National curriculum reform is a complex negotiation point of how basic education should be practiced and what role it should take in society. The question of participation in this process is central to creating a coherent, responsible, and implementable curriculum--but still left for little investigation in the national level reforms. Our goal was…

Finland has long been culturally and linguistically varied and continues to grow even more diverse every year. However, this heterogeneity has not been reflected in the country's history curriculum, which has traditionally been built on the idea of a homogenous Finnish nation. This study examines the representation of both old and new minorities…

The paper discusses the Finnish core curriculum (curriculum framework) for basic education, with focus on how lower secondary education in general, and history teaching specifically, is meant to develop the student's democratic citizenship. Developing the student's democratic citizenship is not an explicit aim of history teaching in the current…

National-level educational administrators constantly face the question of how to ensure that the basic education system successfully meets complex local, national, international, and global challenges, and what is the best way to initiate and drive systemic changes in education amid such complexity and to create value for society. Studies have…

Purpose: One key aspect of European curriculum reforms is to empower students with the skills needed to engage actively in the pluralistic and multicultural global society of the 21st century. This study aims to examine the extent of multicultural education within the national core curricula of three European countries: Hungary, Finland and…

Pandemics, like other global challenges, are unquestionably curricular issues. They are curriculum issues not only because of the disrupting consequences of COVID-19 and the economic and social crisis alike but also because people have, through their own activities, contributed to global catastrophes and perpetuated injustices. This article…

Background and context: In 2016, programming was introduced as part of the revised National Core Curriculum for Basic Education in Finland. Over five years after implementation there has not been substantial increase in teacher or student competencies in programming. Objective: This study explored the perceptions, attitudes, and emotions of…

In Finland, curriculum design is allegedly carried out through a deliberative process that involves various stakeholders, interest groups, experts and ordinary citizens. To facilitate participation in curriculum design, online crowdsourcing has been applied. The objective of this study is to explore to what extent the design process of the latest…

It has been suggested that the outcomes of curriculum reform depend on the implementation strategy and coherence making between the reform and school practice. This study examined how teachers perceived a national core curriculum reform implementation in terms of change management and knowledge sharing, and how these contributed to the perceived…

In the present study, we present a cross-country comparison of the status and condition of sustainable development (SD) in the Nordic physical education (PE) curricula. The aim of the study was to increase knowledge of how SD perspectives are represented and conceptualised in the Nordic PE curricula. An expert-driven research approach was used…

Finnish education has received worldwide attention due to the country's performances in the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). Research investigating Finland's positive outcomes in the assessment has highlighted not only the strength of teachers, but also the rigour of Finnish teacher education. Finnish student teachers must…

Bridging curriculum research with educational leadership, we examined the 2014 Finnish curriculum reform compilation and enactment process through the lens of distributed leadership. As a tool for the examination, we used the resource-agency duality model of distributed leadership. It explicates how organizational members create resources and…

In the Finnish National Core Curriculum for Compulsory Education (2014), the conception of language is based on the communal and functional linguistics model of language. From the perspectives of teaching and learning, this requires that learning contexts and pedagogies enable learning in such learning environments, roles, and processes where the…

This article focuses on the visibility and position of different languages in semiotic space, namely the linguistic landscape provided by textbooks. The aim is to determine to what extent the linguistic landscape of textbooks supports the multilingual emphasis of the Finnish national core curriculum and the multilingualism of Finnish classrooms.…

This paper presents a novel process perspective on educational equality policies by examining the relationship between gender equality discourses and gender binary inequalities in the deliberative design process of the Finnish Basic Education Core Curriculum 2014. The analysis applies Nancy Fraser's theory of three-dimensional justice to feedback…