Browsing by Subject "festival tradition"

The aim of this research is to study what kind of conceptions class teachers have about elementary school's festival traditions and especially Christian based festival traditions. This is a fairly topical issue at the moment. Over the last decades the Finnish society has come more plural and that has highlight the questions what festivals should school celebrate. In the centre of this discuss are Christian based festivals and festival tradition. The subject hasn't been researched much. So this study strives to answer this need of research. I approach the subject from the perspective of the pedagogics and the cultural heritage education. My research problems are: 1. What kind of conceptions have class teacher about the elementary school's festival traditions? 2. Which overtones is relation with these conceptions? 3. What kind of conceptions have class teachers about the reasons of school festivals? The nature of this study was quantitative and qualitative survey research. All together 245 class teachers of elementary schools from Satakunta (n=118) and Helsinki (n=127) took part in survey which was gathered in the fall of 2012. I chose these two areas because of their difference in population, culture and environment. By gathering large sample from two different areas I tried to conservative extrapolate these responses to all class teachers. The material was analysed by statistical analysis methods as means and factor analysis and by using qualitative research basic ideas: categorising and formulating types. According to the results of this study the teachers perceived Christian based festival tradition as part of the cultural education of the school. Teachers also thought that the school festivals were great opportunity to get to know Finnish culture tradition. The culture tradition of other cultures was also seen very important part of the school festival. Teachers' experience was that pupil's religious diversity didn't make school festival tradition significantly problematic although it has impact to the staging of the school festivals. Teachers saw that most of the meanings of the festivals were engaged to the purpose of the festival and in to the celebration of the festival. Teachers from Satakunta felt school festivals a bit more important than teachers from Helsinki. However altogether teachers' conceptions were positive against the school festival traditions. It seems that based on this study celebration of the school festival isn't that problematic thing that public conversation sometimes implies. The school festival tradition definitely needs more research. One viewpoint for the future study could be which issues teachers estimate to include in the Finnish culture heritage, which transmitting is the one assignment of the school.