Browsing by Author "Supinen, Roosa"

There has been intense debate over the Finnish school system and new curriculum in recent years. The purpose of this thesis is to analyze this public debate in the comment fields of news sites. I try to describe the ways in which school reality is constructed in these comment fields. The material of the study was the discussions under the articles about school and new curricu-lum in Helsingin Sanomat and Yle Uutiset from autumn 2018 to spring 2019. The delimitation was made based on the topic of the news and the number and quality of comments on the dis-cussion under it. The method of analysis was interpretive discourse analysis, which was also supported by rhe-torical analysis. In discourse analysis, language is seen as a tool to shape reality, and it is im-portant to examine what kind of image about school is produced in public debate, when public debate is increasingly influencing in educational policy processes. As a result of the analysis, five discourses were constructed. Discourses were called the dis-course of the circle of accusations, the discourse of confrontation, the discourse of international comparison, the discourse of solutions, and the discourse of defending the school and the cur-riculum. All discourses presented different perspectives on education policy, teachers, methods, and students. The new curriculum was seen as a failure. The discourses used strong and even offensive rhetoric.