Maija Lanas

Growing Pains: Teacher Becoming a Transformative Agent.

This paper asks how a teacher transforms from constrained and controlled to an independent yet dialogical agent. We analyse and describe the transformation of a teacher in the Finnish rural north in one school semester from a conforming teacher to a transformative teacher, examining the narrative of her personal journal and ethnographic researcher’s journal. By analysing the transformation process of one individual teacher, we identify the contexts that an individual teacher may need to consider when transforming. This paper finds that the pedagogical transformation process did not focus on learning new teaching methods and applying them in class; instead, the pedagogic transformation occurred after the teacher reflected personally and professionally and carried out small, concrete changes. The pedagogical transformation culminated in two turning points and was enabled by professional support, personal support, space, and personal emotional resources. A three-year survey reveals that such a transformation had permanent consequences.

Failing Intercultural Education? "Thoughtfulness" in Intercultural Education for Student Teachers.

This paper proposes a rethinking of intercultural education in teacher education, arguing that discussion of the intercultural education of student teachers tends to have the following two gaps: one, such discussion tends to overlook student teacher education as a context for teaching intercultural education, and two, it tends to ignore the self of the teacher educator. This paper aims to address both gaps. In doing so, the first task of the paper is to analyse student teacher education critically, as a structural, ideological context for intercultural education; the second task of the paper is to rethink the pedagogical relationship between a student teacher and a teacher educator, considering the self of the teacher educator in particular. The paper concludes by suggesting ‘thoughtfulness’ as a fruitful idea for the intercultural education of student teachers.

Engaging with theoretical diffraction in teacher education

ABSTRACT This article presents a study in which we began with a question ‘how to teach theoretical reflectivity in teacher education’, and ended with a sentence ‘there is theoretical diffraction in teacher education’. The research presented in this paper took place in the context of a university course in which we have been involved for the past two years. During the course we simultaneously aimed to teach theoretical reflection and to analyse what was happening as we taught theoretical reflection. For two years we asked: What are students doing while we are trying to engage them in theoretical reflection? We noted that students are engaged in theory, but not in ways easily readable to the educators, and that the process could be called theoretical diffraction rather than reflection. Theoretical diffraction during the course was patterned by existing discursive practices: (1) disciplining emotions and focusing on control and answers; (2) personalising school as the teacher, and personally defending it; and (3) prioritising practice over theory and seeing both as dogma.

How Can Non-Verbalized Emotions in the Field Be Addressed in Research?.

This paper looks at how emotions in the field move from one context to another and between individuals, and how they change forms in an arctic Finnish village school. During the fieldwork, non-verbalized emotions influenced the events in the field and also penetrated the research. The paper asks how these non-verbalized emotions can be addressed in research. Research questions are asked on two levels: (1) How can non-verbalized emotions be described for an academic audience? (2) How can emotions experienced in the field be analyzed for academic purposes? Taking a reflexive approach to research, a narrative approach to knowledge, and an interactionist approach to emotions, the paper argues that research gains from a researchers emotional involvement.

Revolutionary love at work in an arctic school with conflicts

This paper explores how “revolutionary love” may be a viable response in a teacher’s pedagogical practices. To do so, we present an in-depth case study of one teacher in a reindeer herding village in Finnish rural north. The paper asks what does revolutionary love mean in teaching practice and what distinguishes loving from non-loving teaching practices? What are the implications for the prospects of personal and community transformation? The findings from this study show the manifestations of transformative loving responses in teaching practice and the opportunities that are created for learning and growth. The study has important implications for educational change in small communities and makes a contribution to considering love-as-revolutionary praxis in teaching.

Emerging Emotions in Post-Structural Participant Ethnography in Education

The chapter, based on a fieldwork conducted in a small school in a reindeer herding village in Finnish Lapland, analyzes the emotions emerging in the researcher, in the participant teacher and in the community during reflexive participant ethnography in a sensitive school context. The chapter is informed by reflexive approaches which see the researcher as an essential part of the research, and by poststructuralist perspectives which acknowledge the constitutive effects of emotions as discursive practices. The chapter discusses the methodological implications of emotions for doing participant ethnography, suggesting that a range of ethical questions in participant ethnography can be addressed by attending to so called “positive actions” in the field. The chapter concludes that there is no space “outside” to research.

An Argument for Love in Intercultural Education for Teacher Education.

Abstract This paper proposes rethinking intercultural education in teacher education, arguing that any discussion of student teachers’ intercultural education should be connected more explicitly to a theoretical conceptualisation of love. The first part of the paper focuses on identifying discursive boundaries in engaging with intercultural education in teacher education. It is argued that if we are to develop intercultural education, we need to consciously move away from some discourses in teacher education, namely instrumentalism, performance orientation, emotionlessness and seeing the relationship between teacher and learner as static. The second half of the paper develops a theoretical alternative by engaging with the concept of love as a basis for intercultural education in pursuing an alternative to the instrumentalist, performance-based, non-emotional fixed-relationship ethos of intercultural education in teacher education.

Thinking beyond Student Resistance: A Difficult Assemblage in Teacher Education.

Abstract This paper draws on feminist new materialist, poststructuralist and post-human theories to rethink discomforting moments when engaging with sensitive topics in teacher education. It is argued that the common approach to such events – as instances of student resistance or pedagogical failures – is both simplistic and problematic, and that a more holistic and in-depth approach is needed. Inspired by Deleuze and Guattari’s ideas of assemblage and affect, our aim here is to re-theorise an instance of such an event in an attempt to make visible how place, space, objects, emotion, affect and history entangle in predictable and unpredictable ways in teacher education. The aims of the paper are to propose new ways of engaging with discomfort in teacher education and, secondly, to introduce post-human approaches in the field of teacher education, where they are underrepresented.

Fabricating expert knowledge of the behaviour of problematic students

Abstract This article examines what constitutes students’ disruptive and good behaviour, as described and defined by teachers. Teachers are viewed as professional experts who produce official information regarding their students. The present study analysed the overarching features of behaviour descriptions provided by teachers in official statements regarding students whom they considered to be problematic, in Northern Finland between 1968 and 1991. The analysis showed that there was no common understanding of what constitutes good or bad student behaviour; behaviour assessment functioned as a ground for reinforcing power-relations and making normative comments; the school context was not addressed in the official statements; in the assessments, the focus was on bad behaviour and the form used to make the statements regulated teachers’ answers. The article concludes that social problems in schools were attributed to individual students and their families through official behavioural assessments, while schools’ social environments or their norms were not considered as being related to student behaviour.

The Making of “Good-Enough” Everyday Lives: Literacy Lessons from the Rural North of Finland

Successful lives tend to be led and defined through vocabularies of material possessions, economic growth, social connections, and increasing mobility. This approach emphasizes standards of living, the level of which is commonly measured in terms of gross domestic product. As a result, the everyday lives of people in rural areas (by definition faraway and scarcely populated, and typically less economically vibrant than their urban counterparts) are often considered unsuccessful and unproductive by the standards of the wider society.