Browsing by Author "Hjerppe, Hanna"

The Finnish National Core Curriculum 2014 sets a demand that schools should create a culture that supports student participation. This is based on, among others, the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, which guarantees children the right to participate in issues related to their lives. The right to participate, however, does not by itself lead children to actually participate in a meaningful way. Participation skills can and should be learned. Therefore, as these also are significant concepts in the curriculum, we would assume to find them represented in the educational material also. Teaching and learning has been driven by the educational materials such as books and teacher's materials for decades. This study focuses on examining how much and in what ways these educational materials in Finnish and literature include the students' expression of their opinion. More specifically, in this study it is analyzed what kind development of participation skills the examined material is aimed at. The data consisted of the grade 3 and 4 Finnish and literature students' books and teacher's materials for from the two biggest publishers Sanoma Pro and Otava, based on the 2014 core curriculum. The analysis followed standard procedures of qualitative content analysis and contained some quantification of data. As the analytical concepts there were used, among others, the concepts of argumentation skills and agency. The results indicate the educational material examined were very conservative in using tasks and assignments that include the students own opinions. The tasks did contain some autonomy but were most often on a close-ended scope and included trivial topics with respect to the students' lives. As the scope of the topics was controlled, these kinds of tasks were not considered to be optimal in developing skills of participation. Also, the tasks did not guide the students in constructing an argument, even though it was required in many tasks. The results of this study should encourage schools into reflecting on how choosing the right materials could support students building of expressing their opinions, and thus, developing their participation skills. The authors of the materials, as well as the publishers, should also reflect on how to incorporate more tasks designed at building participation skills in various ways, as it is truly a crucial skill in the changing world.