Browsing by department "Teacher Education"

The Finnish language might even feel foreign to many Swedish-speaking people in Ostrobothnia as they seldom get to use their Finnish language skills in daily life. Due to this, it might turn out to be challenging to motivate pupils to learn Finnish in school. In this study I have analysed the problem to see whether there is a recalcitrance against learning Finnish among the Swedish-speaking pupils in Ostrobothnia. Do these pupils find the Finnish language unnecessary in their lives? If so – what are the underlying causes? In what way is this problem handled by the teachers? The main purpose for this study is two-pieced: I want to learn how pupils think about the language teaching they get – are they motivated to learn Finnish in school, and do they have negative attitudes against learning the language? I also want to know what kind of teaching solutions the teachers have for motivating their pupils. Do the teachers recall motivation-loss among the pupils? I have used The Self Determination Theory by Deci and Ryan (2002) and The Expectancy Value Theory by Eccles and Wigfield (2000) as my theoretical background. I have also used some of the extensive research among bilingualism of Slotte-Lüttge and Forsman (2013) in this study.This is a qualitative research and the data is collected through interviews with four Finnish-teachers in both 2005 and 2018 and eight eight-graders in 2019. I have found out what the motivation for learning Finnish looks like amongst pupils in Swedish-speaking schools in Ostrobothnia. And I have also got to learn how the teachers take notice to these aspects in their planning of the language-teaching in the classroom. The Finnish-teachers witness great difficulties with the Finnish language among the pupils as the teachers often are the only representatives of the language. The pupils almost never get to use their Finnish language skills outside of school. There has been a progress in language teaching and the digitalization has resulted in a more versatile language education during the years 2005 and 2019. The pupils expect more opportunities for communicative language skills and there is a great need of authentic Finnish language environments in the Swedish-speaking parts of Ostrobothnia.

The objective of this research was to describe autoethnographically the intecration points on my personal history´s narrative identities. Material comprises of work plans and work diaries, and the resulting artworks. The scope of the study reference frame was set around narrative identity consepts, integrated with the narrative identity of personality psychologist Dan McAdams (1995) and narrative identity theories of hermeneutic philosopher Paul Ricoeur (1992). The reference frame concerning the craft science was practice-led research where artist acts as researcher of his/her own work. Maarit Mäkelä´s dessertation (2003) ” Memories on Clay” has influenced this work. Mäkelä studied representations of subjective creating process and gender, and verbally described the creative process and the resulting artworks. Research questions: 1. How integration points of my personal history´s narrative identity are materializing into textile art? What kind of process it is? 2. How this research process is shaping my narrative identity? Methods The research material was composed of autoethnographical processing of my personal history´s narrative identity integration points. The work plans and work diaries material comprised 85 pages and included photographs from different stages of the process. During my research process, I created five piece of textile art based on the fragments of my personal narrative identity. I interpreted and analysed the process in the course of it (reflection-in-action) and retrospectively (reflection-on-action) applying to the practice-led research. Results and conclusuions The outcome of this study were five textile art works.

Objectives. The purpose of the study is to examine the effect of the individual and systematic support for the pupil who has wide learning difficulties and slight mental disability. The purpose of the study is to develop my own work as a special class teacher and to gather information about the effectiveness of the support. The theoretical background of the study is based on six principal themes. The themes are pre-reading skills, learning to read, reading disability, how does the mildly mentally handicapped pupil learn to read, evaluation of the pre-reading skills in the school and a model of response support. Methods. The thesis is a qualitative case study. Three pupils who have wide learning difficulties and slight mental disability participated in the study. First the study examines pupils’ pre-reading skills with evaluation tools. Based on the evaluation, an individual training program is designed for the pupil which purpose is to promote the pre-reading skills of the pupil. Results and conclusions. The use of evaluation tools was found suitable to evaluate the pre-reading skills. The slight mental handicapped pupil benefitted from a long-term and planned teaching experiment. All pupils pre-reading skills were progressed during the teaching experiment. The teaching experiment in the thesis is clear and feasible to use in a teachers work. The teaching experiment gives new information about the need of pupil’s support and helps the teacher focus the support on practicing the right skill.

Materiality is highly involved with craft and hobby craft. Features of a concrete material have an impact on the life cycle of the product: designing, manufacturing of the raw materials, making of the product use, caretaking and the disposal of the product. Materiality can also be observed from the immaterial perspective, as craft hobbyists´ values and appreciations are involved in the craft making process. There are studies available on craft hobbyists and the meanings of their craft making from different perspectives, but not on choice of materials from material and immaterial aspects. The objective of this thesis was to study and describe material and immaterial factors, when craft hobbyists at present choose materials for their handicrafts and how they would want to choose materials for their craftwork. This study is qualitative and the questionnaire was completed online in a closed Facebook group called Käsitöiden ystävien vinkkipankki. There were 324 participants in the study. Based on saturation, the first 113 answers were analysed by qualitative theory-based content analysis where sustainable crafts theory was leading the process. ATLAS.ti-computer pro-gram was used to help in the analysis. The results of this study revealed that features of materials, aesthetics and quality were the strongest reasons for craft hobbyists making material choices. Need, lifecycle, impulse buy and will to experiment also had an impact on the material choices. From immaterial point of view, the economical and environmental reasons were the most common, but social, societal and psychological aspects were also found. The main emphasis in material choices were in material aspects. In the future craft hobbyists want to make choices by taking aesthetic, ecological, natural, economical and domestic aspects in consideration. Of the participants, 89% (N=324) reported that they are able to make their material choices based on their values. Based on the results of this study it can be concluded that craft hobbyists in this study are mainly interested in making sustainable craft. The results can be applied in teaching and organizing basic education, liberal adult education and commercial craft hobbyist courses to emphasize the viewpoint of sustainable craft.

Objectives Insect food has been marketed as an ecological and ethical alternative to meat with vegetarians as the main target group. Recent studies have shown that several factors affect how people approach the use of insects for human nutrition. Consumers who value ecological, natural and taste aspects in food tend to be more open-minded towards edible in-sects. In this study, I aimed to examine the motives behind food choices and analyse the opinions of vegetarians and vegans towards insect-based nutrition and how their attitudes differ from those of omnivores. The effects of being knowledgeable about insect food was al-so considered. The target group of this study was ecologically and ethically conscious individuals. Methods. The data was collected by structured questionnaire which was shared via social media and University of Helsinki student organisations’ e-mail lists. The sample of this study consisted of 355 consumers’ answers of which 296 were women, 35 men, 13 other gender and 11 who preferred not to answer. Most of the respondents were undergraduate students and highly educated. The data was analyzed by using IBM SPSS Statistics 25 -software. Quantitative data analyses were carried out using crosstabs, explorative factor analysis and Kruskal-Wallis -test. Results and conclusions. The results of this study indicated that the most important motives behind food choices in all diet groups were environmental effects and necessity of meat consumption, food hedonism and sustainable values. Majority of respondents had critical attitudes toward meat consumption. Omnivores’ attitudes towards insect food tended to be more positive while vegans’ opinions on the topic were in general negative. Vegetarians opinions didn’t align with either of the extremes but were slightly closer to those of omnivores. The results also showed that respondents with good or moderate knowledge about insect food had more positive attitudes towards it than those with poor knowledge. The majority of respondents followed discussion on edible insects but only less than half were interested in consuming insect food. In conclusion, the results of this study indicate that insect food was primarily intriguing to omnivores and vegetarians. Those interested on the topic hoped that insect food was introduced to consumers via various courses. They would prefer to try edible insects in restaurants and cafeterias rather than eat them at home.

The aim of the study was to find out what kind of educational videos the members of the nearly 40,000-member Facebook group called “Alakoulun aarreaitta” shared from 1.3.-16.10.2020. The aim of the study was also to analyze how the criteria of the educational video developed by the author in his bachelor's thesis are implemented in these videos. Based on the shared recommendations, 44 videos published in 2004-2020 were selected as research material. The research method was qualitative content analysis, which used 3-4-level indicators modified from the guidelines of a good educational video. 80% of the videos in the research material were made for educational use. More than a third of the recommended videos were related to environmental education and covered a wide range of environmental and safety-related themes. More than a quarter of the videos provided stimuli for studying music and visual arts. Music, exercise and craft videos related to the spring annual celebrations were popular. The analysis showed that the criteria for a good educational video were only partially met in the research material. They performed best in terms of video duration, resolution, personality, and accessibility. Sound quality and background music posed the most challenges. Subtitling, interactivity, commentary, and humor were scarcely utilized in the videos. The author suggests that the use of educational videos in primary schools should be studied in more detail, a state-maintained educational video register should be established to help the discoverability of videos, and educational video authors should be offered training, for example in video format. The new and revised instructions for the authors of the educational videos are listed.

This study aims to compare the two most recent national core curriculums (POPS 2004 and POPS 2014) of the Finnish school system with the help of critical discourse analysis. The goal of the comparison is to find ideological differences within the national core curriculums from a multicultural/intercultural point of view. The final purpose of this study is to then compare the same ideological differences in the content of geography textbooks. Previous studies have shown that school textbooks adapt always in some level to the contents of the national core curriculums. But on the other hand, some previous studies have shown that textbooks may posses the values and ideologies of the people who have ratified the textbook. Our study tries also to find an answer to this problematic question. The data of the research composed of two national core curriculums published in 2004 and 2014 respectively. The text was analysed using the critical discourse analysis from a multicultural point of view. The textbooks used in this study were made by the same Finnish publishing company (Sanoma Pro Oy) : Avara (which followed the national core curriculum of the year 2004) and Geoidi (of the year 2014). The textbooks were analysed from the themes created by the differences that were found in the national codes of education. The results found out that people tend to be the foundation of the concept of culture in both national core curriculums. The previous national core curriculum took culture as a static and stable concept, of which the borderlines were easily defined in accordance with the fundamentalist interpretation of culture. As for the current national core curriculum, it saw culture as a more unstable entity, being constantly in a process. There was no longer discussion of multiculturality, however it was replaced by the concept of cultural diversity. The textbook series that followed the previous national core curriculum (Avara) shared the values of creating borders between cultures and creating more prejudices. The current textbook series (Geoidi) saw culture being constantly in a process, like the current national core curriculum, even though it sometimes depicted a stable view of the culture.

The foundation of our school system lays on the perceptions of normality and deviant. Special education and the dual system are structured in classification, choosing and naming the special. The ontologies of special or normality are yet to be defined, instead they are being understood as self-evident. The equality of students does not actualize. The ideological goal of the inclusive education is de- and reconstructing these othering structures. Furthermore, it aims for reinventing the ways of thinking and talking in relation to what has been named as deviant. Tanzania is among the poorest countries in the world. Since gaining its’ independence there has been efforts in building the school system more inclusive. Yet approximately two million disabled children are still left outside the school system. Superstitious beliefs about disability and its’ background factors are still prevailing in Tanzanian society. Consequently, this causes the discrimination and even violence towards people with disabilities. The purpose of this study is to explore the descriptions of Tanzanian educational science students about inclusive education. In addition, it aims to examine how ‘special’ discursively constructs and positions in these descriptions. This study is qualitative in nature and is positioned in the field of social constructionism. Two students from the university of Dar es Salaam were interviewed using theme interviews. Interviews were analyzed using the method of discourse analysis. The interviewees produced contradictory descriptions about inclusive education. The discourse about special was characterized by normal – abnormal –dichotomy, in which disability was referred as abnormality. Inclusive education had both conditional and unconditional forms in interviewees’ descriptions. The dichotomy of normal and abnormal dominated both descriptions. In their descriptions, the interviewees operated in the field of special. Depending on how they contextualized themselves within their descriptions, they positioned themselves either in or outside the field of special. The results suggest that the societal prejudices toward people with disabilities and the idea of inclusive education creates contradictions which affect the interfaces of professionalism of the future educational professionals in Tanzania.

Research of natural dyes and more ecofriendly textile materials has been of common interest for years. Research of natural dyes has mostly focused on the dyeing of wool, cotton, silk and regenerated cellulosic fibers. This study expands on this topic by combining natural dyes with the latest regenerated cellulosic fiber Ioncell®. When starting this study there was no previous research about the dyeing of Ioncell® and the most recently published research had only fo-cused on industrial dyes. By varying mordant type, acidity and colorant type, their respective effect on the fiber dye up-take could be studied. The data consisted of color measurements of the dyed samples, which were used to analyze the fiber dye uptake. The mordants used were alum, ferrous sulfate and tannic acid with unmordanted reference samples. Acidities used for the dye baths were pH 4 and pH 8. The colorants were dried skins of yellow onions [Allium cepa] and Cortinarius semisanguineus. Wool was used as a reference material for Ioncell® due to its color taking properties being well known and therefore, the dyeing process could be easily verified by it. A spectrophotometer was used for the color measurements. The color uptaking was evaluated by observing the color of the dyed samples and the differences in color between the undyed and dyed fibers. The color fastness to laundering as well as to artificial light were evaluated according to the standards SFS-ENG ISO-B02 and SFS-ENG ISO-C06 by assessing the col-or change, and fastness to laundering was also assessed by the staining of the multifiber ad-jacent fabrics. For a cellulosic fiber, Ioncell's® color uptake was low in alkaline dye baths. With Cortinarius semisanguineus as the colorant, the color take was low regardless of the acidity and the mor-dant type. With Allium cepa as the colorant, in the acid dye bath the color take was quite good. The color varied depending on the mordant used. However, these strong colors had lower color fastness to laundering than the pale colored samples. During staining differences occurred on the behalf of Allium cepa. Acidity or mordant only had an effect on the staining with alum mordanted samples dyed with Cortinarius semisanguineus. The best color fastness to light had alum and iron mordanted samples dyed with Allium cepa. With the tannin and iron mordants the acidity correlated with the color fastness to light, higher pH giving better results. During staining acidity or mordant only had an effect on alum mordanted samples dyed with Cortinarius semisanguineus. For further studies it would be interesting to see if the surprising results between flavonoid and anthraquinoine could be repeated with other dye source mate-rial and would the color uptake improve with the sodium pretreatment of Ioncell® fibers.

Aims. The purpose of this study was to find out the food choices related to the main meal of the day for the elderly, what factors can be found in the background of the choices, and the attitude of the elderly towards counseling related to food choices. The theoretical framework is based on previous research on food choice, aging and nutrition in the elderly. The concept of food sense is used in the study as one of the supporting concepts of the analysis, and the research questions have been guided by Belasco's (2008) food choice triangle, where the concepts are identity, responsibility and suitability. The main questions of the study are: 1. What food choices do seniors make with the main meal of the day? 2. How do older people justify their food choices? 3. How do older people experience food counseling? Methods. The data were collected by interviewing six retirees over the age of 65. Participants in the study prepared their own meals for the day and independently took care of arranging their own food supply and purchasing food supplies. Two of the participants in the study were men and four were women, among them one couple. The research material was analyzed using the content analysis of the qualitative research. Results and conclusion. The food choices of the main meal of the day were influenced by taste, health, price and reasonableness. The food that was prepared was traditional home cooking. The food was prepared by the participants themselves, and decisions on food choices were made independently by the participants, taking into account general food recommendations and their own state of health. The factors explaining the food choices were one's own taste preferences, the utilization of seasonal raw materials and the suitability of the raw materials for one's own diet. There was not perceived a need for actual nutrition counseling. Information coming through the media was perceived as contradictory and confusing.