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School meals and snacks at school can play a significant role of young person’s food behavior, participation and developing food sense. According to previous studies, the diet of Finnish schoolchildren has become irregular and the use of vegetables, berries and fruits is underrepresented in comparison to the recommendations. The purpose of this research is to highlight the ideas that pupils bring about to develop school meals and snacks. The study ex-amines pupils' nutritional habits and participation in school. The research was carried out in co-operation with the Youth Academy's Own Selection -project (2015–2017). The nature of this study is qualitative research, but the material also reveals elements of quantitative research. The research material consists of two sources of research. The first material was an electronic survey and second material was collected from idea laboratories. The methods of the analyses are cross tabulation and type casting. There were ten schools in the research material from different parts of Finland. A total of 1555 pupils had responded to the online survey. The idea laboratory was a participatory model for the students of the project. A total of 305 pupils from six different schools participated in the idea laboratory. The reliability of the research is strengthened through mixed strategies. The FAMM model (The Five Aspects Meal Model), was used to help analyze the second material. The FAMM model is commonly used for comprehensive assessment of restaurant experience and is suitable for analyzing a variety of food services. (Gustafsson, Öström, Johansson & Mossberg, 2006) Based on the results of the research, the pupils had previously poorly participated in school meal’s arrangements in particular. The results also reflected how most of the students wanted to develop school meals and school snacks, taking into account the perspective of healthy nutrition. The pupils especially wanted to add fruits and vegetable dishes to school. According to interviewees, the results were in line with the new Recommendations for school meals. (Eating and learning together, National Nutrition Council).

Objectives. The objective of this thesis was to examine a planning project concerning an informal learning environment, undertaken by the Kaisaniemi Botanic Garden, that used participatory methods in involving students and teachers. Through finding a synthesis between this undertaking and previous research on the subject, another objective was to build a model which other informal learning environments could use in carrying out similar projects in an appropriate manner. The thesis approaches institutional cooperation through the concept of boundary crossing, especially as interpreted by Akkerman and Bakker. Methods. The study was conducted using a qualitative approach. The research data was collected through semi-structured interviews, in which the three employees of the garden who were mainly in charge of the project were heard. The data was analysed using the methods of content analysis, and the model was constructed by utilizing the traditions of grounded theory. Results. The project was considered successful, but it’s non-recurrent execution was deemed problematic. The biggest obstacles were the everyday challenges of large institutions – schools and informal learning environments – and their balancing in relation to one another. The participatory design framework created in the study offers informal learning environments a nine-step plan of action, which runs through three phases – preinteraction, interaction and postinteraction – in a circular manner.

Aims. Participation after a traumatic brain injury (TBI), e.g. return to work and social roles, is regarded to be the ultimate goal of rehabilitation. At the same time patient's perception of quality of life (QoL) and a subjective satisfaction have become important perspectives in the outcome assessment after TBI. Research shows evidence of relation between participation and QoL, but little is known about the association of the activity specific participation and QoL. In addition correlations between participation activities and subjective appraisals of them are inconsistent. The aim of this study was to explore activity specific participation after TBI and investigate relations between activities and patients' satisfaction with these activities and health-related quality of life (HRQoL). Additionally, less studied effects of elements like sociodemographic factors, injury severity, functional outcome and mood disorders in the association to these were explored. Methods. The study group consisted of a total of 157 adults with brain injury, aged 20–63 years, 101 (64 %) of them being men. The patients participated in an assessment of HRQoL, mood, functional outcome, general health and participation. ICF was the framework used for defining participation. Results. In this study activity specific participation was at best moderately but consistently associated with persons' satisfaction with these activities and HRQoL. Activity specific participation accounted for 3–27 % of the variance in satisfaction and 6–23 % of the variance in total QOLIBRI score. Sociodemographic factors of the patient had no influence on the results, but functional outcome, injury severity and mood disorders changed associations with work status and independence in household finance and satisfaction and HRQoL. The number of regular hobbies and close friendships predicted greater HRQoL. In turn, additional health problems, help needed in daily activities and mood disorders predicted lower HRQoL. Together these variables accounted for 54 % of the variance in the total QOLIBRI score. Results implicate that according to the level of participation directional assumptions of satisfaction of participation and HRQoL can be made. Yet functional outcome, injury severity, mood and personal preferences have influence. Objective information of the participation and the subjective satisfaction and experience of HRQoL reflect different dimensions of a goal attainment and an outcome assessment of rehabilitation after TBI. Therefore both should be taken into account in a rehabilitation phase.

Objectives. The academic relevance of this study is to increase knowledge of the factors that improve the quality of drama education. The study uses Instructional Learning Formats (hereinafter referred to as ILF) as the starting point. The first research question examines what kinds of ILF's were employed in the analysed drama lessons. The Second research question aims to find out if those ILF's are linked to group creativity during drama. The third and final research question scrutinizes the suitability of The Classroom Assessment Scoring System™ (CLASS) observation instrument to analyse drama lessons. Methods. This study is a qualitative case study. The main focus of the research were the different ILF's employed in first to third grade drama lessons. The research material consisted of eight taped drama lessons held by specialized drama teachers. The material was analysed by using the CLASS observation instrument focusing on the use of ILF's during drama classes and does their use generate group creativity. The main factors that were examined were the influence of teacher's behaviour and the methods used by the teacher on student's staying interested and committed to teaching activities. Conclusions. The examined lessons received mid and high range scores (4-6, scale being 1-7). Central factors to engaging students and increasing group creativity were the teacher's personal involvement, presence, facilitating student's engagement, clarity of learning objectives and creating an understanding and open-minded atmosphere in class. The best drama methods to support group creativity are those that utilize work in small groups. Especially consensual planning in small groups improves the possibility for students to participate, present their own ideas and to strive to find creative solutions together to hypothetical problems presented during drama.

To advance children's participation is actively pursued and it is seen as a leading concept in documents guiding the work of early childhood education. However, supporting children's participation requires a common understanding of what the concept means. This study examines the views of kindergarten teachers in Vantaa about the participation of children. The study identifies factors affecting participation, and examines in particular how kindergarten teachers feel that the need for special education influences the child's participation in early childhood education. The characteristics and skills associated with adult activities that contribute to the realization of each child's participation and the sense of belonging are analyzed as part of the study. The theoretical framework of the study is based on the view of participation as one of the principle of inclusion. The theory of participation has been dealt with according to the multidimensional model of Leena Turja. The material of the study was collected at half structured interviews witch were taken part in seven teachers from city of Vantaa on February 2017. The interviews were recorded and transcribed for analysis. The analysis was done with the methods of content analysis. Sosiograms of the groups have been utilized as a supplementary research material. The results of the study show that interviewed teachers describe participation as a multi-dimensional phenomenon that can be viewed from different perspectives. Determining participation was considered challenging and there was a clear need for a common discussion both in the team and in the work community. In general, participation was seen as an important topic that could also have a wider impact on children's well-being. According to the interviewed kindergarten teachers, the special educational needs of the child contributed significantly to their participation in the group. However, the factors contributing to participation are strongly linked to an inclusive culture and supported the participation of every child in the group. Kindergarten teachers felt that the same factors could support and, on the other, block children's participation. Play was felt as an activity to support participation and children's peer interaction. The most important factor for participation was adult activity and interaction that takes into account the individual needs of children.

Involvement is a phenomenon that interests the researchers at the moment also in the context of a leadership. Involvement research in the early childhood education is focused on the involvement structures and possibilities of small children. At the moment shortage of the competent teachers and practical nurses and their commitment to the long-term work relationship however brings us back to the basic questions of leadership; how to lead involvement? The theoretical frame of this study is based on contextual model of leadership (Nivala 1999) which sees the early childhood leadership and the early childhood substance inseparable. I also use the theoretical frame of involvement created by Finnish National Institute of Health and Welfare that define involvement as closely related to the intrinsic motivation, possibility to have an affect to your surrounding environment and benevolence. My research task was to find out how early childhood education leaders experience leading involvement. What experiences they had about competence, distributed leadership and challenges that related to the industry? The study was qualitative and was based on phenomenological methodology which reach for the subjective experiences of the individuals. As a data I used the themed focus group interview material that was collected in the Eduleaders project training. Method of analysis was the theory-guided content analysis. In the results competence became a key factor in leading involvement. Leadership competence meant both common leadership skills and the ability to lead early childhood substance. Important were also the professional skills of the working community, teachers and practical nurses and their ability to work autonomously. Leading involvement was also based on functional distributed leadership that called for workable structures as well as the teacher´s competence in leading their teams and distributed pedagogical leadership. Early childhood leaders also saw joint leadership between leader- leader and teacher-teacher as a functional leadership structure in the future that may increase the experiences of deeper involvement. The challenges of leading involvement were the resources related to work as well as the current change in the operational culture, which challenged the definition of job descriptions and the involvement of a multi-professional work community. In the future the leaders hope for more innovative working style, experimentation and autonomy in relation to the mission of the early childhood education.

In my thesis, I studied the conceptions of the teachers who supervise school councils in primary schools. The purpose of this study was to examine the aims of school councils, how the aims are actualised, and how the school councils are organised and enhanced at the school level. The concern about the social passivity of children and the young has been raised to public discussion after the millennium. School councils have been considered to be a solution for decreasing social passivity. School democracy has not been a popular topic since the 1980 s, but during the 21st century, it has become more popular, and nowadays, many primary schools have their own school councils. Nevertheless, school councils have not been a popular research subject. In this study, the perspective to school world is societal, and the supervising teachers' conceptions are reflected to democracy, participation and citizenship education using the writings by Dewey, Freire and Biesta. The research data was collected from ten thematic interviews. The interviewees were ten teachers from Espoo, who were responsible for supervising the school councils at their schools. The interviews were analysed using research methods typical for a phenomenographic study. According to the study, the teachers are mainly very satisfied with school councils. School councils were considered to be such places in which pupils learn useful knowledge and skills. In addition, the teachers thought that school councils enhance the communality of schools as well as the participation of pupils. The role of school councils as an organiser of events was considered to be very strong. Via school councils, pupils have been able to affect schools' equipment and conventions, for example, the equipment that can be used during breaks, and school catering. Even though school councils were considered very positive, the interviewed teachers found many things to improve. For example, the teachers thought that pupils and teachers should be more active. In addition, it was considered that even though school councils provide a model of democracy and active citizenship, the pupils' possibilities to impact matters at their school were only minor. School councils were considered to be led by teachers and coordinated from above. School councils could be improved by shifting the focus on school democracy from school councils to classrooms. In classrooms, every student would have an opportunity to learn useful knowledge and skills and to gain experience if they could impact matters at school.

Aims. The aim of this study was to examine the experience of principals in the metropolitan area about how partly integrated worldview education has been implemented and why schools have been transferred to it. In addition, in this thesis I’m interested in how schools have planned the partly integrated way of teaching in their school, how teachers, guardians and students responded when school started to teach it, is the integrated way of teaching successful and what are the principals’ future views in the teaching of religious education. The topic of this thesis is highly relevant, because religious education has been the subject of the debate in both media and research. Research on factors in the background have not been studied at least in Finland. However, some research has been done on principles, pupils and teachers in the objectives and success of integrated worldview education. In the theoretical part of the thesis, I used my bachelor’s thesis from 2020 and topical research in the field. This research aims to examine the subject from the perspective of principals. The research questions are: How schools have implemented and planned the teaching of partly integrative worldview education in their schools? And What were the biggest factors that schools have been transferred into partly integrated worldview education? Methods. This thesis was qualitative in nature which I conducted as an interview. Interviews with six principals took place between December 2020 and February 2021. I chose to interview principals from the metropolitan area who is working at schools that teach partly integrative worldview education. This thesis does not aim for generalizability and the aim of my research was to provide information about experiences of the principals. The material was analysed using content analysis and the interview method was theme interviews. Results and conclusions. Based on the results of the study the integrated worldview education will be implemented in three different ways: to one grade, to 2-4 grades or throughout the whole primary school. I created five factory categories for why schools transferred to partly integrative worldview education. These were: 1. ideological and essential elements of worldview education factors, 2. cultural diversity factors, 3. the opportunity to arrange a teaching in a new way, 4. economic factors, 5. teaching organization factors. None of these factors were the only reason behind the transfer, but many factors worked together with transfer. Partly integrated teaching based on the results, was well received by teachers, pupils and guardians. At the beginning most questioning of the new way of teaching came from the guardians. All principals felt that integrative worldview education was a successful way to teach. In the future principals hoped for more freedom at arranging worldview education at the school level and hoped that Finland would also be transmitted to teaching of common subject for all students in worldview education.

For decades, the Finnish education sector has suffered from a lack of qualified early child-hood education (ECE) teachers. If qualified applicants are not available, it is possible to deviate from the eligibility requirements and recruit an unqualified applicant. One of the reasons behind the shortage of labour is the stature and appeal of the profession. Although the im-portance of ECE is widely recognized, frequent changes to its requirements and core func-tions have affected the stature and education of the staff. In fields with shortage for qualified labour, the competition between employers naturally intensifies. This increases the importance of employer branding and well-functioning recruitment process, and some employers attract more applicants than others. This Master's thesis examines how employer branding can be seen in recruitment announcements and what expectations the announcements set for the applicant. The thesis also identifies some of the key challenges faced in the recruitment by the day-care managers and different approaches to facing them. For the thesis, 31 recruitment announcements for ECE teacher’s position were analysed. The announcements were collected from the website of the Ministry of Employment and the Economy and from the recruitment service for the Helsinki metropolitan area. From the analysed announcements, four recruiting day-care managers were selected for interviews for deeper insight into the process. The announcements showed a lot of variation both in terms of content and length. Some announcements did not include any information about the job or requirements for the applicant. In the interviews, managers' responses highlighted challenges with labour shortages and different approaches to overcome those. A diverse perspective to recruitment as well as the manager's own actions in the process can affect the number of applicants. Careful preparation of the recruitment notice, together with creating a smooth recruitment process from the applicant’s viewpoint are critical in a sector suffering from labour shortage.

Objectives. The material for this case study was collected during the academic year 2010–2011 in a municipal round-the-clock daycare centre in Southern Finland. The study aims to describe what kind of environment round-the-clock daycare provides for young children. I have especially observed the relationships during a child's daycare shift, which means counting the adults and children who were in the same place at the same time and the amount of interaction relationships between any two people. The documents directing early childhood education have little to say about round-the-clock daycare. The municipalities are obligated to provide daycare in such forms and to such extent as needed. Round-the-clock daycare has not been researched much and the principles of providing it vary. When it comes to the daycare of small children, good interaction between the adult and the child, small daycare group, familiar adults and peers, and sufficiently short daycare shifts are considered important. Children's involvement in play or task activities is considered a criterion of quality. In round-the-clock daycare situations change constantly; children and adults come and go all day long. Work schedules determine who is around at any given time, and economical reasons demand that different groups work together. Methods. I used several methods to describe the round-the-clock daycare of young children. I inserted the data concerning the care hours of the six youngest children of the group from autumn 2010 into the SPSS system. The length and time of each daycare shift, day of the week, and the amount of other children and adults present during each daycare shift were observed. I counted all the interaction relationships that occurred during each daycare shift. It was also noted whether the people present were from the children's own group or from another daycare group. In spring 2011 I recorded children's actions on video and observed the daily routines of the group and the daycare centre. The videotapes were used to observe and evaluate the children's involvement level on the 5-point LIS-YC scale. Results and conclusions. The six children had a total of 372 daycare shifts. With only the peers of their own group there were 123 shifts. The shifts were from two to 26 hours long. The interaction relationships during one shift amounted to 10 – 1 128. The median was 288. The mode was 276, which equals a common daycare group of three adults and 21 children over the age of three. Based on 76 evaluations, the children's involvement level was satisfactory, 3.11 on average. In a round-the-clock daycare group young children have to face a lot of people and endure constant interruptions in their activities.