In the process of higher education choice, the prospective students compare and organise universities into a preference order, which indicates status hierarchies among institutions. In this study, the aim is to investigate how (and based on what) recent business graduates construct institutional hierarchies in the national higher education…

Student self-assessment has been framed as a way to address the issues of power in assessment in higher education. However, rarely has self-assessment been used to challenge the broader political issues of grading. In this study, I introduce the concept of summative self-assessment, drawing on self-grading as a practice that seeks to disrupt the…

This article is an ethnography of a student protest against a Finnish university's plans to give up 25 percent of its campus buildings until 2030. The Finnish universities faced financial deficits primarily due to education cuts implemented by Finland's right-wing government between 2015 and 2019. To balance the budget, Tampere University proposed…

Institutional education traditionally entails a premise of language separation. This article aims to analyse language management through spatial ideologies and practices as interconnected manifestations of language policies. Informed by post-structural theorisation, the analysis draws on ethnographic data produced at a co-located campus of…

This article discusses North-South-South higher education collaboration as a context for development education. We analyse an intensive course on qualitative research methods and culturally responsive education organized by a network of five universities from global South and global North. The course aimed to enhance qualitative understanding of…

This case study explored how children's moral expressions like love and violence differ according to the mode of narrative, comic strips or written narratives. Sixteen third-grade children from a primary school in Finland took part in the study. Children's moral expressions were divided into justice and care. Reading frequency of fairy tales and…

In this paper student comments are examined to identify a typology of demands for granting their consent to a teacher's pedagogical authority. The data for this study (136 written responses and 66 interviews) have been collected from students in a Finnish comprehensive school and examined by means of a theory-bounded content analysis. The results…

A Finnish magazine published my request that people remember and write about their teachers. Many writers recalled teachers who, for example, had humiliated, favoured or laughed at their students. This article focuses on a study of such negative memories, examining what writers tell about teachers and students in power relationships and how…

Background: Research into school bullying has a long tradition but a rather narrow scope. Many prevention programmes have been designed, but despite extensive investigation, most studies suggest that bullying is not decreasing. There is something paradoxical in this phenomenon. In order to have any real impact on some phenomena, thorough…

Data from interviews with Finnish secondary school teachers and students and student essays that examined teacher authority and moral dilemmas indicated that the most problematic conflicts related to teacher-determined punishment. Teachers used manipulative means to control classroom life. Their education had not prepared them to handle situations…