The study aims to gain a better understanding of the complexity of teacher learning by exploring the elements of teachers' sense of professional agency in the two primary contexts of teachers' work: the professional community and the classroom. Moreover, the relationship with agentic learning in these contexts is studied. A total of 2310 primary…

This case study examined how the agency of a fifth-grade pupil appeared across different learning environments in the primary school context. In this study, agency is defined as the initiatives taken by an individual in interactive situations. The research question is: how does a pupil's agency manifest and vary through taking initiatives across…

To examine different approaches to teacher autonomy in nation-states, three countries were selected for a comparative study: Estonia, Finland and Germany. The emphasis of the study lies on the subjective perceptions of upper secondary school teachers (n = 33 semi-structured interviews) regarding their curricular autonomy and experiences of being…

This article addresses teachers' challenges in relation to other stakeholders, in light of funding policies and evaluation mechanisms. In particular, a condition where pressures toward high pass rates or 'throughput' in the degree system provide a good negotiation position for students with little learning orientation as to their aspirations after…

The authors discuss the results of a study in which they investigated 68 university-level media education students' knowledge of Web 2.0 and their conceptions about its impact on media literacy. The main research finding was that the students argued firmly in favor of new media literacy. Their own use of Web 2.0 applications was, however, rather…

The purpose of the study was to describe Finnish children's conceptions of aspects of the adult world and the development of the structure of children's thinking. Ninety boys and girls between the ages of 5 and 10 were interviewed individually. Each child was asked a minimum of 15 questions in each of the following subject areas: 1) war and peace;…