Tuure Tammi

Democratic Deliberations in the Finnish Elementary Classroom: The Dilemmas of Deliberations and the Teacher's Role in an Action Research Project.

Finnish youth are found to be, despite their broad knowledge, uninterested in politics and in societal participation. As a remedy, international studies suggest enabling democratic experiences in schools. This article discusses an action research project aimed at developing deliberation-based democratic practice in an elementary classroom. Results suggest that the formal deliberative-democratic practice opens up a way for pupils to productively express themselves, challenge the prevailing structures, make sense of social reality and, thus, practise skills and motivations needed in democratic citizenship. However, the teacher is argued to be in constant struggle between deliberative-democratic stance and control orientation. This tension exists in the teacher’s actions and thinking and in his reflections about the contrast between the classroom practice and the overall school ethos. Therefore, this article suggests using the understanding of this tension in scrutinizing projects aiming at pupil participation and involvement.

Reconfiguring urban environmental education with ‘shitgull’ and a ‘shop’

Abstract The worry over urban children having lost their connection to nature is most often addressed with either initiatives of reinserting the ‘child back to nature’ or with evidence aiming to prove that the worry is unfounded to begin with. Neither approach furthers our understanding of child–nature relations as continuing transformation of both ‘child’ (‘human’) and ‘nature’. The objective of this paper is to redirect attention from evaluating connectedness of two separate units to mapping mutual emergence of children and their surroundings in relation to each other. The question asked is: Of what kind is environmental education beyond connectedness of ‘child’ and ‘nature’? The aligned theoretical approach, (critical) posthumanism, will help us to elaborate a premise for environmental education according to which humans and their nonhuman surroundings do not exist as independent of each other. The empirically grounded events discussed in this paper are named ‘shitgulls’ and ‘shops’. These events map mutual emergence of child and nature, evidencing the need for environmental education to understand itself as a relational phenomenon.

Deliberative Communication in Elementary Classroom Meetings: Ground Rules, Pupils' Concerns, and Democratic Participation.

ABSTRACT Previous research has identified numerous obstacles that counteract attempts to involve pupils in democratic processes in schools. Drawing from deliberative democratic theory and sociolinguistic research on dialogic teaching we discuss an intervention grounded on the ideas of deliberative communication and decision-making in an elementary classroom in Finland. We show that deliberative communication can provide pupils with opportunities for democratic participation. This process involves altering conventional classroom interactional patterns and the power processes they uphold. The possibilities of expanding deliberative communication from isolated democratic meetings to everyday schooling are considered.