Browsing by Author "Machreich, Miklas"

Aims. The aim of this study was to examine the experience of principals in the metropolitan area about how partly integrated worldview education has been implemented and why schools have been transferred to it. In addition, in this thesis I’m interested in how schools have planned the partly integrated way of teaching in their school, how teachers, guardians and students responded when school started to teach it, is the integrated way of teaching successful and what are the principals’ future views in the teaching of religious education. The topic of this thesis is highly relevant, because religious education has been the subject of the debate in both media and research. Research on factors in the background have not been studied at least in Finland. However, some research has been done on principles, pupils and teachers in the objectives and success of integrated worldview education. In the theoretical part of the thesis, I used my bachelor’s thesis from 2020 and topical research in the field. This research aims to examine the subject from the perspective of principals. The research questions are: How schools have implemented and planned the teaching of partly integrative worldview education in their schools? And What were the biggest factors that schools have been transferred into partly integrated worldview education? Methods. This thesis was qualitative in nature which I conducted as an interview. Interviews with six principals took place between December 2020 and February 2021. I chose to interview principals from the metropolitan area who is working at schools that teach partly integrative worldview education. This thesis does not aim for generalizability and the aim of my research was to provide information about experiences of the principals. The material was analysed using content analysis and the interview method was theme interviews. Results and conclusions. Based on the results of the study the integrated worldview education will be implemented in three different ways: to one grade, to 2-4 grades or throughout the whole primary school. I created five factory categories for why schools transferred to partly integrative worldview education. These were: 1. ideological and essential elements of worldview education factors, 2. cultural diversity factors, 3. the opportunity to arrange a teaching in a new way, 4. economic factors, 5. teaching organization factors. None of these factors were the only reason behind the transfer, but many factors worked together with transfer. Partly integrated teaching based on the results, was well received by teachers, pupils and guardians. At the beginning most questioning of the new way of teaching came from the guardians. All principals felt that integrative worldview education was a successful way to teach. In the future principals hoped for more freedom at arranging worldview education at the school level and hoped that Finland would also be transmitted to teaching of common subject for all students in worldview education.