0000000000477904
AUTHOR
Kari Uusikylä
Neoliberalism, curriculum development and manifestations of ‘creativity’
There is a manifest tendency for national education policy to follow global economic trends. In many western industrialized countries this relationship has intensified or strengthened within the last decades. The strengthening of this relationship has been seen, among other things, as evidence of the growing power of neoliberal ideology. The background reference for this article is the emergence of a neoliberal education policy ideology in the two creativity related strategies implemented by the Finnish government during the first decade of the 21st century. The main focus of the study was the concept of creativity, for it has appeared to be the prevailing trend within the Finnish basic edu…
The Question of Creativity in the Finnish Elementary School Curriculum
This article is intended to examine the role of creative education in the design of the national curriculum and the division of lesson hours during the period 2010-2014. During this process, pupils, private citizens and experts from different fields were given the opportunity to submit their contributions to the exercise. The article intends to examine whether the curriculum development exercise fulfilled the conditions for a wide democratic consultation process. Three professional groups, elementary school teachers, artists (writers, visual arts teachers, musicians) and academic engineers (n= 1163) were the main focus of this research project. Creativity related claims, which were posted o…