Browsing by Subject "ulkosuomalainen"

The main subject of this Master Thesis is to study the importance created by the expat parents towards schools which operate abroad and serve Finnish language studies for expat children. This research is strongly theory based, where parenthood, Finnish-expats and the dimensions of Finnish-schools operating abroad is studied. The main goal has been to understand the meaning of Finnish-schools abroad to expat-families. There is only limited amount of previous studies concerning Finnish-schools abroad, so there has been a clear research gap. The topic was investigated by electronic surveys, where parents could freely tell about their experiences and feelings about the Finnish-schools abroad, under the guidance of the researcher. This research is qualitative in nature and the research method has been hermeneutic. Data was collected from 11 parents, whose children study at Amsterdam's Finnish School during the spring 2016. On top of that, researcher has been present in Amsterdam's Finnish School in order to understand the topic better. The results from the study are in with the research questions. Parents felt that the importance of Finnish School is mainly social, for both themselves and for the children. Finnish School was seen as a social environment, from which it was possible to find Finnish-speaking friends and also to communicate in Finnish. Cultural and linguistic education was also part of the results but it was seen less important than the social-aspect. It was also found that parents do a lot of voluntary work for Finnish School and everyone wanted to participate to these activities. It can be seen from the results that the importance of Finnish School to parents is very high. Through the Finnish School the Finnish-culture and language could be maintained through the whole family and the school also provided peer support. These were also aspects, which help Finnish-expats to maintain their mother-tongue and to cherish their cultural identity, within both children and adults. Finally, it could be concluded that investing to Finnish Schools and maintaining those schools is very important part of supporting the Finnish expats.