User-centricity and usability are a premise of digitalization, a current trend for business model innovation based on advanced digital technologies. The article addresses a gap in the literature, in which descriptions of the cases of updating university curricula in usability are lacking. This gap also exists in the practice. The study uses the…

Background: Although the contexts, structures and administrations of early childhood education (ECE) may differ internationally, effective pedagogical leadership remains an essential component in supporting young children's development and learning. This paper reports on a comparative study which considered ECE in two different settings, Finland…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to explore the governance of educational reform, as an interpretive process -- "interpretive governance" -- through a case study of five superintendents living in a predominantly Swedish-speaking region in Finland. Design/methodology/approach: To foreground superintendents' perspectives on reforms as…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to present an example of pedagogical strategy, called innovation pedagogy, and study whether its learning environments (activating teaching and learning methods, working life orientation and research, development and innovation (RDI) integration, multidisciplinary learning environments, flexible curricula,…

Curriculum reform that has an effect on the everyday practices in schools always entails translation of new ideas into new educational practices. This takes place primarily through shared sense making. However, our understanding of the different ways in which shared sense making is carried out is still scarce. In Finland, the district level plays…

Internationally multicultural education research has pointed to the need to move from superficial to social justice-oriented multicultural education. However, realising this goal in policy and practice is a challenge. This study takes Finland as a case and examines the discursive developments of multicultural education in its national curriculum…

Despite many music classrooms welcoming popular musics in striving towards an inclusive and democratic education, there has been relatively little research into teachers' decisions regarding which popular musics are included and which are excluded from classroom activities. This is of particular interest taking into account arguments that the…

The present article introduces diversity (educational, social and multicultural) of children as a resource in language teaching. Two English teachers with a total of 105 children of their language classes participated in the teaching experiment that was part of a nationwide research and development project in Finland. The aim was to develop…

GeoCapabilities is a transatlantic collaborative project for researching the purposes and values of geography education through a "capabilities approach." Inspired by the writings of philosopher Amartya Sen and economist Martha Nussbaum, the capabilities approach provides a normative framework for understanding the broader aims of…

This article focuses on the learning affordances of different language and communication curricula in the world. For reasons of space, only two national education systems (Finland and Singapore) and their language and communication curricula are referred to. The accounts of national education systems consist of the identification of mechanisms…

This study addresses the challenges concerning the internationalisation of higher education, with a particular focus on designing new international programmes. It presents a case study of a novel international study programme: the MA in Media Education at the Faculty of Education at the University of Lapland, Finland. The study looks into its…

Finland recently adopted two national core curricula that apply to kindergartens (ages one through six). An early childhood education and care curriculum outlines expectations for children under seven (when school starts), while a preschool curriculum establishes guidelines specifically for six-year-olds. Both curricula describe broad principles,…

Academic curriculum and curricular units that are responsive to work necessarily involve the interaction of knowledge from two different communities. In this paper a number of cases of responsive curriculum are analysed in order to answer the following questions: Can general differences between work and academic knowledge be ascribed to the nature…

Compares the policies of inspection in Finland and England where the former promotes school self-evaluation and the latter utilizes the Office for Standards in Education (OFSTED). Finds that OFSTED inspections affect teacher morale and focus on policies and procedures; in Finland, inspections lack a whole-school strategy but encourage changes in…

In the 1990s, educational policy in Finland shifted to decentralization and the granting of more local control to municipalities and schools, with the intent of encouraging more active, locally relevant learning. Within national guidelines, schools develop their own curricula and do their own budgeting. Case studies examine how three different…