Finnish schools are famous for their egalitarian principles, but they face challenges related to pupils' equal opportunities and, more broadly, democratic schooling. In this article, we examine the lived consequences of a growing challenge, school segregation, using Basil Bernstein's concepts of inclusion and classification. Our analysis is based…

European quality framework for early childhood education and care calls for creating environments that support all children's sense of belonging. This study aims to advance empirical knowledge on educators' interpretations of children's belonging in early education settings. The study is part of a project conducted in five European countries --…

Basic psychological needs and people's experiences affect the choices they make, and further shape the trajectories followed through school. The present study focuses on the perspectives of people who left school without graduating. Through narrative interviewing processes we collected the storied experiences of eleven imprisoned early school…

The study draws on a relational and intersectional approach to young children's belonging in Finnish educational settings. Belonging is conceptualized as a multilevel, dynamic, and relationally constructed phenomenon. The aim of the study is to explore how children's belonging is shaped in the intersections between macro-, meso-, and micro-levels…

In studies of academic resilience, the concept is typically operationalized by pre-defined cutoff values of students' achievement level and their social background. A threat to the validity of such arbitrary operationalizations is that students around the cutoff values may be misclassified. The main objective of the current study is to apply a…

School engagement is critical to learning and long-term academic success. Feeling overwhelmed with school demands form a threat to students' engagement. We examined the roles of person-internal (academic buoyancy) and person-external (social support) factors in mediating the association between academic stress and school engagement among primary…

Inclusive learning environments have been described as a crucial factor for fostering disabled students' sense of belonging in higher education. However, few empirical studies have elaborated on how learning environments contribute to disabled students' belonging. In this study, we have taken a socio-political approach and widen the theoretical…

This longitudinal study covering two educational transitions examined 1,821 Finnish students' participation in and identification with school and their associations with students' academic achievement and truancy. The students were surveyed (a) at the end of primary school, (b) at the beginning of lower secondary school, (c) at the end of lower…

Schools represent a central meeting place where societal inequalities are reproduced and questions of social justice become important. This study focuses on categorisations related to race, nationality, and gender in interactions in Finnish teaching environments, as well as teacher reflections on these situations. We discuss the implications of…

Academic resilience is difficult to define in an international setting, since economic levels and achievement standards vary across countries and over time. In studies of academic resilience, the concept is typically operationalized using pre-defined cut-offs of achievement and social background. The main objective of the current study is to apply…

Recent national and international evidence suggests that the wellbeing of young people in the UK has decreased. In 2018, the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) asked participating pupils a number of questions about their wellbeing, and some of the measures can be tracked over time. Based on PISA 2015 and 2018, this report…

Recent national and international evidence suggests that the wellbeing of young people in the UK has decreased. The Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) 2018 national reports for England, Wales and Northern Ireland (Sizmur et al., 2019a; Sizmur et al., 2019b; Sizmur et al., 2019c) identified cause for concern for 15-year-old…

This study explores the complexity of emotionally engaging schoolwork among students by analysing the interrelation between the affective and the social dimensions of emotional engagement. The data were collected from 78 Finnish sixth-grade (aged 12-13 years) and 89 eighth-grade (aged 14-15 years) students using picture tasks. The results show…

The question of how students' sense of membership and connectedness to their school can be supported through school practices concerns educational contexts internationally. According to the Programme of International Student Achievement test, students' experiences of school belonging have decreased and polarized in many of the participating…

This study, building on previous studies stressing the bond between positive sense of ethnic identity and school belonging, puts at its center the very process of ethnic identity construction. Thus, identity is viewed as co-constructed, within a social-constructionist perspective on learning. The study is two-folded. It starts out by describing…