A Dialogical Exploration of Student Teacher Reflections: From Notions of Insideness and Outsideness to Pedagogical Alongsideness

This article offers a dialogical exploration of student teachers’ reflections on notions of insideness and outsideness, the focal themes of an Erasmus+ ten-day intensive programme (IP). The arts-based, interdisciplinary IP involved 32 student participants and twelve members of staff from eight European universities hosted by the University of Jyväskylä, Finland. The data for this paper are based on the final written essays of student participants as they reflected on their understanding of outsideness and insideness at the end of the IP. The dialogic approach used in the analysis allows for a careful exploration of how the students attended to different experiences, surmised the meaning of …

Who and how? : Preservice teachers as active agents developing professional identities

Abstract This study is part of an ongoing action research project with preservice class teachers in Finland. The study aims to better understand the forms agency takes in preservice teachers' professional identity development. Through the dialogical analysis of student assignments, this study outlines how student teachers are active within their own development and the way in which experiences are drawn on as preservice teachers exert their identity-agency. The results of this study provide a relational picture of identity development highlighting the way in which identity-agency is contextualized, potentially nourished by the relationships between self and other and dependent on experience.

Global connectedness in higher education : student voices on the value of cross-cultural learning dialogue

The study explores how sense of global connectedness can be enhanced by creating opportunities for cross-cultural dialogue in higher education. Thematic analysis of randomly selected 15 learning journals, students’ reflections on their learning during an international seminar was used to identify students’ significant learning experiences. The results emphasise the added value of diversity (geographical, disciplinary, cultural and social) among students, faculty and invited presenters for creating meaningful learning. Furthermore, they suggest that designing an integrated approach of contents, contexts and activities for critical engagement in global dialogue and knowledge generation in hig…

Visualizing communication structures in science classrooms: Tracing cumulativity in teacher-led whole class discussions

Teacher-led whole class discussions are essential when it comes to guiding students' construction of knowledge, and recent studies on teaching and learning emphasize the need for more student-centered teaching methods. In previous studies, the extent to which different types of communication take place in the classroom have been extensively reported by means of lists, tables, and charts, yet these studies have not included overviews of how talk develops and progresses over time. This study addresses this aspect by presenting how different communicative approaches constitute a specific, cumulative communication structure. Within this structure, the role and temporal considerations of a dialo…

Dialogic struggles and pedagogic innovation

The aim of this research was to explore the way in which talk is used in teacher focus group discussions. The data from these discussions belong to a wider study on the challenges teachers face when introducing foreign-language mediated education. The research presented here provides a careful analysis of the talk between teachers drawing on Bakhtin’s dialogic theory. This theoretical framework allows for the critical consideration of the relationship between the teachers and the cultural context of institutionalised education. The main outcome from this research is the notion of ‘dialogic struggle’ as an important characteristic of and window into thought-in-progress. As a key feature of t…

Student participation in peer interaction

This study explores how students deal with material resources in their peer interaction when working in pairs in an open-ended problem-solving task. The productive use of material resources can be expected to support successful peer work. However, research into social phenomena in peer interaction is needed in order to identify and describe productive and less productive forms of dealing with material resources as students participate in open-ended problem-solving tasks. Consequently, this explorative study responds to this research need. Based on multimodal data, including video recordings, transcribed talk and the written contributions from four pairs of Year 7 students aged 12-13 years, …

Modes of Study Handbook for Students and Educators

The aim of this handbook is to support the further development of multilingual and multimodal approaches to academic study at JYU. This handbook has been developed within the Faculty of Education and Psychology as part of the Creating Space pedagogical development project during the 2019-2020 academic year, drawing on and developing existing study guides by JYU . We hope, however, that this handbook is useful beyond our Faculty and that it adds language and cultural considerations to the existing study guides. We have provided brief explanations of different types of assignments and academic activities that are part of academic study and relevant to teaching in higher education. We have als…

Varhemmin helposti : luokanopettajien käytännön ideoita kieltenopetuksen varhentamiseen

Tässä artikkelissa käsitellään luokanopettajien luovia ratkaisuja englannin kielen varhentamisessa alakoulun ensimmäisellä ja toisella luokalla. Luokanopettajilta kerättiin raportteja kevään 2018 aikana heidän hyväksi toteamistaan aktiviteeteista, joiden avulla he ovat varhentaneet vieraan kielen opetusta omassa työssään. Esimerkit ovat englannin kielen opetuksesta, mutta niitä voidaan käyttää myös muiden vieraiden kielten opetuksessa. Artikkelissa kerrotaan myös luokanopettajien omista tuntemuksista ja kokemuksista kieltenopetuksen varhentamisesta. Opettajien mukaan tunneilla on muun muassa pelattu, leikitty, kerrottu tarinoita, askarreltu ja kirjoitettu lyhyitä tekstejä ja esitelmiä. Vähä…

A phenomenological research of democracy education in a Finnish primary-school

This phenomenological research examines democracy education and the conditions contributing to young students’ democratic agency. The dataset includes interview and observation data from a school and educational decision-makers. The findings from the iterative analysis highlight the contradictions between democracy education as an ideal and opportunities for democratic agency. One significant contradiction was the expectation that young pupils should be competent democratic agents before being offered opportunities to act democratically. Young students deemed to possess the greatest competencies were offered opportunities to learn about democracy in action, whereas most students were expect…

Modes of Study Handbook for Students and Educators

The aim of this handbook is to support the further development of multilingual and multimodal approaches to academic study at JYU. This handbook has been developed within the Faculty of Education and Psychology as part of the Creating Space pedagogical development project during the 2019-2020 academic year, drawing on and developing existing study guides by JYU . We hope, however, that this handbook is useful beyond our Faculty and that it adds language and cultural considerations to the existing study guides. We have provided brief explanations of different types of assignments and academic activities that are part of academic study and relevant to teaching in higher education. We have als…

Proactive and reactive dimensions of life-course agency: mapping student teachers’ language learning experiences

Although the concept of agency has received a lot of interest in recent educational research, its significance in language learning biographies as well as contextual and relational aspects of learner agency are still little studied. This paper aims at a more thorough understanding of agency by studying student teachers’ previous language learning experiences. This paper is based on a dialogical analysis of 12 student teachers’ biographical essays describing their relationship with English as a foreign language. The participants are students in a Finnish class teacher and language teacher education programme that uses English as the primary medium of instruction. The study proposes a tripart…

Qui suis-je

The scarcity of research on French immersion teachers’ professional identity contrasts with the increasing popularity of French immersion programs in Canada and the concomitant need for French immersion teachers. This study explores the professional identity negotiation of four French immersion teachers in Alberta, Canada, with a focus on discontinuity. Semi-structured interviews conducted face-to-face with the participants were analysed using dialogic narrative analysis. The findings highlight how discontinuity is occasioned by a change in knowledge about the French immersion teaching as a profession, encountering classroom realities, shifting one’s values concerning second language learni…

Seeking understanding of the textbook-based character of Finnish education

This article provides a critical exploration of the textbook-based character of Finnish educational culture. The opening section points to the need to recognize and better understand the role of textbooks in Finnish education. The next section outlines how and why textbooks have become a characterizing feature of Finnish educational culture before addressing different ways in which pupils and student-teachers are socialized into textbook-based practices of schooling. The later sections critically consider the importance of textbooks as part of Finnish education, as well as the implications for educational research, the ongoing development of Finnish education and in particular teacher educa…

Exploring the conditions of English language education through the experience of Eritrean Sophomore English language learners and teachers

This study addresses the little studied context of English language education in Eritrea. Despite the teaching of English as a subject and the forward-looking mother tongue policy implemented in Eritrean elementary education, Eritrean students struggle to cope with English as the medium of instruction from the start of junior school to the end of tertiary education. This qualitative study analyses sixteen sophomore student interviews and six teacher interviews to critically explore the conditions of English language education in Eritrea. Using an ecological perspective, the findings from this study highlight how the affective, didactic, study and linguistic conditions interrelate with one a…

Developing an integrated Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) pathway in Central Finland

This article outlines the CLIL educational pathway that has been developed by a teacher community in Jyväskylä in recent years. This pathway was initially developed in 2009 yet it continues to evolve in the light of curricula and demographic changes. This paper is hopefully useful to CLIL educators seeking to build continuity across different levels of education and to be sensitive to societal developments. nonPeerReviewed

Identity, agency and community: reconsidering the pedagogic responsibilities of teacher education

This article presents a model for teacher education based on an ongoing action research project at a Finnish university. This model draws on the educational theory of Dewey and the pedagogical sensibility of Bakhtin to critically consider the concepts of teacher identity and agency and to highlight the role of community in teacher development. Our aim is to propose a model that supports the development of new directions in teacher education that would better prepare teachers to face the challenges in their future work by engaging with the educational community in the present. peerReviewed

What is the value of plurilingualism?

This article seeks to answer the question, 'What is the value of plurilingualism'? by first of all exploring some different terms from Finnish and English that suggest different ways of understanding the world. The article then goes on to outline the importance of mother tongues as a way of rooting a child into a culture, whilst plurilingualism provides the child with different ways of understanding the world. The second half of the article uses a story to explore the challenges of sharing different understandings with others and outlines how these ideas can be introduced to children. nonPeerReviewed

Inquiry-Based Approaches in Primary Science Teacher Education

This chapter introduces an interactional graphic tool together with a model for inquiry-based science teaching (abbreviated as IBST). The combination of the graphic tool and model offers an approach to support the planning, implementation, reflection and analysis of dialogic IBST. The potential use is illustrated here using a case study in which student teachers used IBST to develop their teaching. The interactional graphic and the model are fundamentally related to three established approaches to science teaching: inquiry-based science teaching, dialogic teaching and the communicative approach. Together, these approaches draw attention to learner participation in inquiry-based science teac…

Voicing the challenges faced by an innovative teacher community

This research draws on sociocultural theories of learning and activity theory to explore the challenges faced by an innovative community of teachers in Central Finland. The aim of the teacher community was to develop a stream of foreign‐language (FL)‐mediated teaching and learning in the locality from kindergarten to upper secondary level. To achieve this goal, the teachers needed to form coherent groups within the member schools, as well as between the schools. The aim of this research is to give voice to the challenges identified by the teachers and in so doing give voice to the teacher community itself. Recognising the voice of this community also contributes to a broader conceptualisati…

Children’s strategic participation in a bilingual Early Childhood Education and Care Centre

This article considers children’s language learning experiences at an early childhood education and care centre (ECEC) in Central Finland. The article draws on data gathered as part of a Master’s thesis study (Holmila, 2019) which looked at the perspectives of staff, parents and children regarding the use of English as part of the Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) methodology at the ECEC, with a view to future developments of CLIL provision. This article considers what can be learned from the children’s perspectives. Following a brief overview of the advantages of bilingual educational programmes and the educational context for this study, the main section of this article focu…

Reconceptualising teacherhood through the lens of foreign-language mediation

Student participation in peer interaction : use of material resources as a key consideration in an open-ended problem-solving mathematics task

This study explores how students deal with material resources in their peer interaction when working in pairs in an open-ended problem-solving task. The productive use of material resources can be expected to support successful peer work. However, research into social phenomena in peer interaction is needed in order to identify and describe productive and less productive forms of dealing with material resources as students participate in open-ended problem-solving tasks. Consequently, this explorative study responds to this research need. Based on multimodal data, including video recordings, transcribed talk and the written contributions from four pairs of Year 7 students aged 12-13 years, …

Educational research for democracy

The moral journey of learning a pedagogy: a qualitative exploration of student–teachers’ formal and informal writing of dialogic pedagogy

Students of education encounter a range of pedagogies yet how future teachers’ appropriate moral principles are little understood. We conducted an investigation into this process with 10 international students of education attending an intensive course on ‘dialogic pedagogy’ in a university in Finland. The data comprising student learning journals and essays were coded for the level of questioning, acceptance and irreverence. In the findings, reverential acceptance was more frequent than questioning and irreverence; however, our qualitative analysis also found a large number of micro-transitions between questioning, acceptance and irreverence suggesting a dynamic interplay. Recognising this…

Repositioning teachers as assessors : Compromised aspirations and contested agency

The global trend to emphasise assessment for learning brings up the issue of repositioning teachers in assessment. The contemporary curricular policy reforms encourage teachers to take an agentic role in assessment, but multiple dimensions of the environment affect its realisation. Drawing on an ecological approach to teacher agency, this empirical study investigated how Korean secondary English teachers (KSETs) perceive and enact their own teacher agency in assessment within the ecosystem of Korean education. The dataset for the study comprises semi-structured interviews with 15 KSETs. The interview questions involved the main themes such as personal experiences over the life course regard…

Teacher development through language-related innovation in a decentralised educational system

This study explores how early childhood education and basic education teachers develop and develop innovations within the decentralised educational system of Finland. The comprehensive dataset of 20 field interviews provides a range of insights into teachers’ goals, principles, inspirations and experiences when working with a variety of language-based innovations across Finland. The ecological perspective employed in the study highlights the complex relationships between the different ecosystems of education. With the particular focus on the educator-exosystem relationship, the findings indicate how Finnish teachers respond to the expectation to continuously develop and innovate as key chan…

Looking for Intercultural Competences in language teacher education in Australia and Finland

Teacher education is crucial to supporting equitable educational outcomes and social justice in schools. In a global context of increasingly mobile and diversified school populations, pre-service teachers, and their students, need new capacities and strategies to counter racism and ethnocentric attitudes which appear to emerge in classrooms in many national contexts (Welch, 2016; Dervin, 2016). Intercultural competence has been discussed in many iterations in teacher education internationally for a number of decades. There have been many individual initiatives to devise programs in teacher education to impact pre-service teacher competences (for example, Dervin & Dirba, 2006; Jokikokko, 200…

JULIET 2022 : Continuing to prepare class teachers as language educators

In 1995 JULIET programme was established in the Department of Teacher Education at the University of Jyväskylä and 27 years on, JULIET continues to prepare class teachers specialised in foreign language pedagogy. Each year a ‘home group’ of students join the 35ECTS programme that continues across the four-five years of class teacher education. Over the years, however, significant developments have taken place in the Finnish National Curriculum for Basic Education, in the diversity of students and school communities, and in the JULIET programme itself. This article outlines how JULIET has developed and continues to prepare class teachers specialised in foreign language education today. nonPe…

Exploring dialogical spaces of discovery

This paper revisits two teacher-education contexts which we independently researched. Both contexts invested in teacher-professional transformation, presenting unique puzzles in our respective data analyses. Bringing together Bakhtinian dialogic theory and Natural Inclusionality (Rayner, 2017), we return to these puzzles in a reflective dialogue. The paper unpacks two emergent themes. The first theme details our sense-making of the dialogic-dialectic-dialogic flow as part of professional development, and the second theme captures our deliberations about the energy-filled spaces of the in-between that form part of teacher development in our contexts. The paper discusses key insights about th…

Identity and Agency Development in a CLIL-based Teacher Education Program

A consensus exists in applied linguistics that agency and identity are key concepts in understanding teacher development. Although a large body of research has focused on studying language teacher and learner identity and agency separately, less attention has been paid to the relationship of these concepts in individual development. In this contribution, we use an ecological perspective to explore and illustrate the interplay between and development of agency and identity. The participants in the study were primary school teacher students specializing in foreign language pedagogy for younger learners and studying in a CLIL-based teacher education program. The qualitative data were collected…

Exploring agency and entrainment in joint music-making through the reported experiences of students and teachers

This qualitative interview-based study draws on the reported experiences of students and teachers to explore how agency and entrainment resource and constrain each other in joint music-making. The participants were 23 students of Grades 6 and 11 music teachers from different primary schools. The qualitative content analysis of the 11 student pair interviews and 11 one-to-one teacher interviews indicated that experiences of music-related interpersonal entrainment intertwine with different dimensions of agency. In the analysis, four themes were identified as follows: presence, belonging, safety, and continuity. These findings provide insights into the relationship between agency and entrainme…

Exploring global responsibility in higher education students’ cross-cultural dialogues

This study engages with current debate around global education and internationalization of higher education(HE). There is an identified need to critically reflect on how global education commitments are introduced to HE students, and how the debates are brought to individual as well as institutional levels. The study explores how students in a Finnish university develop their understanding of global education, citizenship and potential dispositions towards global responsibility. The students participated in an international seminar on the global Education for All (EFA) process, with purposefully planned participatory activities and cross-cultural dialogues, and reflected on their learning a…

Investigating the professional agency of secondary school English teachers in South Korea

This qualitative study examines the professional agency of secondary English teachers in Midwestern South Korea. Specifically, it investigates how secondary English teachers in South Korea understand their professional agency and what mediates their professional agency. The ecological approach in this study recognises that agency encompasses both individual and environmental dimensions and is formed through the constant interplay between the individual and the environment. The dataset for this study comprises 15 semi-structured interviews with secondary English teachers in South Korea. The thematic analysis highlights a significant gap between Korean English teachers’ espoused agency and re…

Teacher Educators’ Professional Identity in English-Medium Instruction at a Finnish University

Publisher Copyright: © 2021, University of Ljubljana. All rights reserved. Although different forms of English-medium instruction (EMI) are being recognised, the different ways in which EMI can impact the pedagogical activities and expertise of higher education educators have received less attention. Using face-to-face and written interviews with nine teacher educators at a Finnish university, this study examines the most important aspects teacher educators perceive in their work through EMI and how these aspects connect to the understanding of their professional identity. The study is theoretically premised on the interconnected concepts of pedagogical doing, pedagogical being, pedagogical…

Opiskelijan ja opettajan opas monipuoliseen yliopisto-opiskeluun

Oppaan tarkoituksena on tukea monikielisen ja multimodaalisen (monikanavaisen/monimediaisen) opiskelun kehittämistä Jyväskylän yliopistossa. Se on laadittu JY:n kasvatustieteiden ja psykologian tiedekunnassa osana Kieli- ja kulttuuritietoisen oppimisen tilat -hanketta lukuvuoden 2019–2020 aikana, ja siinä on hyödynnetty ja kehitetty edelleen JY:n muita opinto-oppaita . Opas on yleishyödyllinen, koska se lisää kieli- ja kulttuurinäkökulmia aiemmin laadittuihin opinto-oppaisiin. Mukana on kuvauksia erityyppisistä tehtävistä ja aktiviteeteista, jotka kuuluvat korkeakouluopiskeluun ja -opetukseen. Lisäksi opas sisältää hyödyllisiä vinkkejä opiskelijoille ja opettajille, ehdotuksia eri kielten k…

The emotional journey of being and becoming bilingual

This article examines the foreign language learning biographies of six Finnish English speakers who reflect on their journey towards a bilingual identity. In this article language learning is examined as a process that is intrinsically emotional as emotion connects individuals with the world as well as being a movement within oneself. The data analysis is based on dialogical and narrative approaches. Through the analysis two key story types were named: Bilingualism as striving and Bilingualism as a gift. In the striving stories English was held up as an ideal, as a way of engaging with the wider world but moreover as a way of finding a better ‘me’. In the gift stories, English was experienc…

Students’ experiences of their agency in whole-class playing

The agency of primary school students has been studied increasingly in recent years; yet, we know relatively little about student agency in music educational settings or how students experience their participation in joint musical action. This study explores sixth-grade students’ experiences of their agency in whole-class playing. Qualitative content analysis of 11 pair interviews identified vulnerability as an essential element of participating in whole-class playing, highlighting the intrinsically emotional nature of the process, the immediacy of the musically shared moment and the safe place of entrainment. This study elucidates the enactment of agency and the resources facilitating and …

Qui suis-je : Discontinuity as part of teacher identity in Canadian French immersion

The scarcity of research on French immersion teachers’ professional identity contrasts with the increasing popularity of French immersion programs in Canada and the concomitant need for French immersion teachers. This study explores the professional identity negotiation of four French immersion teachers in Alberta, Canada, with a focus on discontinuity. Semi-structured interviews conducted face-to-face with the participants were analysed using dialogic narrative analysis. The findings highlight how discontinuity is occasioned by a change in knowledge about the French immersion teaching as a profession, encountering classroom realities, shifting one’s values concerning second language learni…

Being a good neighbour: developing intercultural understanding through critical dialogue between an Australian and Finnish cross-case study

Language educators in Australia and Finland are expected to foster intercultural understanding within foreign language education. This paper presents findings from a qualitative case study focusing on theoretical and practical intercultural understanding in secondary school language education. The data for this study includes lesson observations as well as student and teachers interviews collected in two secondary schools in Australia and Finland. The findings demonstrate the complex resources teachers and students draw on to develop and share intercultural understanding. The discussion addresses the value of different perspectives and the need for a new metaphor to conceptualise intercultu…

Teacher beliefs about student agency in whole-class playing

This study explores music teachers’ beliefs of student agency in whole-class playing and investigates what characterises student agency through teachers’ values, actions and observations within this unique multimodal and -dimensional learning environment. Our abductive analysis of 11 interviews reveals that the role of teacher support is significant in enacting students’ agency. This study provides insights into student agency through the eyes and actions of teachers within the context of whole-class playing and suggests that the enactment of different aspects of student agency is an essential feature necessary for whole-class playing to succeed. peerReviewed

Exploring the material mediation of dialogic space : A qualitative analysis of professional learning in initial teacher education based on reflective sketchbooks

This study addresses the crucial relationship between theory and practice as a key feature of professional learning in initial teacher education. The context for the study is an EU-funded intensive programme drawing on different dimensions of insideness and outsideness and artsbased pedagogies in response to the diversity of education today. The data for the study comes from self-selected pages from preservice teacher participants’ reflective sketchbooks. As a methodological approach that unifies the sensuous and cognitive this study suggests that reflective sketchbooks document the dialogic encounters of students whilst also providing a material space that can itself become a form of dialo…

Opiskelijan ja opettajan opas monipuoliseen yliopisto-opiskeluun

Oppaan tarkoituksena on tukea monikielisen ja multimodaalisen (monikanavaisen/monimediaisen) opiskelun kehittämistä Jyväskylän yliopistossa. Se on laadittu JY:n kasvatustieteiden ja psykologian tiedekunnassa osana Kieli- ja kulttuuritietoisen oppimisen tilat -hanketta lukuvuoden 2019–2020 aikana, ja siinä on hyödynnetty ja kehitetty edelleen JY:n muita opinto-oppaita . Opas on yleishyödyllinen, koska se lisää kieli- ja kulttuurinäkökulmia aiemmin laadittuihin opinto-oppaisiin. Mukana on kuvauksia erityyppisistä tehtävistä ja aktiviteeteista, jotka kuuluvat korkeakouluopiskeluun ja -opetukseen. Lisäksi opas sisältää hyödyllisiä vinkkejä opiskelijoille ja opettajille, ehdotuksia eri kielten k…

The impact of foreign language mediated teaching on teachers’ sense of professional integrity in the CLIL classroom

Content and language integrated learning (CLIL) has received significant interest in recent years as a practical means of creating a plurilingual European community. A key feature of CLIL is the non-native speaking teacher responsible for developing learners’ content and language knowledge in a foreign language mediated environment. Teachers often enter the CLIL classroom with established expertise in either content or language learning; however, the impact of entering the foreign language mediated environment is little explored in existing literature. This investigative research is based on six teacher interviews intended to access the teachers’ own understanding of how foreign language me…

Teacher agency within the Finnish CLIL context : tensions and resources

Recent discussion indicates that the initial enthusiasm of Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) teachers can be undermined by the demands of foreign-language mediated education. However, there is a lack of research on the resources and tensions that respectively support or limit the professional agency of CLIL teachers. By means of semi-structured interviews with fourteen participants, this study seeks to better understand how teacher agency is experienced by CLIL teachers working in Finnish primary schools. To examine tensions and resources in CLIL teachers’ work lives, a holistic and dynamic theoretical conceptualization of teacher agency is suggested, paying particular attenti…

How Do Higher Education Students Negotiate Global Responsibility in Education?

Learning research in a laboratory classroom : a reflection on complementarity and commensurability among multiple analytical accounts

With the myriad theories generated through research over the years, a continuing challenge for researchers is to navigate the multitude of theories in order to communicate their research, integrate empirical results, and make progress as a field by building upon empirical research. The Social Unit of Learning project was purposefully designed so that researchers from multiple disciplines with different theoretical perspectives could work together to examine the complexity of the mathematics classroom. In this paper, we reflect on the multiple analytical accounts generated from the project, drawing from the notions of complementarity and commensurability. Two parallel analyses, applying the …

Seeking Understanding of Foreign Language Teachers’ Shifting Emotions in Relation to Pupils

Teaching is recognised as an emotional practice. Studies have highlighted the importance of teachers’ emotional literacy in the development of pupils’ emotional skills, the central position of emotions in teachers’ ways of knowing, and in their professional development. This longitudinal study draws on a dialogic understanding of emotion to present findings from qualitative interviews with teachers. This study aims to provide further understanding in this area by offering a perspective into 7 foreign language teachers’ emotions in relation to their pupils during their first decade in the profession. The most important finding was that negative emotions decreased while the positive emotions …

Yhteistyöllä kohti tulevaisuuden kielikasvatusta

Mitä uutta voisin kokeilla omassa opetuksessani? Mitä toimivaa omassa opetuksessani on ja mikä kenties kaipaa kehittämistä? Tällaiset pohdinnat luovat pohjan innovatiivisuudelle ja luovuudelle opetuksessa. Monet opettajat ja varhaiskasvattajat testaavat ideoita ja soveltavat niitä jokapäiväisessä työssään: innovatiivisuus rakentuukin usein pienille arjen valinnoille. nonPeerReviewed

CLIL teachers in Finland : The role of emotions in professional identity negotiation

Research on emotions has yielded many theoretical perspectives and many concepts. Yet, most scholars have focused on how emotions influence the transformation and maintenance of teacher identities in the field of teacher education and novice teachers, with little research being conducted on either experienced or foreign language teachers. This study explores emotions in Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) teachers’ work and their role in identity negotiation. The data is based on interviews with thirteen CLIL teachers working at six different primary schools around Finland, while the analysis draws on Meijers’ (2002) model of identity as a learning process. According to this mod…

Kieli-, kulttuuri- ja katsomustietoisuus koulutuksen ja kasvatuksen kentällä

Language considerations for every teacher

The national core curriculum for basic education in Finland emphasizes language aware education (kielitietoisuus) with each adult a language model and language teacher (FNBE, 2014: 28). This approach recognises pupil diversity and the need to address language as a key tool in teaching and learning as well as for societal integration. In language aware education, the responsibility for pupils’ language development is shared across the school community. Discussions around this issue recognise the need to support heritage languages as well as the value of plurilingualism. These are important discussions, but can overlook the ways in which language is already present and used within education. …

A narrative account of a teacher community

This narrative account draws on dialogic approaches to education to critically reflect on teachers’ expressed pedagogic thinking in community. The context for the study is a teacher community in Central Finland comprising teachers from pre-primary to upper secondary contexts. The shared interest of the community is in the foreign-language mediation of education. The data were collected over a period of one and a half years and primarily consisted of teacher-produced notes from community sessions. These data were thematically analysed using a theory-driven approach. The key findings underline the value of pedagogic relationships between teacher-colleagues to support enriched critical underst…

Mapping a language aware educational landscape

This article is based on a poster presented at the 2017 FERA conference at the University of Lapland, Rovaniemi (Figure 1). The poster aims to provide a visual aid to enhance discussions with in- and pre-service teachers as well as educational researchers around the role of language in education. The perspectives presented here are intended to provide different ‘entry points’ into language awareness and highlight different considerations. This contribution begins by outlining why language awareness is needed before introducing the six entry points we use to map a language aware educational landscape. Hopefully the discussion will continue in different forums and the model will also be devel…

Teachers’ pedagogical and relational identity negotiation in the Finnish CLIL context

Abstract This study explores the professional identity of Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) teachers in Finnish primary education. It aims at explaining how CLIL teachers negotiate their pedagogical and relational identity, and how identity agency is exercised in negotiating a more encompassing professional identity. Thematic analysis of thirteen interviews outlines the bi-directional process of identity negotiation between personal and professional resources, and social contexts at work. The results highlight a connection between professional identity and agency, and suggest that identity negotiation is a process of working and sharing with others, but also individually.

Examining how global citizenship education is prefigured in the Scottish Curriculum for Excellence

This study uses the Aristotelian notion of phronesis as a critical lens for examining how global citizenship education is prefigured in the Scottish Curriculum for Excellence. Based on a content analysis of key curriculum documentation, the findings outline the way in which techne and episteme with their associated ways of knowing and acting dominate the curriculum. Nevertheless, the hints of phronesis indicate the potential for developing a more critical form of global citizenship education that prefigures praxis that wisely pursues that which is good for humankind and individual flourishing. This article contributes to the notion of ‘planetary phronesis’ as a critical concept for the furt…