Browsing by Subject "Yrityskylä"

Neoliberalisms influence is growing in today’s society and responsibilities are moved from the state to its citizens. Individuals own capabilities are now more important than ever. Financial capabilities are especially important. Before responsibilities can be transferred to individuals, it must be ensured that citizens have sufficient capabilities. At the moment this is not so. Finnish basic education is a great place to teach necessary financial capabilities with the help of financial education. Financially capable individuals want to and can operate actively and responsibly in different financial environ-ments. The current knowledge on the effects of financial education or the level of financial capabil-ties of our youths is not sufficient. In this thesis I studied the effects of ten Me & MyCity lessons on financial capabilities. Financial ca-pabilities were narrowed to informational level. I tried to find out how financial capabilities improve and are there differences between genders. With help of some earlier tests I constructed a survey con-sisting of 30 objective multiple choice items to test my research questions. 207 students from 11 dif-ferent school classes answered my survey. 171 students answered the survey both before and after Me & MyCity lessons and 170 answers were eligible for further analyses. All students participated in the Me & MyCity in Helsinki-Vantaa in the spring of 2016. To test the suitability of my test I did item analysis and IRT analysis. The result was that my test was sufficient in the scale of this research. The test should be improved if used in forthcoming research. Three items that were not functioning correctly were removed from the test. The test was slightly easy and therefore didn’t differentiate better students as well as it could have. The development of fi-nancial capabilities was tested with paired samples T test. The differences between genders were test-ed with a T test. Financial capabilities improved by 15,6%. The progression was varied between sub-factors. Gender did not affect the results. Answers stating ”I don't know” decreased by 52% in the se-cond questionnaire. The increase of correct answers was significantly lower. Me & MyCity improves financial capabilities at least on informational level. The progression was low level, although this may be partly caused by the incorrect calibration of the research instrument. Education is transforming from teaching singular skills and subjects towards teaching holistic capa-bilities. Effective methods are required both for this transformation and to supervise its results. Me & MyCity is in part specialized to financial education and is therefore a good place to start improving financial education and the measurement of financial capability.

The aim of this study was to find out teachers’ visions about citizenship and civic education and Yrityskylä’s role in it. Citizenship education was reformed in 2014 when new curriculum was introduced. The reform brought a new subject, social studies (yhteiskuntaoppi) to fourth and sixth graders. Active citizenship has been the ideal kind of citizenship education in the world, including Finland, for a quite long time and social studies aim to raise students to be “active, responsible and industrious citizens”. As part of citizenship education most of the sixth graders participate to Yrityskylä’s learning concept. Students will attend 10 lessons at school to study about working life, economy and society before visiting Yrityskylä’s learning environment for one day. Yrityskylä is a learning concept where students’ act as an employees, citizens and consumers in a simulated society. Data was collected by interviewing six teachers who participated with their students to Yrityskylä and one retired class teacher during spring 2018. One interview was a two persons’ group interview and the rest were individual interviews. All interviews were carried out as theme interviews. The data was transcribed and analysed by using theme analysis. Based on theme analysis altogether six themes were formed. According to the teachers the citizenship concept contained four themes: social skills, self-leadership, economic skills and critical thinking. In the teachers’ view Yrityskylä’s role as a part of citizenship education was to teach students generally about citizenship and produce citizenship education itself. Teachers’ visions about citizenship correspond to the ideal of active citizenship and is very similar to the curriculum’s aims and contents. Yrityskylä is seen as an important part of school’s citizenship education. That it also provides students with concrete understanding about citizenship. Furthermore, it is a place where students can practice citizenship skills and learn more about citizenship and being a citizen.

The 2001 PISA results have acted as an accelerator of positive reputation of Finnish education globally. Now Finland is taking steps to make its education to an exportable education product. The aim of this master's thesis is to examine how Finnish education is referred to as an export product and how it is justified. The aim was to critically examine the educational export discourse and to deepen the discussion on the Finnish education export. Comparative education perspective offers tools to examine the Finnish education export, in analyzing the transfer of educational practices from one context to another. In addition, international literature on the internationalization of education and on the development of Finnish education contextualize the thesis. The case representing Finnish education export was a Finnish learning concept Yrityskylä, which is a learning module for sixth and ninth graders. The research data was collected by interviewing the participants involved in Yrityskylä's internationalization. Along with the interviews, the data consisted of observation and documents related to the internalization project. The data was analyzed by operating with critical discourse analysis. The aim of the discourse analysis was to come out from the case, to look more extensively on the discourses of Finnish education exports and to reveal assumptions and common truths in the speech of Finnish education exports. As a result of the thesis, four discourses were constructed, which justify and describe the Finnish educational export speech and discussion. The discourses were the discourse of Finnish quality, the discourse of global necessity, the discourse of the potential of productization, and the discourse of innovative solutions. Based on the thesis, Finnish education export is presented without critical examination of the culture and context of the recipient country. Finnish education is presented as an excellent concept that does not need an explanation. Finnish education export is seen as an untapped potential and productization is presented as a solution. Finnish education export rely on the Finnish curriculum, but the actual products are presented as innovations, outside the traditional school.