Browsing by Author "Priha, Emma"

Crafts was for a long time one of the only school subjects that separated boys and girls to their own groups to study differing contents. Since the foundation of Finnish comprehensive school, technical or textile crafts have not been gender-related on the curriculum level. However various social, cultural, and historical factors have maintained the gender structures in school crafts that guide girls to study mainly textile crafts and boys technical crafts. The division has been especially distinctive among boys, who have almost exclusively studied technical crafts whenever the possibility to choose has been given. It has been considered desirable that students are offered a possibility to choose the crafts that they have interest in and tendencies towards, as it has been stated in the national core curriculum 2004. Studies have however shown that also many other factors have affected the choices and guided the students towards historical gender-specific crafts choices. In this study, fifth-grade boys were interviewed in order to examine the background of their choices between textile and technical crafts. It was also studied how meaningful the interviewees generally consider the possibility to choose and how they think about shared crafts, the way crafts education is arranged since the most recent national core curriculum. The interviews took place in November 2014. The interviewees were eight fifth-grade boys who had made the choice between textile and technical crafts in previous spring at the end of fourth grade. Only boys were researched since the historical gender structures have more distinctively been seen in boys’ choices. The interviews were executed as semi-structured surveys. The data was analyzed using qualitative content analysis. According to this research, there has been a discrepancy between the curriculums and daily life in school when it comes to choosing between textile and technical crafts. The choices were not made only out of boys’ own interests but several social and cultural factors affected the choices, and also guided them towards choosing the historically and socially more accepted technical crafts. The interviewees had differing views when asked about the meaningfulness of the possibility to choose. However most of them stated that they would have preferred to continue studying shared crafts, if given the opportunity. According to this study, the possibility to choose between textile and technical crafts was mostly not considered meaningful, at least not at this point of the interviewees school career.