The ‘spirit of the times’: Fast policy for educational reform in Finland

This article examines the nature of neoliberal influences upon educational policy making in the Finnish education system in recent times. The article draws upon key policy documents, government reports, journal articles and media articles about reforms in the early childhood, basic/compulsory school and vocational education and training sectors to evidence these processes. Analytically, these reforms are understood as instances of what has been referred to as ‘fast policy’. Methodologically, we draw upon principles of zeitgeist analysis to reveal the features and effects of these fast policy influences as they relate to educational provision in Finland. These features and effects include i…

Learning to survive amidst nested crises: can the coronavirus pandemic help us change educational practices to prepare for the impending eco-crisis?

The ongoing ecological crisis and the more recent Coronavirus crisis challenge the grand narrative of Enlightenment that human beings are ‘masters of nature’. For millennia, human social learning has allowed Homo sapiens to outpace most of our competitor creatures and live a comfortable life, but this competitive success has resulted in cataclysmic failure for the ecosystem. However, people’s unique ability to learn gives us hope that we can overcome the nested crises, or learn to live with them. What is required is not more knowledge, but instead, collective learning to change practices, institutionalized in educational processes. Drawing on the theory of practice architectures, this paper…

Koulutuksen tutkimuksen arkkitehtuurit

Philosophical and Youth-Studies Perspectives on the Participation Imperative

In this article we analyse the concept of participation. The analysis is informed by both quantitative and qualitative youth studies conducted in Finland. To analyse different aspects of participation special emphasis is placed on the migrant young seeking asylum. Young can be seen as sometimes engaged and disengaged from the existing forms of participating. The results of the youth studies also show that there seems to be a gap between representative democracy and the peer-group-based forms of participation of the young. To analyse in detail how this gap can be understood, the theory of recognition developed by Axel Honneth is used to pinpoint different arenas of participation. Honneth’s l…

Miten muuttaa käytäntöjä ihmisen ja luonnon kannalta kestäviksi? : ekososiaalinen sivistys käytäntöarkkitehtuuriteorian valossa

Aikamme suurin haaste ei ole luotettavan tiedon puuttuminen vaan toimintatapojemme muuttaminen. Kasvatus ja koulutus ovat ratkaisevia, jotta käytäntöjämme voisi muuttaa sosiaalisesti ja ekologisesti kestävämmiksi maapallon ekosysteemien ollessa kriisissä. Tässä artikkelissa hahmotellaan käytäntöteoreettista näkökulmaa kestävän elämänmuodon edistämiseksi kasvatuksen ja sivistyksen avulla. Ratkaisuksi ongelmaan on ehdotettu ekososiaalisen sivistyksen lisäämistä. Perinteinen tulkinta sivistyksestä on kuitenkin ongelmallinen sen ollessa kognitiivisesti painottunutta, abstraktia ja ihmiskeskeistä. Ehdotamme sivistyksen tulkintaa, joka painottaa käytäntöjen ontologista ensisijaisuutta. Huomio koh…

Designing education democratically through deliberative crowdsourcing : the case of the Finnish curriculum for basic education

In Finland, curriculum design is allegedly carried out through a deliberative process that involves various stakeholders, interest groups, experts and ordinary citizens. To facilitate participation in curriculum design, online crowdsourcing has been applied. The objective of this study is to explore to what extent the design process of the latest Finnish national curriculum for mathematics was open, democratic and deliberative. The theoretical framework of the study is the theory of democratic will-formation of the German philosopher Jürgen Habermas. The comments given on the early version of the core curriculum of mathematics were analysed using directed content analysis, in which the abov…