Lecture 3 Teachers, teaching and educational communities


TTEE teaches what they research and they research what they teach, whether that be teacher education, adult education. This group of individuals left quite a positive impression on me. Their research in particular I found to be very intriguing because they do not draw hard lines in regards to what is fair game for research. The educational process itself is also an institution that doesn’t get talked about enough. I was overjoyed to hear them talking about re-theorizing education  and developing new methods to advance empirical knowledge. More importantly however was learning that this department collaborates with everyone! At risk of sounding callous, the educational studies field can be connected to anything and educational studies for the sake of educational studies limits the benefit that the work and research being done in our field can have on the broader population.

I found the article on Young Children’s Belonging in Finnish Education settings to have really piqued my interest, especially coming from the context of the United States which has a much more diverse demographic relative to Finland (Puroila et al., 2021). The manner in which the article seeks to examine who is designing educational curricula and conversely: for whom are these national curricula designed is something that has a lot of relevance when compared with educational curricula in the United States. As I previously stated, Finland is a relatively homogenous country than the United States is.  However, this homogeneity is slowly being chipped away. I think that in 20 to 40 years time there will be many difficult decisions being made in regards to the teaching of world history. Not necessarily Finnish history, rather the teaching of (colonial) Europe’s role in world history. There will likely be resistance to Eurocentric studies especially in relation to socio-religious belief systems. Whether or not non-Finnish citizens of Finland, specifically non-white one will be accepted and beloved, or tolerated and othered. As the study indicates, tensions in ways of being do not directly translate to (un)belonging and similarities do not directly translate to belonging (Puroila et al., 2021). It will be the job of the national government to profit off of the cultural “richness of diversity” or to tolerate others by merely “taking them into account” as opposed to encouraging the agentic development of Finland's newest migrants/ citizens.
References

Puroila, A. M., Juutinen, J., Viljamaa, E., Sirkko, R., Kyrönlampi, T., & Takala, M. (2021). Young Children’s Belonging in Finnish Educational Settings: an Intersectional Analysis. International Journal of Early Childhood, 53(1), 9–29. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13158-021-00282-y


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