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Finland is famous for high scores in PISA league tables as well as for high scores in gender equality indexes. Sometimes these two championships seem to be competing. Since the first PISA tests, an old concern for boys’ underachievement has received new emphasis and the gender gap in results has detracted from national pride in the excellent overall results, as well as hiding a growing social and ethnic gap. In the 1980s concern about underachieving boys in Finland was matched by efforts towards gender equality in education following global declarations and resolutions of gender equality after the United Nations’ Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women in 1979. Supported by the first equality projects, gender research in Finnish education took the first steps in the late 1980s. Since that time, gender researchers in education have collaborated in carrying out gender equality administration and projects. A constant task has been to challenge the simple juxtaposition of girls and boys that is sometimes evident in the concerns about boys’ achievements. In this chapter, I describe and analyse the interlinked histories of gender equality work, feminist studies in education, and the boy discourse, with reflections on changes and sustainability in Finnish education policies. The bodies of data include documents associated with gender equality projects, national PISA reports, reviews of research articles and PhD studies that draw on feminist research in education. I also use my own experience as an actor in the field since the early 1980s.

The focus of this article is on the history and current trends of feminist ethnography in Finland. It highlights the impact of feminist ethnography in Finnish educational research and illustrates how feminist ethnography has succeeded in asking novel questions and developing methodologies by drawing on multiple feminist theories. The article is based on a review of studies, selected to represent the multiplicity of themes, theoretical approaches and methodological epiphanies, as well as earlier analyses and memories of researchers who launched feminist educational ethnography in Finland. Drawing predominantly from the British feminist educational ethnography, in Finland feminist ethnography in education took its first steps in the 1990s and achieved a stable position in the early 2000s. Feminist ethnography has contributed to a debate on social justice by highlighting the hidden modes of discrimination and exclusion in educational institutions, thus ‘troubling’ the national self-image as a forerunner of equality and social justice.

Feminist ethnography in education has in so-called Western countries developed in the late 1900s into a research approach with its own identifiable characteristics. Starting points are in feminist theorizations that draw from perspectives of different marginal groups, raised in the context of cultural radicalization of the 1960s and 1970s. In Finland, feminist ethnography took the first steps in the 1990s and achieved a stable position in educational research in the early 2000s. This emerging research has provided possibilities for subtle analysis in educational institutions on gendered, spatial and embodied practices, which have impact on intersectional inequalities. A theoretical and methodological invention developed by the first Finnish feminist ethnographers in the 1990s is differentiation between the official, informal, and physical layers of the school. Teaching and learning, the curriculum, pedagogy, and formal hierarchies belong to the official layer. Interaction among teachers and students, including informal hierarchies and youth cultures, takes place in the informal layer. The physical school refers to temporality, spatiality, and embodiment. These layers are intertwined in the everyday life of the school; the distinctions between them are analytical. This differentiation is one illustration of nuanced ways to conduct analysis of gendered, classed, and racialized processes and practices in schools. This analytical tool was elaborated in the large ethnographic project, Citizenship, Difference and Marginality in Schools—With Special Reference to Gender (1993–1998). The project was conducted in schools in Finland, collaborating with a similar project in the United Kingdom. The collective project was conceptualized in comparative reflections on contemporary educational politics and policies in both countries and included cross-cultural ethnographic analysis. The layers were used as tools in constructing the theoretical-methodological layout of the project and in focusing the ethnographic gaze in the field, as well as in analysis, interpretation, and writing. Using the layers of the school as an analytic tool passed on to later studies and have further been developed in novel ways, demonstrating the usefulness of collaborative feminist work in national and international networks.