In this study, we explore how teachers communicate and construct educational ideals concerning evil and emotions to children in the context of Finnish pre-primary education, and how this contributes to the processes of villainification; making out-groups represent evil and/or anti-villainification; contributing to complex understandings of evil. To understand this construction and communication, we focused on a single case that illuminated how two pre-primary education teachers formulated educational ideals concerning evil. For this purpose, we analyzed two data sets by utilizing discourse analysis. The first set consisted of five interviews with the teachers dealing with the topic of evil and education. The second data set included video recordings of two related educational sessions conducted by the teachers with children. The results show that the ideals were constructed and communicated by discursive practices without direct usage of the word “evil”, and these mainly contributed to anti-villainification processes. To prevent a strict binary of good and evil and following polarization in society, more direct exposure of evil is needed in education. In this way, the children can be more aware of the villainification and anti-villainification processes they are involved in through education.

In this micro-ethnographic study, I explore the tensions and contradictions of sleep practices in early childhood education and care (ECEC) settings from a cultural-historical activity theory perspective. By drawing on interactional analysis of children’s and adults’ sleep time conduct in two Finnish kindergarten groups and an analysis of interviews with them, the kindergarten leaders and the children’s guardians, my study shows how the troubles experienced stemmed from several contradictions embedded in the sleep time practices and their enactment. These results are consistent with existing research but also go beyond it by providing a more nuanced and layered picture of the conflicting demands placed on sleep time in ECEC settings. Such a picture is vital if we want ECEC settings to provide for more quality sleep during early childhood, and assist in finding ways which allow for this.

Choice and autonomy are central tenets of interest-driven learning. Yet, in most studies on interest in school, students' choice and autonomy have been confined within the boundaries of the curriculum and the subject matter in question. This limits our understanding of how schools can support interest-driven learning as well as students' interest development in educational settings more broadly. To address this gap, in this study, we have focused on student learning when they are allowed to follow their interests beyond the curriculum during school time. Building on relational and practice-based perspectives on interest, we conceptualized such extensions as productive deviations and centered on a particular case of two 6th-grade students - Tamaz and Nuri - who created two computer games during their time in the FUSE Studio, alternative STEAM learning infrastructure for schools. Our interactional analysis of Tamaz and Nuri's problem-solving during their game-making shows that their productive deviation formed a significant learning experience for them in terms of game design and working with computers. Overall, our study contributes to discussions on fostering and supporting students' interest-driven learning and interest development in school settings.

Our study contributes to research on moral-ethical tensions in the work of early childhood educators by applying cultural-historical activity theory, and Change Laboratory (CL) intervention. We argue that studying and resolving moral-ethical tensions cannot be done without addressing the underlying contradictions which pertain to particular cultural-historical context and local practices. This requires a shift of focus from individual educators’ perspective to the whole system of their collaborative activity. In result, we identify two historical developments which produce the moral-ethical tensions in educators' work, and we explore how the educators invented expansive solutions to address these tensions in the CL sessions.

In this chapter, we focus on an understudied aspect of children’s and youth’s civic engagement, namely their responsible agency. ‘Responsible agency’ draws attention to children and youth’s ethical and political aspirations and how they give meaning to their civic engagement. Over the last decades, the ways in which children and youth engage in civic activities have been in motion. An important form of this engagement are personally resonant activities that we call civic projects. Our cultural-historical activity theory analysis of two ongoing civic projects - P365 and Climate Warriors – highlights how the projects emerge and are sustained and developed through the children and youth’s responsible agency as well as the re-mediation of social and material support for the projects.

This study compares the adoption and spread of an educational innovation—a project-based, interest-driven, science, technology, engineering, arts, and mathematics learning program—in two culturally distinct contexts: a large school district in the southeastern United States and the public schools in Helsinki, Finland. Using actor network analysis, we show how the educational innovation got in, got rooted, and spread in these two contexts. Our analysis shows how and what actors needed to be mobilised for the program to be implemented and sustained (or not) in these two contexts. Our analysis highlights both similarities and difference between the districts. However, despite key differences, we found that the emergent classroom cultures and student experiences were similar. Our findings have implications for understanding how educational innovations scale as well as similarities and differences between the Finnish and American school systems.

Students' interest pathways are fashioned not only from existing educational resources and opportunities, but importantly also by extending beyond them. In this study, we conceptualise these extensions as productive deviations and engage in a comparative analysis of various productive deviations we have identified in our ethnographic study of seven 5th and 6th grade FUSE Studios - an alternative learning infrastructure for schools. Our analysis shows that the deviations can vary from short term excursions to semester-long projects and can also become the focus of other students' interests.

This study compares the adoption and spread of a learning sciences innovation, a project-based, interest-driven STEAM learning program, in two culturally distinct contexts: a large school district in the southeastern United States and the public schools in Helsinki, Finland.Using Actor Network analysis, we show how and what actors needed to be mobilized for the program to get in, get rooted, and spread (or not) in these two contexts.Our findings have implications for understanding both how to spread and sustain learning sciences innovations and similarities and differences between the Finnish and American school systems.

Problems encountered in top-down school reforms have repeatedly highlighted the significance of teachers’ agency in educational change. At the same time, temporality has been identified as a key element in teachers’ agency, with teachers’ beliefs about the future and experiences of the past shaping their agentic orientations. However, research on teachers’ future orientations is typically limited to short-term trajectories, as opposed to long-term visions of education. To address this, we draw on a futures studies perspective to give more explicit attention to teachers’ long-term visions of their work. We argue that the method of future narratives, already well-established in the field of futures studies, is a fruitful methodological framework for studying these long-term visions. In this paper, we first show that the futures studies approach is theoretically compatible with the ecological model of teacher agency. We then outline the method of future narratives to point out the possibilities it offers. Finally, we illustrate our approach with an exploratory analysis of a small set of future narratives where teachers imagine a future workday. Our analysis reveals that the narratives offer a rich view of teachers’ longer-term visions of education, including instances of reflecting on the role of education in relation to broader societal developments. Our study suggests that this novel approach can provide tools for research on teacher agency as well as practical development of teacher education, addressing long-term educational issues and policies.

In an era of high-stakes testing and performance demands that regulate future educational opportunities and affect how schools are managed and funded, failure can easily become stigmatized in the practices of schooling. In turn, it can lead students to avoid activities in which they can be evaluated as failing. As researchers, if we wish to help students recognize the value of failure in the process of learning and to capitalize on failures as significant learning opportunities, we must find ways in which failure at school can be reframed as something productive, rather than punitive. In this study, we investigated how student experience in a FUSE Studio—an alternative infrastructure for learning in schools organized around principles of student choice and interest (Stevens et al., 2016)— support a different, more productive ‘use’ of failure. Our study is an investigation of how failure was framed in the FUSE Studio by students and teachers and whether these participants recognized learning from failure as a productive part of their FUSE Studio experience. Our analysis, which was based on a year-long video ethnography conducted in a typical FUSE Studio, revealed two distinct ways in which failure was framed. In addition, an analysis of participant interviews highlighted that the students and a facilitator viewed failure as a significant and productive part of their FUSE Studio experience. In sum, the study contributes to the existing literature on the value of failure for learning, by highlighting a way that failure can be framed as being productive for both students and teachers.

Imagine a drop of water. Next, imagine placing that drop of water on your knuckle and watching it roll down your hand. Then, a second drop of water. And a third. Each new drop might well follow the...

The rapid development of various recording technologies in recent years has created appealing opportunities for researchers to document and study science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) learning in ways which previously were either impossible, high-priced, or impractical. The potential access that low-cost and ever-smaller recorders provide us has been wisely tempered with cautions that researchers critically reflect on whether the benefits of the research outweigh the invasion of participants’ privacy, especially in research with children. These cautions rightfully place the burden of ethical deliberation on the researcher. However, by so doing they also direct attention away from the ethical work done by study participants and overshadow their agency in relation to the research. In effect, the cautions join and reinforce dominant narratives of participants’, especially children’s, vulnerability in research and the researcher as the main ethical actor during the research process. This study seeks to balance such narratives by drawing attention to how children demonstrate their awareness of the audience of nearby recorders to each other and, through such actions, also create spaces for private, out-of-view interaction they do not wish to be recorded. With demonstrative vignettes from a yearlong ethnographic study of children’s learning in an alternative STEM learning infrastructure, the study argues that such moments highlight children’s ethical agency in research.

Myötätuntoinen toimintakulttuuri on tutkimusten mukaan tärkeä osa toimivaa organisaatiota. Kasvatuksen kentällä ei kuitenkaan ole juurikaan mallinnettu sitä, miten myötätuntoiset kasvatusyhteisöt rakentuvat ja kehittävät kulttuuriaan. Tässä artikkelissa esittelemme osana Opetushallituksen rahoittamaa hanketta ”Empatian ja myötätunnon laajenevat kehät varhaiskasvatuksessa” (2019–2020) kehittämämme pedagogisen mallin. “Kohti elävää myötätuntokulttuuria” -mallin avulla päiväkotiyhteisöjä voidaan tukea oman myötätuntokulttuurinsa tiedostamisessa, tunnistamisessa ja kehittämisessä ja sitä kautta elävän myötätuntokulttuurin saavuttamisessa. Myötätuntokulttuurilla tarkoitamme yhteisön vakiintuneita ja toistuvia tapoja huomata jäsentensä mielipaha ja kärsimys ja myötäelää näissä tilanteissa. Tavoitteemme on, että pedagogisen mallin avulla päiväkodit voivat arvioida ja kehittää itse omaa myötätuntokulttuuriaan. Tähän pohjautuen kuvaamme artikkelissa mallin syntyprosessia ja ideaa, sekä hankkeessamme esiinnousseita mahdollisia kehittämiskohteita varhaiskasvatukseen liittyen. Artikkelimme tuottaa lisää ymmärrystä päiväkotien toimintakulttuurien piirteistä ja käytännöistä, jotka vahvistavat empatiaa ja myötätuntoa varhaiskasvatusyhteisöissä.