Browsing by Author "Inkiläinen, Jaana"

The premise of the thesis was to study Finland’s folk costume’s most prominent aspects and develop learning material based on those aspects. I started by reviewing literature connected to the topic about teaching materials. Based on the results, I concluded that quite a bit of research has been done about folk costumes’ history, and there exists a fairly extensive amount of literature about it. However, there wasn’t that much teaching material available about folk costumes, even though a need for it has been recognized. Therefore, the mission for my thesis became to develop introductory teaching material about folk costumes for beginners. The goal for this thesis is to develop a folk costume manual, that offers an extensive information packet for beginners, along with instructions for wearing and acquiring one. As a research method I chose design-based research which consists of developing the teaching material and the theory of its development. I started the development of the manual by mapping out, what meanings are associated with folk costumes. This was carried out by interviewing four experts. The results were narratives of their experiences around folk costumes. These narratives were divided into categories to be used as material for the first draft of developing the manual, along with literary reviews. The first draft was tested by a heuristic review, in which three of the assessors of the previous step were evaluating the manual by making notes about ideas for developments and other comments. A heuristic list was offered to support the evaluation. Then, the notes were summarized into comments, and the experts classified them based on their prominence. The manual was developed based on the comments, if the experts estimated the problem to be significant. The result of the design-based research is a folk costume manual, and information about the development process. An expert interview and a heuristic evaluation proved to be functional methods for developing this type of learning material. Two themes were highlighted in relation to folk costumes in the experts’ comments: Way of speaking and vocabulary with which the costumes’ instructions and recommendations are being described, and versatility of the folk costumes. These themes had a significant impact on the folk costume manual as well.