Browsing by Author "Huttunen, Tytti"

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.