Browsing by Author "Kalske, Kreetta"

Aims. The new national core curriculum for basic education that defines aims for learning came into effect on 2016. That curriculum directs schools to use integrative teaching methods by foregrounding multidisciplinary themes. Though curriculum binds schools to use integrative approaches, the ways of implementation are left for every school to decide. Phenomena of integrative teaching have been described in the research literature with several terms depending on the era of research. Terms are not equivalent with each other that makes it difficult to compare researches of different times. In this thesis, the problem is solved by using the term phenomena of integrative teaching. It is used to describe all such methods of organizing teaching that lowers the borders between traditional school subjects. The aim of this study is to investigate how the phenomena of integrative teaching have been presented in Finnish national curriculums for basic education and how it is treated in research from the 1980s to the 2010s. Methods. This thesis is descriptive review and chosen articles are published either by the peer reviewed journals, the compilations of articles or state’s bureau of education. Most of the articles used were research reports on pedagogical experiments where researchers implemented the integrative methods of teaching between different school subjects or themes. Those articles were sorted by their topic when it was possible to compare them with different theories of integrative teaching methods. Results and conclusions. When gathering data for the thesis, it was noticed that it was difficult to find articles from the 1994 curriculum and it was also noticed that it didn’t have on chapter for integrative teaching methods. By the articles used, it can be observed that the most common way of implementing integrative teaching methods is to handle the same theme in two or more school subjects at the same time. However, the curriculum in use encourages teachers to take the integrative teaching even deeper and lower the barriers between different school subjects. Nevertheless, there is not yet research to be found on that kind of teaching and especially teachers experience, and conceptions should be studied more.