Browsing by Author "Aroranta, Sonja"

Finland is continually becoming more multicultural and hence a re-evaluation of the education system is required. The Finnish education system has to adapt in order to maintain its high teaching quality while significant cuts to funding are being made. The question remains, how can quality be improved while funding is decreasing? The aim of my Bachelor’s thesis was to examine what kind of developmental areas kindergarten teachers have noticed in Finnish as a second language instruction. The developmental areas were divided into physical capital resources, human capital resources and organizational capital resources, as first classified by Barney (1991). My aim was to examine where attention must be paid in order to maintain or possibly even improve the quality of teaching. For the purpose of this study a meta-synthesis was conducted by interpreting study results of other qualitative studies in the related area. The research data consisted of four Master’s thesis’ done in 2009 –2014. In order to find similarities between the studies, data was analyzed by means of meta-synthesis. The most significant developmental areas that stood out in every study were the lack of employees in kindergartens, the lack of information kindergarten teachers are provided with Finnish as a second language instruction during teacher education and further education, the lack of time and difficulties in cooperation with both the parents of children learning Finnish as a second language and other partners. The issues that were brought up the most in the studies were related to organizational capital resources such as lack of time. However, according to the results, the single largest developmental area was the kindergarten teacher education and the possibilities for further education that belong under human capital resources. Thus, the results show that the most significant developmental areas are not necessarily dependent on the budget given to education but rather on organizational matters. Overall the study shows that there are numerous developmental areas. This puts into question whether the future and possibilities for further education for those in Finnish as a second language instruction are equal to those who belong to the main population.