Browsing by Author "Rantakokko, Anni"

Following the wide attention towards the Finnish educational system after its high scores in the PISA assessments in the early 2000s, Finland has been particularly keen to strengthen its global role in the education sector. This has included strengthening education sector development cooperation, policy influencing and education export systematically. As one part of supporting education sector development cooperation, The Finnish Centre for Expertise in Education and Development (FinCEED) was established within the National Agency for Education in 2021. Among other modalities, FinCEED has organised expert deployments to ministries, multilateral organisations and other institutions. Through focusing on the case of FinCEED expert deployments, this thesis discusses what kind of expertise has been seen essential for international expert assignments in education sector development cooperation and what kinds of key factors have affected the assignments. Furthermore, acknowledging the variety of motivations and objectives behind development cooperation, this thesis also discusses how FinCEED expert deployments are situated within a complex web of power dynamics. This qualitative case study is based on social constructivism, as it focuses on how partners and experts deployed by FinCEED have experienced the expert deployments, including their outcomes and the nature of expertise required in them. The data consists of questionnaire responses by partners and reports written by experts during or after their FinCEED expert deployments. The data analysis was conducted through an inductive process where the data was coded and themes emerged from the data, connecting both the questionnaire responses and the reports. The results are discussed in the main categories of outcomes, the nature of expertise required, and the key factors that affected the FinCEED expert deployments. Both partners and experts deployed by FinCEED discussed context knowledge, local ownership, interest towards Finnish educational expertise, networks and communication, work culture, and cooperation with FinCEED in relation to the deployments. These key factors had connections to the overall success of the expert deployments and depending on the case, most of the key factors had the potential of becoming best practices or major challenges. For example, the importance of knowing the local context was highlighted in the data: if the context knowledge of the expert was seen sufficient, it was approached as a key strength, but if the expert had limited familiarity with the local context, it had significant effects on how the overall success of the deployment was perceived. Most partners were interested in similar expert deployments in the future, while they also identified challenges that need to be addressed.