Session Information
07 SES 01 A, Different Perspectives on Intercultural Education
Paper Session
Contribution
The Finnish comprehensive school, similarly to Western schools at large, is generally described as multicultural and representing culturally and linguistically diverse learning contexts. Multicultural education has officially been promoted within projects of the Finnish National Board of Education in the past decade. Finnish education has also frequently been given international acclaim for supporting equality with regard to students’ diverse backgrounds. However, even if there is support for cultural diversity on a general policy level these discourses commonly leave open what the culturally diverse school actually entails and what multicultural education involves in terms of the curriculum and educational practice. Also, other less supportive discourses on diversity are increasingly visible in the Finnish political arena. A nationalist and anti-immigration oriented discourse is gaining ground, which may reflect onto the discourses on multiculturalism also in the educational sector. The populist “Finns Party” gained entry into Finnish government coalition in spring 2015, and represents a party program, which promotes assimilation rather than a two-way integration of immigrants. Simultaneously the comprehensive school continues to be subject to extensive cuts, which strains the implementation of educational policies and practices. These political changes as well as the obscurity in the conceptual use of cultural diversity and multicultural education raises concern about how the discourse on multicultural education is developing in Finland.
This study takes as its starting point a critical multicultural education perspective (Nieto 2000, Wright, Singh & Race 2012; Holm & Zilliacus 2009), and aims at a deeper understanding of the discourses on cultural diversity and multicultural education in the Finnish context. The critical multicultural education perspective encompasses three general aims: supporting pluralism in education, aiming at social justice in education, as well as educating students towards the values and skills related to pluralism and social justice. By supporting pluralism we mean supporting students’ plural and individual identities in the education. Students’ identities include multiple aspects, such as ethnicity/ies, language/s, religion/s, class belonging/s, gender/s, sexual orientation/s, and dis/ability/ies. Apart from critical multicultural education being characterized by the above aims, the scope of multicultural education includes different areas of education and society, such as educational practices and structural foundations, including the curricula and organization of education, as well as the wider society.
The focus of this study is on the curricular level, that is, discourses of the national comprehensive school curricula as well as the governmental educational policies during the past two decades. The research question is: How have the discourses on multicultural and multilingual education in the Finnish national curricula developed 1994-2014? This investigation includes analyzing discourses on how different cultural aspects are to be taken into consideration, including language, sexuality, gender, religion and social class. Theoretically the national curriculum can be seen as representing a key educational discourse, which reflects a social imaginary (Rizvi 2009), and demonstrates politically sanctioned ways of thinking and reasoning about community and self (Popkewitz 1997). The Finnish curricular development is characterized by an open and collaborative system, which is not purely governed by administrators but is the outcome of a broad national discussion and the concrete teamwork of different stakeholders. In this process also international and European policy development has gained a significant role. As Rizvi (2009) argues, contemporary theories of globalization have destabilized the imaginary of the nation state as policy authority. For understanding policy it is relevant to ask whether the discourses of educational policy necessarily comes from the nation states and how global processes intersect with national policy development.
Method
Expected Outcomes
References
Gee, J. 1999. An introduction to discourse analysis: Theory and method. London: Routledge. Gee, J. 2014. How to do discourse analysis: A toolkit. London: Routledge. Holm, G. and H. Zilliacus. 2009. Multicultural Education and Intercultural Education: Is there a Difference? In Dialogs on Diversity and Global Education, edited by M. Talib, J. Loima, H. Paavola and S. Patrikainen, 11– 28. New York: Peter Lang. Nieto, S. 2000. Placing Equity Front and Center: Some Thoughts on Transforming Teacher Education for a New Century. Journal of Teacher Education 51 (3): 180–187. Popkewitz, T. 1997. The production of reason and power: Curriculum history and intellectual traditions. Journal of Curriculum studies 29 (2): 131–164. Rizvi, F. 2009. Global Mobility and the Challenges of Educational Research and Policy. Yearbook of the National Society for the Study of Education 108 (2): 268–289. Taylor, S. 2001. Locating and conducting discourse analytic research. In Discourse as data, edited by M. Wetherell, S. Taylor and S. J. Yates, 5-48. London: The Open University. Wright, H. K., M. Singh and R. Race. 2012. Precarious international multicultural education: Hegemony, dissent and rising alternatives. Rotterdam: Sense publishers.
Search the ECER Programme
- Search for keywords and phrases in "Text Search"
- Restrict in which part of the abstracts to search in "Where to search"
- Search for authors and in the respective field.
- For planning your conference attendance you may want to use the conference app, which will be issued some weeks before the conference
- If you are a session chair, best look up your chairing duties in the conference system (Conftool) or the app.