Browsing by Author "Tallqvist, Jenni"

With the drawing up of the new 2016 curriculum the concept of pupil participation has played a major part in the discussions on care and education. Peer mediation has been seen as a way of enabling participation and increasing communality in schools. The goal of this treatise is to survey the significance of peer mediation in pupil participation and as an activity aimed at increasing communality. Restorative thinking and restorative approach are essential in peer mediation. Hence, the ability of pupils to use these methods is also of interest here. Research questions became: 1. How do the objectives of pupil participation and increasing communality in schools in the basics of the curriculum of basic education (2014) manifest in the experiences of the pupils acting as peer mediators? 2. How do restorative thinking and restorative approach manifest in the peer mediator students' descriptions of the mediation process? This is a qualitative study and the research material was collected by themed interviews. The informants were eight girls who had acted as peer mediators in a primary school in Helsinki in the school year 2014-2015. The data was inspected using content analysis. According to the findings of this study, peer mediation does increase communality. However, its affect on pupil participation depended on the overall operational culture of the school and particularly the actions of individual teachers. If the teachers of the school allowed the pupils to participate, the peer mediator students had strong experiences of participation. However, other pupils had the opposite experience. There were great differences in the restorative thinking of the peer mediator pupils. Some of them applied the restorative approach well, others had a less restorative course of action.