the premier of the provincial government, Martin Isaksson, are then analyzed in more detail. The debate was precipitated by, among other things, an upcoming reform of the school system that called attention to the question of whether Finnish were to be taught in Ålandic schools. Eriksson and Isaksson disagreed on what attitude Åland should have toward Finland, Finnish speakers, and the Finnish language and on whether Finnicization was a threat to Åland. Eriksson saw any intrusion of the Finnish language as a threat to Åland's autonomy, while Isaksson believed Ålanders had to know some Finnish to be competitive on the job market. The overall aim of the article is to broaden our understanding of how ideas and perceptions related to language and autonomy have developed over time on Åland and to put them in a broader perspective through the use of the concept of societal cultures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As evidence has become the predominant requirement for decision-making on policy in modern democracies, the importance of experts has increased tremendously. Education reforms are no exception. International organizations have gained power globally in national education policy and politics, particularly through the data they produce and the policy discourses they advocate. However, nationally appointed experts participate in the production of these discourses and advocate for policy ideas in their national context. This article examines the interplay of national and international through a spatiotemporal reading of eleven interviews with experts involved in Finland's and Norway's recent curriculum reforms. In their social encounters, experts exchange knowledge that does not show up in the written recommendations for reform but influences their content and focus. The author identifies three positions of experts as translators of policy knowledge that reflect the complexity of education policymaking processes which are rooted nationally, but increasingly influenced by international power structures and transnational social encounters. The author asserts that international organizations derive power not only from the data they produce but the meeting places they facilitate. Who is invited is partly a matter of geopolitics. However, the most exclusive places might only open for those ´at the forefront´ of education reforms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: The current study investigates school contextual effects on students' academic self-concept and achievement, that is, peer socioeconomic effect and big-fish-little-pond effect (BFLPE), in four Nordic education systems (i.e., Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden) and selected Chinese education systems (Hong Kong and Beijing-Shanghai-Jiangsu-Zhejiang). The two school contextual effects are studied simultaneously to negate the confounding effects of student and school socioeconomic status (SES), academic self-concept and academic achievement. The study focuses on the following research questions: Are there differences in the between-school variation in school SES composition, academic self-concept and reading literacy across the Nordic and selected Chinese education systems? What are the sizes of peer SES and BFLPE in the Nordic and Chinese education systems? Are there any differences that can be observed between the 2000 and 2018 data for the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) in the first two questions for Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden and Hong Kong? Methods: Using PISA 2000 and 2018 data from Denmark, Finland, Norway, Sweden, Hong Kong and Beijing-Shanghai-Jiangsu-Zhejiang (in 2018 only), a multiple-group two-level structural equation modelling was applied to estimate the school contextual effect. Results: The current study indicated that school academic and socioeconomic segregation intensified over the two decades in most of the studied countries. This finding lays the groundwork for understanding the two schools' contextual effects. School SES compositions positively affected students' academic achievement, while average school achievement negatively affected students' academic self-concept. Given that students' academic and socioeconomic composition has become more homogeneous within schools, the contextual effects were more pronounced. However, variations across diverse education systems were also notable. Conclusions: The current study adds evidence of the school contextual effects regarding the peer SES effects and robustness of the BFLPE, considering the nested structure of the data and diverse cultural milieu. We argue that these diversities reflect the varying extent to which educational reforms were introduced in different countries, here as oriented to marketisation, privatisation and choice. These reform actions have changed the composition of students at schools and school culture, which moulds individual students' cognitive and noncognitive development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article begins with a review and analysis of the literature on educational reform in Finland, with particular reference to values education and secular ethics. The analysis of the curriculum began with a review of the literature on secular ethics in Finnish basic education. The next stage was to analyse the curriculum along with the curricular guidelines and support for primary schools in grades 3-6, especially with regard to what is applicable to all schools in Finland; this involved a review of the literature on educational reform in Finland, values in teaching and secular ethics. The article addresses a key issue in curriculum policy: ethics education in grades 3-6. The article explores what is embodied in this policy, especially the objectives of the subject of ethics. The problem method and critical discourse analysis were applied to the study of documents concerning educational reform and the study of discourses in political rhetoric. The problem method is based on an educational phenomenon related to time and society, so it was necessary to contrast the different views presented in contemporary Finnish education and to examine various consistent factors. Education here is thus an interaction between the various sets of teachers' values and the ongoing construction of students' values. This method of primary education encourages appropriate conditions for lifelong learning for each student. Suggested lessons may include discussions with students about values so that students perceive the variance in values and are able to think about them in a constructive and critical manner. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Spanish Journal of Comparative Education / Revista Española de Educación Comparada is the property of Editorial UNED and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This article details the nature of superintendents' agency/influence over school development within their districts under current conditions of educational reform. The research draws upon interview data with five superintendents from a Swedish-speaking minority region in Finland and analyzes their understandings of their work in light of theorizing of agency and social practice and workplace learning. The research reveals superintendents' capacity to 'evidence' their agency, including through detailed accounts of how they have sought to enhance school development. However, we also reveal that such 'evidencing' was often characterized by considerable concern about the morality and ethics of their practice – praxis – within their districts. We refer to such morally informed concerns as an 'ethics of agency'. This work was undertaken via very particular practices, involving specific discussions ('sayings'), actions ('doings'), and interactions ('relatings'). The research reveals that even as superintendents' feel constrained by the conditions within which they work, they do so in ways that give hope for the cultivation of alternative conditions for practice. Further inquiry is needed into the nature of the specific conditions and particular practices essential for fostering enhanced agency, especially an 'ethics of agency,' on the part of superintendents and educational practitioners more broadly. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent decades, an essential global aim of the reforms of special education has been the promotion of inclusive education. This article discusses the implementation of reforms with a focus on tiered support systems in the context of Finnish comprehensive school education. Based on earlier literature, legislation, and administrative documents, we provide a background for Finnish education policy and special education reforms. The focus of this article is on the description of parallel reforms targeting the re-structuring of the systems around support for students and funding of education in the 2010s. We discuss the processes leading to these reforms and the reforms themselves. In addition, we discuss their implications for the organization of the tiered support system. Finally, we highlight some challenges of reform implementation and the current education policy's movements towards inclusive education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]