Research suggests that the reported increase in student mental health issues such as study burnout might be related to students' identity problems and their motivations for undertaking higher education. The present study added to this line of research by investigating the associations between identity profiles, motives for attending university and…

How to support young people's agency is a key question of sustainability education. Action competence for sustainability is suggested covering the essential components of youth's readiness to act both individually and collectively, but empirical tests of these associations are scarce. Therefore, this study explores the relationship between action…

Purpose: This paper investigates how academic teachers engage in identity work and make sense of entrepreneurship and academia in an entrepreneurship training programme. Design/methodology/approach: By employing a sensemaking approach, the paper inductively analyses materials from a business idea development camp organised for academic teachers.…

When social justice education is conducted in religious education (RE) classes, it can take the forms of education about (concepts and facts), into (enhancing commitment), with (negotiating practices) and through (pupil-led action) social justice. The first three approaches were used in seven RE lessons observed in urban Finnish lower secondary…

The role of compassion has attracted increasing interest in the higher educational context due to its recognised benefits. As values influence the cognitive, emotional and behavioural domains, certain values are expected to be closely related to the capacity to experience compassion. This paper empirically examines the relationship between…

We examined practices and experiences of leadership during the COVID-19 school closures in 2020 by analyzing Estonian (N = 219) and Finnish (N = 775) school leaders' responses to open-ended questions in an electronic survey. In the analysis we used five categories drawn from the data: Making decisions, Re-organizing schoolwork, Communication,…

Based on the expectancy-value perspective on identity and identity formation, this paper explores the relationship between math identity (MI) and the dimensions of motivation (i.e. intrinsic value, attainment value, utility value and perceived competence) and math achievement in primary school. An additional aim of our research was to explore…

Impostor syndrome (IS) refers to the inner speech of self-doubt and the belief that you are not as competent as others perceive you to be. The university can be considered a work environment prone to IS, especially because of the requirements of present higher education and science policy, which emphasizes continuous evaluation, a competitive…

This study focused on Finnish leaders who participated in a training program called "Positive Leadership Training". The purpose of this study was to enhance the general understanding regarding the emergence of positive leadership in leaders, as they themselves described. A narrative research approach was chosen, and the data were…

There is long-lasting horizontal and vertical segregation between female and male academics in technical fields in Finland. This article takes the lack of female academics as its starting point and focuses on a particular case in Finland: the merger of Tampere University of Technology (TUT) and the comprehensive University of Tampere (UTA), two…

English-medium instruction (EMI) is a global phenomenon with accelerated growth in higher education, and with implications for EMI lecturers' professional tasks and self-understanding. This study examines the professional identity of university lecturers with EMI duties in a non-Anglosphere country, and how their experiences of stress at work may…

This article presents a study that examined the historical social narratives of 14-17-year-old Finnish-speaking adolescents in Finland and transnational settings. Our goal was to research what kinds of narratives young people would tell when they were asked to write the history of a group or nationality most suitable for them. The research…

This study aimed to explore the relationships between Finnish early childhood pre-service teachers' (N = 274; aged 20-49; 92% female) self-reported physical activity (PA) and perceptions of their own enjoyment of schooltime physical education (PE), self-evaluation of the content of their current PE studies, perceived importance of PE, and…

Managerialism in higher education has gained prominence in recent decades. One of the crucial elements of this approach is the steering of the higher education sector, including the introduction of multiple forms of evaluation of academic work. Little is known about how academics evaluate themselves in comparison to their colleagues. Therefore,…

As governments and international organisations have pressured universities to demonstrate the value and effectiveness of tertiary education, universities have started to highlight graduate employability as a key driver and measure of university outcomes. This paper contributes to the underutilised "processual" employability studies by…