Browsing by Author "Malinen, Satu"

Objectives. The new curriculum of crafts teaching that will be brought into use of autumn 2016, introduces a new concept of crafts which is called multimaterialism. Multimaterialism will consist of the materials, equipment and techniques of both textile work and technical work. At the same time, teaching lessons of crafts will be reduced in secondary schools. Previously, in crafts the finished product and used skills have been seen as great importance for teachers' competence and student's learning. Former studies that have been completed have seen craft as a process which occurs inside of textile or technical work. Based on some studies, the way of teaching crafts seems to be changing to multimaterialism. In these studies crafts has been seen as a part of the technical development and design. This study examines the teacher's competence through professional and pedagogical views. In addition, the features of crafts teacher's specific competence were examined through meaning of skills, product and process-related meanings, complete craft and pedagogical way of thinking which is connected to crafts teacher's work. Research question is that, how the new curriculum of crafts teaching will challenge the educational community and teachers who are planning and working with teaching. Second question is how the new curriculum will challenge the teacher's competence. Methods. The study was conducted as a multimethods case study, which utilized qualitative data. Multimethods was chosen because it helped to get more diverse information. The research materials in this study were video material from two events and the supplementary material related to these events. The first video material was derived from a panel about multimaterialism, from the discussion of five crafts curriculum experts. In addition, there was also Flinga-comments, enabling the public to participate in the debate on the big screen. There were approx. 80 participants at the event, but due to the on-line broadcast the amount was approx. 160. The second video data was collected at a meeting of the textile teachers union's member association's teachers, who discussed about the new curriculum. From this meeting written material about crafts elective lessons was received. At the event there were 30 textile teachers. The data was analyzed in accordance of the research questions and themes from the data, using the ATLAS.ti program. From these themes four main themes were found that were corresponding to the research questions. Results and conclusions. The challenges facing the teachers competence and the educational community were in some ways overlapped. The findings were looked upon in the light of multimaterialism. Based on the research the challenges of crafts education that arose were 1) Taking new curriculum into use as well as the dialogue of the teacher's values and the curriculum, 2) understanding and implementing multimaterialism, 3) The guarantee of the crafts teachers employment and high-quality crafts teaching. 4) Challenges to the teacher's competence and the challenges the school community were partly overlap. Teacher's competence challenged the changes in the job description and co-operation, understanding skills, understanding of the craft process and product, as well as understanding craft's pedagogy. Dialogue of the theory and the data can be said to be the key role of the teacher when the local crafts curriculum is drawn up. Crafts teachers must be able to find their own crafts values and practical skills in common with the new curriculum. But In same way must also adopt new approaches to crafts teaching so that she/he is able to justify the place of crafts teaching to the educational community. In addition the educational community must allow for the training of teachers and implementation of education so that the objectives of the curriculum can be carried out.