Browsing by Subject "juhla"
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(2014)Objectives. Regardless of the era, people have been always celebrating different occasions. Celebration has signified the division of continuously flowing time into ordinary and sacred. At the same time, continual reminiscent rituals have answered the humane need to feel control over life and foresee future. The celebration has also strengthened the social cohesion between the individuals who take part in it. Christmas is a celebration that intensely influences the whole society time and again. Even though Christmas seems to have stayed unchanged throughout the centuries, closer analysis reveals that there can be seen different layers from different parts of history. It contains elements from pre-Christian times, medieval peasant traditions, and 1900th century familial. There is substantial amount of literary about Christmas but very little recent academic research on this subject. The purpose of this study is to examine how Christmas is celebrated in contemporary families and what kind of meanings are connected to it. Through these meanings, it can be understood why Christmas is celebrated. Methods. The research material for this study was collected with essays. Before the essay itself, there was a small priming quantitative part. Parents who had at least one child of primary school age acted as informant. In this study, the methods of content analysis were applied. After this, the synthesis on which all the conclusions are based was formed. Results and conclusions. The preparations for Christmas and Christmas Eve itself form the structured part of Christmas. This part moves forward as chronological and predictable chain of events. In the descriptions of Christmas Eve, same elements are repeated nearly in the same order. From these descriptions, a story which connects all the writings can be formed. This kind of story can also be called narrative. After this programmed part, the form of the celebration turns into casual and there is time for those things which are experienced as the most paramount meaning of Christmas – resting and being together with the closed ones. From the descriptions of Christmas, all the functions of celebration can be found. It divided time, strengthened the bonds towards own community, and its repetitive pattern provided safety. From this point of view, it is not surprising that Christmas has maintained its vitality regardless of societal situation.
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(2013)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.
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