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Through a conversation analytic approach, we investigate the emergence of accounts provided by autistic children in small-group discussions. Nine Finnish children (7-10 years old) attending school with special support participated in a five-month-duration pedagogical practice purposefully designed to enhance children's participation in groups. We analyzed videos of sharing circles where children discussed their ideas and interests. Our data show three different account structures, which created different modes of children's participation and gradually changed how they positioned themselves in the group. Results show how accounts can create different focuses of attention; reveal children's reflections on what is relevant to them, and how to promote the exchange of ideas within a small group. Implications for the development of educational practices are discussed.

This paper aims to interrogate the design studio conversations between teachers and students in order to explore the indicators regarding empathy. To investigate design conversations occurring between design teachers and design students, participant observation studies were conducted at two universities in Finland and Turkey. As an empathic indicator, we addressed (1) how design teachers take the perspective of other agencies and (2) what deliveries are utilised for empathic perspective-taking. It was understood that design teachers identify themselves with both human and non-human agencies as design students, users and materials. Moreover, deliveries leading to the identification of design teachers with these agencies included both discursive and performative means.

Practicum periods are an essential part of early childhood education and care (ECEC) teacher training. To support a student's learning, they need supervision by an expert ECEC teacher to process and analyse information, and supervisory discussions are key forums for that. The aim of this study is to examine the cultural scripts that are identifiable through discourse analysis of supervisory discussions between an ECEC student teacher and a supervising ECEC teacher. In the analysis we focused on the practical cultural script, phases of the supervisory discussions and the structure of the supervisory relationship. The data comprised recorded supervisory discussions. Three discursive phases can be identified in supervisory discussions: (1) the Launching phase, (2) the Reflective phase and (3) the Closing phase. The supervising ECEC teacher is responsible for conducting the discussion and for extending the topics of supervisory discussion. The results of our study show that practices in the ECEC centre dominate supervisory discussions and the role of educational theory remains at the margins. The results further highlight the need to develop collaboration between universities and ECEC centres.

Purpose: This study aims to explore the range of sustainability-related discourses by the stakeholders within a particular Finnish Higher Education Institution (HEI); interaction between the discourses and the context of the HEI; and the extent to which different understandings of sustainability cause challenges for the implementation of the university strategy for sustainability. Specifically, the paper explores how the employees within the HEI make sense of sustainability in their teaching, research and daily life and the extent to which sustainability-related discourses are aligned with the university strategy. Design/methodology/approach: This research draws upon collected qualitative and quantitative data. It focuses on individual discourses by executives, teaching and research staff within an HEI regarding their understandings of sustainability and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Findings: This paper illustrates the key challenges of sustainability and SDG implementation that may emerge in HEIs due to varied understandings. The results indicate a need for efficient HEI strategic vision communication and consideration of the stakeholders' multiplicity of sustainability values. Originality/value: This paper sheds light on the challenges involved in seeking to enhance sustainable development in an academic setting with multiple disciplines and categories of staff guided by academic freedom. The analysis thus advances the understanding of academic sustainability-related discourses and framings as well as mechanisms through which the implementation of sustainability-related efforts can be enhanced in such a context.

This article presents findings from an empirical study in which we investigated Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) students' linguistic resources in the L2 (English) to convey different Cognitive Discourse Functions (Dalton-Puffer 2013; 2016)--"Describe, Compare (Categorize), Report, Evaluate" and "Explore"--in two different contexts. The participants were primary school students (grade 6) participating in CLIL programs in Finland and Spain. To allow comparison, two sets of data were obtained by asking the students to write in response to a similar prompt in the area of social science (History in the Spanish context and Geography in the Finnish context). We compared the frequency of the Cognitive Discourse Functions (CDFs) produced, and the fluency and complexity of students' realizations of CDFs, using tools of Systemic Functional Linguistics. The results reveal similarities across contexts in the frequency and extension of some of the CDFs produced, and differences in terms of CDF complexity, measured in students' use of clause complexes, "Appraisal" resources and complex nominal groups to express different CDFs.

In this article, we examine how policymakers from three Nordic countries, Finland, Iceland and Sweden, reflect on the future at 2 different points in time: just before the first PISA study (1998-1999) and more than 15 years later (2015-2017). The empirical data consist of interviews (N = 37) with national policymakers, collected in two comparative Nordic education policy research projects. As a result of this study, we identified three common themes according to which Nordic policymakers discussed the future: (a) school, work, and social equality in a changing society; (b) policies and practices of education governance; and (c) the future of the teaching profession and teacher education. Whereas these themes constitute a shared semantic basis for envisioning the future of Nordic education, contrasting policymakers' future reflections across time and space also reveals differences, contradictions and changes in ways of thinking about the future.

The reformed Finnish vocational education and training (VET) system is a competence-based, customer-oriented educational programme with two overarching aims: to develop a skilled labour force and to promote social inclusion. Support and guidance have become increasingly important in Finnish VET in recent decades. This study focuses on how linguistic constructions of support and guidance for VET students with special educational needs are constructed in the dynamics between institutional ideas and the language use of VET staff. Data were collected through focus group discussions among different categories of staff. Through a psychological discourse analysis, three different linguistic constructions emerged: a package of support measures, a structure falling apart and dialogue as a bridge builder. Tensions and contradictions were identified between the different constructions. The results point to the need for balance between institutional structures and the possibilities of staff that daily interact with the student to provide holistic support measures.

Finland has repeatedly been presented as a "success story" of equality and education, promoter of human rights and included equality and human rights as part of national curricula. However, research has shown the slow progress of integrating topics of equality and human rights in teacher education despite hundreds of project-based interventions during the past 50 years. We used historically informed discursive reading drawing from the existent literature, human rights and equality policy documents, and data from student teachers (n = 311) about their perceptions. The theoretical framework in this article is grounded in critical and feminist theories. The aim is to analyse why student teachers still report receiving too little education in human rights and equality despite the improvements in human rights and equality education law and policy. We argue that Finnish teacher education has an ambivalent role of representing itself as "exceptional" while reproducing inequalities. Furthermore, this alleged "exceptionalism" does not enable a focus on equality and human rights policies goals. We constructed a general theoretical frame to re-examine critically the role of ambivalence, ignorance, and "innocence", which reproduce inequalities. Our analysis describes several discursive realities of public narratives and student teachers' experiences concerning equality and human rights education. This article provides a novel interpretation frame for the persisting inequalities in education in a country that profiles itself as a champion of human rights and equality. Based on our results, we suggest critical self-reflection for educational policy to advance continuous measures to affect structural inequalities.

The development of videoconferencing technology has enabled new modes of combining in-person and remote teaching. In this article, we investigate interactional practices in hybrid language classrooms that combine on-site and remote participation by way of telepresence technology. Telepresence robots are videoconferencing tools that can be remotely controlled and moved in the 'local' space during video-mediated interaction. In our video-based study, we investigate recordings from university-level foreign language classes (Finnish, German, Swedish and English) involving robot-mediated participants as part of an otherwise on-site classroom student cohort. We draw on multimodal conversation analysis (CA) and analyse a selection of data extracts with a focus on how participants use the robot's mobility as an interactional resource in moments of transition between whole-class and group-based activities. The analysis explores how moving the robot enables the remote student to demonstrate competent participation and to contribute to the progression of the activity transition. We also analyse how teachers make sense of the remote students' engagements by monitoring the positioning and movements of the robot, and how they individually support the remote students in moments that can potentially be interactionally challenging in hybrid environments. These findings expand CALL literature by demonstrating how telepresence robots can enhance the multimodal range of meaning-making resources of remote students within everyday classroom practices in hybrid language teaching. As practical implications, we outline some ways in which social interaction provides both a rich resource base for participants and a site in which many pedagogical questions relevant to hybrid education play out.

Finnish queer teachers work in an esteemed profession but also belong to a marginalized minority group. This article analyses interview data focusing on non-heterosexual teachers' understanding of their language use in schools, drawing from sociolinguistic research with queer linguistics. Methodologically, Critical Discourse Analysis is applied to the data to explore the influence of heteronormativity shaping the way queer teachers understand their language use, resting on the knowledge that language use constructs social meanings and establishes discourses. The analysis provides discourses of safety, incompatibility and resistance that demonstrate the construction of social meanings to the understanding of language use, suggesting the main issues in heteronormative schools are connected to safety and experiencing incompatibility as a teacher. Queer teachers are also compelled to resist heteronormativity in many ways. The article concludes that there are heteronormative power settings specific to educational contexts, information that could be utilized for initiating change.

This qualitative study explores teaching and learning cultures in the context of a community-oriented pedagogical development process initiated during Finnish-Palestinian transnational cooperation. Research data include focus group interviews and texts produced during a pedagogical training program with Palestinian university instructors. The study examines teaching and learning cultures as constructed by discourses in and around the Palestinian university. A poststructuralist discourse analysis identified five discourses of teaching and learning: disciplinary differences, traditional and modern education, improving education, sociocultural and religious context, and political and economic circumstances. The study shows that teaching and learning cultures are dynamic and fragmented as they are constructed by the contrasting discourses. The findings suggest that pedagogical development initiatives need to provide spaces for discursive transformation, especially in the transnational context that introduces additional alternative discourses into the institutional cultural meaning-making.

We present the analysis of an episode of mathematical problem solving in a group, where data came from multiple advanced recorders, including multiple video cameras, Smartpen recorders, and mobile eye tracking glasses. Analysis focused on a particular group that was ineffective in their problem-solving process. Relying on the commognitive theory of learning on the one hand, and on quantitative descriptors of eye-tracking data on the other hand, we ask how do the interpretations of the discourse analysis and gaze data complement each other in understanding the obstacles to problem-solving in this episode. The setting included four Finnish 9th grade students solving a geometrical problem in the students' authentic mathematics classroom. The commognitive analysis revealed intensive social communication (subjectifying) along with the mathematical one (mathematizing), which seemed to interfere with the problem-solving process. Specifically, it masked the differences in students' interpretation of the tasks, and did not allow explication of meta-rules according to which students endorsed mathematical claims. Diagrams of quantified gaze data enabled a more macro-level picture of the full 15 min interaction, revealing differential loci of attention of the group members and thus triangulating the micro-analysis.

Our study examines interpersonal functions enacted through a stance marker in spoken ELF academic discourse. We specifically focus on investigating the functions of "I don't know" in an academic speech event by embracing an interpersonal pragmatics and sociolinguistics perspective to figure out how it contributes to the act of stancetaking as an intersubjective activity. We have examined 14 interactions of doctoral defense discussions from the ELFA corpus. Our detailed discourse analysis of these doctoral defense discussions has revealed five distinctive interpersonal functions of the stance marker "I don't know" allowing speakers to construct their stance and adopt a face-maintaining strategy in the ongoing spoken discourse: prefacing a suggestion, seeking acceptance, hedging/mitigating, checking agreement, and expressing uncertainty. Considering the highly-context dependent and context-regenerated functions of "I don't know," our study attempts to delve into the relational and interpersonal aspect of communication, and thus contributes to research in this strand by disclosing the interpersonal functions of stancetaking as an intersubjective activity with a particular focus on ELF academic discourse.

The doctoral defence is the oral examination of the doctoral thesis. While it is a major milestone for doctoral candidates, this event is often shrouded in mystery. In this article, I explore the doctoral defence from an international perspective. I have studied the format of the defence based on written testimonies as well as the literature on this topic. From this analysis, I distinguish four main elements of the defence format: (1) timing of the defence with respect to thesis publication, (2) number of steps in the defence, (3) public or private defence, and (4) the timeline of the defence itself. I then use these building blocks of the doctoral defence format to discuss differences and similarities between the formats, and finally to categorize defence formats used internationally by analysing the format of 26 countries, 24 of which use an oral defence format. The result is a deeper understanding of the defence format, which is valuable for candidates, committee members, supervisors, and administrators, and which can also serve the current discussions within the European Union on a standard format for the doctoral defence. Ultimately, understanding the defence format removes the mystery surrounding the defence.

External privatisation of public education has emerged in Finland in the admission to higher education. A field analysis of thematic interviews (N = 22) with powerful actors in the private educational market and middle-class young people applying for places at universities in the highly competitive disciplines of medicine and law was conducted. The research task was to examine the discourses that construct the limits of the public and private fields, and the kind of homology that emerges. Four discourses were identified: support, business, social responsibility, and personal responsibility. The private field distinguished itself from the public fields through the discourse of business and attached itself to it through the discourse of support. The dominance of the symbolic power of transformed economic capital in the private field mobilised in the public field was misrecognised during the admission process as 'motivation'. The homology between the two fields was strong yet hidden.

In market-oriented higher education (HE) systems, fee-paying students are positioned as customers, and studying is juxtaposed with service use. In this study, we investigate how students position themselves in relation to the student-as-customer discourse in Finnish HE, in which only students coming from outside the EU and EEA areas are charged tuition fees. We investigate the construction of the student-as-customer discourse in the narrative environment of Finnish HE through interviews with both international fee-liable and Finnish non-fee-paying master's degree students (n = 34). In addition, we analyse social differences that are constructed between fee-liable and non-fee-paying students in relation to the student-as-customer discourse. We argue that fee liability creates unequal positions for some international students and thus challenges the equality principles embedded in Finnish HE. Paradoxically, it was also found that the fee-liable student-customers have less freedom and fewer options than the non-fee-paying students.

Background: Although the contexts, structures and administrations of early childhood education (ECE) may differ internationally, effective pedagogical leadership remains an essential component in supporting young children's development and learning. This paper reports on a comparative study which considered ECE in two different settings, Finland and Florida, providing insight into teachers' perspectives on the characteristics of pedagogical leadership. Purpose: This study sought to investigate and compare the perspectives of ECE teachers and directors in Finland and Florida via their discourses about teachers' pedagogical leadership. The goal was to provide an overview of the ECE teachers' and directors' discourses in each location, in order to allow comparison and a better understanding of the influence of aspects including locational contexts, curricular guidelines and teacher preparation on the ECE teachers' and directors' perspectives. Method: A comparative case study design was used. The data consisted of semi-structured focus group interviews and individual interviews with ECE teachers and centre directors in Finland and in Florida. Data from the two locations were first analysed separately to identify the main discourses; secondly, discourses were compared collectively to reveal major themes. Findings: The analysis indicated a similar conceptualisation of distributed pedagogical leadership. However, differences were identified in teachers' expectations of independence in instructional decisions, and the extension of pedagogical leadership practices within and beyond the ECE centres. The analysis of discourses led to the identification of three major themes, which generated implications for teacher preparation, curriculum development and implementation, and ECE programme directions. Conclusion: The study enables a more comprehensible conceptualisation of teachers' pedagogical leadership as it emerged from teachers' and directors' discourses across two locations. Pedagogical leadership is recognised as an indicator of high-quality pedagogy in early childhood education and the findings highlight the need to continuously support and strengthen teachers' pedagogical leadership.

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 applying the framework of critical discursive psychology to analyse university students' employability construction. Following this framework, employability is something students "do" rather than something they "have." The empirical study was based on interviews of Finnish students of social science. Analysis of the interviews demonstrated notable variation in the ways in which university students talk about their employability. While some students constructed their employability by positioning themselves as traditional bureaucrats, others constructed their employability by positioning themselves as entrepreneurial agents. Nevertheless, the central point is that some students related ambiguously to both positions and tried to manage the ideological dilemma between stability and security of the bureaucrat position, and variability and risk of the entrepreneurial position. The study calls for better understanding of ways in which students and graduates deal with the dilemmatic nature and requirements of the labour market.

Previous research has shown that the importance of education for sustainability is acknowledged in Finnish early childhood education and care but not systematically put into practice. At present, curricula require considering social, cultural, economic and ecological sustainability in all activities. In this research, discourse analysis was used to examine Finnish personnel's views on the ways in which social and cultural sustainability are taken into account and implemented in work with children. The participants consisted of 53 ECEC teams. The data were gathered through the Assessment tool for Promotion of Sustainability in ECEC (PROSUS). Based on the analysis, three constructions emerged which describe the sustainability work with children under 6 years old. Findings revealed the challenging nature of integrating social justice issues into pedagogy. The implications of this research point the necessity of strengthening personnel's knowledge and understanding of social justice and emphasising children's own agentative role in promoting sustainability work.

The paper explores the "in situ" negotiation of in/exclusion in and through language in a multilingual professional setting, paying special attention to the relationship between language and space. We argue that multilingual practices and material space are co-constitutive; individuals enact group membership and professional roles spatiolinguistically and re/produce in/visible social and material boundaries. Despite the well-established literature on in/exclusion, the ways in which it is negotiated in asymmetrical, emplaced, workplace encounters is still underexplored. We introduce a "topographies of practice" framework and show how professional asymmetries are enacted in and through language choice and language use in the multilingual workplace. We take an Interactional Sociolinguistic approach and report on the analysis of 23 h of interactional data and 42 h of ethnographic observations from a professional, multilingual kitchen in Finland. We show patterns that are un/marked in the data and constitute the norms in this particular workplace. We argue that topographies of practice are topographies of in/exclusion enacted in and through situated encounters; we pay special attention to the role of employees who are legitimised to cross visible and invisible boundaries and we close the paper with recommendations for future research.

Internationalization at home (IaH) policies in higher education institutions (HEIs) are rarely negotiated with and by students. Therefore, students' takes on such policies could be missed opportunities for HEIs. This qualitative study investigates international and local students' negotiations and meaning-making of integration and IaH as stated by institutional policies. The data consist of online forum entries and reports from small group discussions between 40 students in English medium master's programs in Finland (Europe). The key concepts of ideology and imaginary serve as entries into data analysis, which consists of enunciative discourse analysis. The findings indicate a perceived hierarchy of mutual but not equal integration between university staff, local and international students. Furthermore, the categories of 'international as guests' and 'local students as hosts' are challenged by the participants. Local students are considered as 'guests with more privilege' and international students as 'guests with less opportunities'. The responsibility to achieve IaH goals is perceived to be unequally distributed among these actors. Practical implications include reconsidering the categories of 'international' and 'local' students and how IaH policies could share the responsibilities to achieve their goals more equally among students and staff.

This article explores university students' approaches to and positions with regard to making the most of their study time. The article discusses how various normative societal expectations around students' use and management of time feature in their talk about how they organise their everyday lives. The research is based on thematic interviews (n = 28) that focused in detail on students' day-to-day activities that were generated with students from two sets of generalist study fields in three regional Finnish universities. The results of a discursive analysis of students' positionings reveal three discursive positions that represent of a variety in students' approaches to make sense of the temporal organisation of their everyday lives as students. The identified discursive positions draw on broader societal discourses and ideals about fast completion of studies, significance of academic immersion in becoming an expert, and optimising one's time use to enhance employability.

Adopting the methods of multimodal conversation analysis, this study demonstrates that adult second language (L2) users with emergent literacy formulate requests as 'complex multimodal Gestalts' consisting prototypically of deictic or depictive gestures combined with gaze, situationally relevant material, and vocal or linguistic resources. The data obtained for this study are from classroom interactions and out-of-class service encounters that were conducted as part of pedagogical tasks in the context of integration training for adult L2 students with emergent literacy. The analysis shows how co-constructed request sequences typically involve multimodal negotiation in which the co-participants support L2 users to formulate requests that are understandable and that contribute to the progressivity of the interaction. The findings contribute to an understanding of practical requests as multimodal, context-sensitive, collaborative actions and underline the importance of this perspective especially from the view of L2 users with emergent literacy.

Background: Questions about the optimum age for young people to complete their compulsory education, and how this relates to issues of equity, are familiar topics of debate in many jurisdictions. The aim of educational equity has been fundamental in Finnish education, upheld through decades of reforms. A recent reform has extended compulsory education in Finland to the age of 18. As part of gaining insight into its implications, more needs to be understood about how it is perceived by young people in education settings. Purpose: This study sought to explore young people's perceptions of extended compulsory education in the context of the recent reform in Finland. Methods: A total of 19 focus group interviews were carried out with 56 15-to-16-year-olds who were among the first cohort of young people experiencing the extension to compulsory education. Data were analysed qualitatively, using a discourse-analytical approach. Findings: Three main discourses emerged, which helped illuminate the young people's views: (i) grade discourse, (ii) potential equity discourse and (iii) part-of-the-system discourse. Goals and pressure to succeed were emphasised through grade discourse; the extension was also discussed in terms of equity around provision of accessible information and access to education. While most participants deemed completing secondary education self-evident, doubts arose about the system's flexibility and whether it might hinder choice. Different discourses slightly influenced agency; grade discourse reinforced young people's goal-oriented stance. Conclusion: This study highlights how certain 'ideal' positions may be favoured among young people considering various educational and career paths. While effective for those with clear goals, it could discourage deviation from peers' choices. The findings draw attention more broadly to the need for quality study guidance and wellbeing prioritisation for all young people as they negotiate transitional points in their individual learning journeys.

This article examines how second language (L2) interactional competence is manifested in students' use of "and"-prefaced turns when doing meaning-focused oral tasks in pairs and small groups. Drawing on video recordings from English-as-a-foreign-language upper-secondary classes recorded in Czechia and Finland, 86 sequences involving "and"-prefaced turns were scrutinized using multimodal conversation analysis, focusing on language, gaze, and material resources. The findings suggest that by producing "and"-prefaced turns, students orient to task progression. These turns have two functions: task managerial and contribution to the emerging task answer. By using task-managerial "and"-prefaced turns, the current speaker invites another student to participate, while in "and"-prefaced contributions to the task answer, a participant adds to, generalizes, or modifies the previous task answer. The analysis shows that students mobilized their L2 interactional competence in producing "and"-prefaced turns in close coordination with embodied resources and with respect to the spatio-material surroundings and the nature of the task. These findings contribute to the multimodal reconceptualization of the grammar-body interface and research on turn-initial particles within L2 interactional competence.

Based on the identification of the discourse of choice in debates on neoliberalism, meritocracy and post-feminism, this article analyses how highly educated mothers position themselves within the discourse of choice and use "choice" as their discursive resource when reflecting on how their demanding careers combine with motherhood. The data come from 26 interviews with mothers employed in research and innovation in Finland. The analysis reveals five ways in which the mothers positioned themselves within the discourse of choice. It appears these ways are all based on, and produce, the moral primacy of individual self-governance. We treat this as a demonstration of how neoliberalism is internalized and lived. Furthermore, the results show that an egalitarian welfare society whose policies support work-childcare reconciliation does not remove the need to use the individualistic discourse of choice. We suggest that this could be changed by voicing the challenges it poses to many women.

This paper examines the roles of different language ideologies--sets of common-sense beliefs about language and its speakers--in students' identity construction and negotiation in the context of internationalizing higher education. Along with the increasing diversity of students as English speakers, language ideologies have been critically examined for potential contribution to inequalities among students. I analyze two focus group discussions of students from international English-medium instruction master's programs at a Finnish university. I explore the students' talk using critical discursive psychology to illuminate possible intersections between language ideologies and students' situated identity construction, paying attention to ideological dilemmas alongside students' identity negotiation. The findings indicate that both emerging and established language ideologies may become relevant to students' identity construction and negotiation. Possibly, turning students' attention towards the multilinguality of every student and the specific purposes and characteristics of academic language might contribute to the discursive sustainability of inclusive interpersonal relationships among students.

In 2017, the International Bureau of Education (IBE) at the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) put forth seven global competences to address accelerating technological progress and increasing levels of complexity and uncertainty affecting many facets of society (Marope, 2017). These competences were used in examining participant discourse in a global, collaborative digital makerspace environment, where students ages 12 to 17 from six countries develop and share STEM-focused media artifacts. The participants communicate synchronously through video conference calls, referred to as online global meet-ups. The meet-ups allow students to present media artifacts they have created, share ideas, exchange information, and provide feedback. In this analysis, epistemic network analysis (ENA), a technique in quantitative ethnography, is used to examine the connections made among the IBE-UNESCO global competences in a meet-up involving participants from Finland, Kenya, and the U.S. ENA network models were created initially for the three sites, then further disaggregated by time segment to analyze how participant discourse patterns may have evolved in each context. Through this approach, the paper explores more broadly the interactive role of media making, cross-cultural engagement, and collaborative learning in the development of global competences in students.

This study employs interviews and observations to investigate instructional rationales of two purposefully sampled teachers with divergent classroom discourse practices in Swedish-speaking Finnish lower secondary mathematics classrooms. Studies on classroom discourse often point to beliefs and contextual factors shaping teachers' discourse practices. Less is known about how tensions perceived by teachers can influence the instructional rationale in a context such as Finland, known for traditional and teacher-centered mathematics instruction. The findings of this study suggest that these Finnish teachers' instructional rationales for differently enacted classroom-discourse practices are grounded in similar concerns of student needs, related to student learning, well-being, and equity. One of the teachers perceived tension between these concerns and mathematics education literature's ideals of classroom discourse and avoided engaging students in discussions other than in tightly teacher-led format. The other embraced the idea of discourse as facilitating learning and created methods for giving all students equal access to the perceived benefits of mathematical discussions. The identified tensions of student learning, well-being, and equity can be used as guiding principles in developing teachers' discourse practices in professional development in Finland and beyond.

Bad student behaviour is argued to be one of the major challenges for schools today. In response to the challenge, there is a strong body of literature aiming at fixing student behaviour. In this paper, we look into professional knowledge discourses regarding 'bad student behaviour,' focusing on one national context, Finland, to explore how disturbing behaviour is discursively established in the professional literature for teachers seeking help with challenging student incidents. We analyse expert sources that are readily available for Finnish teachers (n = 19), looking at what fields of science are represented, whose voice is represented, how the problem is defined, and where it is located. We conclude that the professional discourse about disturbing behaviour in Finland places the problem on the individual child or family while also silencing the individuals in question and portraying them as deficient. Furthermore, the sources produce a decontextualised notion of behaviour and describe it as either acceptable or unacceptable, completely overlooking any societal, historical or cultural aspects of behaviour or other mitigating circumstances. The findings resonate with research findings from other international contexts.

Previous research has indicated that asylum interviewers--contrary to recommendations--use more closed than open questions to elicit information. In the current study, we investigated how information is elicited in asylum interviews by analyzing question-answer pairs in 105 official Finnish asylum interview transcripts. We developed a new coding framework for analyzing the content and characteristics of the answers and used previously collected data on the questions. As predicted, we found that open questions elicited more new information and new key aspects of the asylum claims than other question types. We further extend on previous research by showing that the free recall phases only elicited half of all key aspects of the claims and that mis-matched answers and difficult or unanswerable questions were alarmingly common. Interviewers would benefit from more training in asking open questions, creating and maintaining rapport, resolving misunderstandings, and increasing the efficacy of the free recall phase.

Introduction: This study concerns students' criteria in the evaluation of Internet sources for a school assignment requiring reflections on a controversial issue. The findings are elaborated by analysing students' discursive accounts in justifying the use or non-use of sources. Method: The interview data was collected in a Finnish upper secondary school during classes on religion and ethics. Thirty-nine students were interviewed in one to three person groups after they had given the presentation in the classroom. Analysis: The interviews were analysed using the discourse analysis in social psychology approach. The analysis concerned how different accounts related to information evaluation are used to justify the truthfulness of knowledge. Results: The most used evaluation criteria were the authority and neutrality of information. Various types of evaluation criteria and arguments were used simultaneously. The arguments were, in part, comparable to evaluation criteria presented in previous research. Conclusion: The evaluation criteria are cultural objects that can be utilized in various ways within different discursive contexts. The criteria were used in students' accounts alternately, not as mutually exclusive. Personal interests and high motivation with regard to the school assignment's subject were essential for students to identify and use more reflective and diverse argumentation related to evaluation criteria.

In early childhood education, the concept of distributed leadership has emerged as a key analytical tool for understanding leadership as well as a normative guide for what leadership should be. The concept originates in Peter Gronn's work, where it is positioned as overcoming the structure-agency debate, which is a foundational question in the study of social reality. While distributed leadership itself has been extensively studied, the problem motivating Gronn's work--the structure-agency problematique--has rarely been investigated. In an effort to create a deeper understanding of the role of structure and agency in constituting early childhood education leadership, this study examines how these two key dimensions of social reality structure early childhood education center leaders' understanding of leadership. The data for the study consist of focus group interviews where early childhood education center leaders discuss various aspects of leadership. The data are analyzed in the broad framework of post-structural discourse analysis, using the analytic concept of frame, which reveals the interplay of structure and agency in early childhood education leaders' understandings of their work. The findings show that early childhood education center leaders' understanding of leadership is mainly focused on the side of structure and offers few chances for the kind of collective effort hoped for by Gronn.

This article reports a study on an encounter between preschoolers and contemporary photography. The article has two aims: first, it elucidates preschoolers' meaning-making when viewing photographs, and second, it investigates the possible benefits of using contemporary photography as a forum for prompting children's aesthetic agency in early childhood education. This article is based on a qualitative case study that draws on childhood studies, research in art education and visual cultural studies. The data was produced in a photography workshop in a Finnish daycare center in autumn 2014 during which children both viewed contemporary photographic art and took photographs themselves. The article reports on preschoolers' accounts of contemporary photography studied by applying discourse analytic thinking. In contrast to earlier research findings, the article elucidates diversity and flexibility in the preschoolers' accounts and their aesthetic agency expressed in both individual and collective meaning-making.

Technology development allows new ways of communication, learning and collaboration. This is reflected in the professional scenarios of language teaching. Modern curricula value participants' interest and meaningful (inter)action as a basis for learning. Sensitivity is important in anticipating participants' changing needs in modern learning environments, characterised by linguistic and technological hybridity, as well as novel pedagogical approaches. Language students, more familiar with teaching in the traditional classroom, need to appropriate new practices to orchestrate learning in settings requiring multiple activities simultaneously. This study explores how language students learn to manage complex pedagogical situations during a university course in which they create an online project for school children. During online chat sessions administered for the school pupils, the university lecturer's office was an important site for negotiating and acting on pedagogical issues as well as practical matters arising from the work at hand. Nexus analysis was used as a research approach. Primary research materials include video recordings from the university lecturer's office, chatlogs and reflection papers from students. The study is relevant for reconceptualising the changing roles of (language) teachers and provides new perspectives for language teacher education in a technology-rich world.

Background: Teachers' limiting conceptualizations of students influence students' learning opportunities. We analyze teachers' professional conversations to understand how dialogues can expand teachers' conceptualizations. Methods: We examine professional dialogues from nine whole-school intervention meetings. Drawing on discursive psychology and activity theoretical notions of learning the study conceptualizes teachers' collective assumptions as a lived ideology actively sustained by stabilization discourses. We analyze the discursive devices through which the teachers' talk about their students limits/expands their sense of what is possible in their teaching and their dialogic effects. Findings: Our analysis finds a range of discursive strategies that sustain or re-stabilize the lived ideology. Even when challenged by contrary evidence (e.g., surprises), dilemmatic tensions and reframing repair actions are found to close potential dialogic openings. Importantly, we identify a form of discourse that avoids immediate closure, characterized by sustained reflection on the students' challenges developing a need to change. We term this reflexive noticing: it is enabled through sustained puzzle, constructing dilemmas as origin of change and discursive consciousness of stabilization. Contribution: We illustrate why contrary evidence often fails to shift limiting conceptualizations about students and show the discursive mechanisms generating possibility knowledge. Implications for teacher learning are discussed.

This article sets out to analyze how landscape functions in an educational context. It examines how landscape functions as an irreducible totality and as a nexus of discourse. The article focuses on the materialization of de jure and de facto discourses pertaining to languages in a primary level school in Southwest Finland. It also examines the role of different landscape participants in relation to the materialized discourses. Therefore the purpose of this study is to render visible, not the visible (Klee 1920, 28), focusing not on appearances but on the apparition of materialized discourses (Schein 1997). In order to achieve that, the article provides a concise examination of the relevant core concepts, discourse, discourse materialized and landscape. The results indicate the materialization de jure and de facto discourses on monolingualism and bilingualism, pertaining to Finnish and English. Teachers and staff are largely responsible for the materialization of these discourses.

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 the categorisations on social justice and the role of the teacher in these situations. We conducted video observations of a sixth-grade teacher in a Finnish primary school. The study employs both critical multicultural education approaches and Conversation Analysis. Results show that the pupils use categories race, nationality, and gender in ways that limit the agency and positioning of some of the pupils. The extensive and intersecting categorisation in teaching situations makes it demanding for teachers to address and challenge unequal norms attached to the categories. Results also indicate that teachers need an understanding of othering and normativity in order to allow spontaneous critical discussion and problematising categorisations that pupils use. Also, the results highlight the importance of involving pupils in the process of questioning norms that do not provide all pupils with the same agency or sense of belonging.

This study explores how five pre-service subject teachers from different disciplines made sense of and characterized their teacher identity after completing their yearlong pedagogical studies. Leaning on the Bakhtinian dialogical approach and socio-culturally oriented discourse analysis, we examine how the students negotiated multiple voices in their narratives (interviews) and how they positioned themselves in relation to these voices. In the students' identity negotiation, the Discourse based on participatory pedagogy and education responsibility contradicted with the Discourse of traditional pedagogy that the students had as a cultural resource from their own youth. These different Discourses collided with each other and were tested and reflected in an internal dialogue. Through this process, the students negotiated their prospective subject teacher identity.

In this article, we ask how Finnish basic education school textbooks in social science portray tourism and countries with a big tourism sector. We have analyzed the textbook quotes from a postcolonial perspective, using discourse theory analysis. The idea is to challenge what is considered objective information about tourist locations in school textbooks. The results show that even if some ethical questions are at times debated openly, particularly environmental problems at tourist sites, tourism is considered as something predominantly positive. The textbook reader is assumed to be a potential tourist. Some textbook quotes resemble tourist brochures, while people living in tourist locations are given marginal importance. A key argument is that the unequal global power relations between tourists and those living in tourist locations are not challenged. Considering tourism from a postcolonial point of view brings a vital perspective to social science education. There is a need to challenge the positions that are appointed to textbook readers.

The invasion of managerialism in universities has changed the prerequisites for academic work. Decision making and control over academic work based on the expertise of academics have declined; in turn, managers have gained more decision-making power. Our study's target group comprises academics representing educational sciences in two Finnish universities, where large managerialist reforms have been carried out. We explore how the academics positioned themselves towards the new management system based on managerialism. In the analysis of our qualitative work welfare survey data, we applied a narrative-discursive approach. The positionings traced in the analysis ranged from resistance to managerialism to desire for strong management. The new management system was regarded as problematic because it was perceived as neglecting traditional academic ideals. We conclude that increased managerial control, accompanied by many administrative duties, may disturb the basic work of academics and therefore decrease the quality of research and teaching in universities.

Through detailed multimodal analyses, this article shows how participants of an English language course create and manage sites of attention for achieving collaboration across multiple spaces. The ethnographic data for the study comes from an English language course 'Academic reading' offered for university students majoring in Finnish Sign Language. The paper examines a classroom situation where the participants interact simultaneously with each other in a chatroom environment and physical environment via several mediational means, such as Finnish Sign Language and typed text in a chatroom that appears on students' tablets and on a large screen in the classroom. The emerging interactional patterns coordinate fragmented interaction into mutual sites of attention so that the participants are able to collaborate. Further, the paper reflects how gaze plays a crucial role in coordinating actions together. Gaze itself is seen as a mediated action which begins to display regularities, and 'comes into being' through long and short life trajectories. The longer trajectory of the mode of gaze is traced to the patterned ways of using gaze in signing communities of practice.

This study offers detailed observational analyses of how teachers use optimism as an instructional resource when responding to students' failure expectation displays in classroom situations. The results were based on video-recordings of 25 lessons in two Finnish part-time special education settings, analysed by means of applied conversation analysis. The results showed that the teachers boosted optimism by inverting students' negative utterances, giving examples of successful experiences of peers, offering praise for students' earlier performance or focusing on problems through instructional support. The study underlines the importance of addressing and elaborating students' negative learning-related self-assessments in classroom interactions.

The language used around the digitalization of education tends to be inherently political, value-laden, and deterministic. This position paper scrutinizes this so-called 'Ed-Tech speak' via narrative methodology. The analytical focus is the paradoxes that exist between the normalizing master narratives of Ed-Tech speak and the complexity and polyphony of everyday praxis in terms of participation. By using an educational tablet project conducted in Finnish primary and secondary schools as an empirical example this paper will problematize the promise of participation in the context of the digitalization of education through three different viewpoints: paradoxes of societal participation, paradoxes of participatory pedagogics, and paradoxical politics of participation.

In this article, the authors refer to key national policies, and associated politics, in the Swedish, Finnish and Australian contexts, to reveal the key discourses that characterise how ongoing teacher learning is constituted in these settings. Drawing upon Peck and Theodore's notion of 'fast policy', the authors identify what they describe as the 'markers' of fast policy in relation to teachers' continuing professional learning, at the same time as they indicate countervailing praxis-oriented discourses that challenge these 'fast policy' approaches. Their research reveals a complex picture, indicating the clear prevalence of such markers in the Australian context, recent challenges to such markers in the Swedish context, and less evidence of such markers in the Finnish context but with some anomalies more recently. The research presents contestation to such markers as resources for hope, at the same time as it cautions how various markers of fast policy exert influence on teachers' learning.

This article examines how two Finnish religious education (RE) teachers, one in Islamic and one in Lutheran RE, seek to construct openness when dealing with religious truth claims and religious commitment, the key areas in which indoctrination might take place. It also observes how these constructions work in the classroom and explains them in the light of teacher intentions and pupil pre-understandings of the RE classroom setting. Focusing on Islamic RE contests secular and Protestant discourses concerning the practices of RE in Europe, especially in denominational settings. Comparing the two contexts, Islamic minority and Lutheran majority RE, also helps to avoid over-interpretations about the impact of Islam. The issue is approached by combining classroom observations with teacher and pupil perspectives expressed in interviews. The findings suggest that there was frequent mismatch between teacher goals and pupil interpretation. In order to 'do openness' in the classroom more effectively, RE teachers should regard openness and critical thinking as learning objectives instead of mere circumstances of learning.

The notion of content and language integration has recently become a key topic of inquiry in research on content and language integrated learning and other kinds of bilingual educational programmes. Understanding what integration is and how it happens is of fundamental importance not only for researchers interested in gauging the possibilities and limitations of bilingual programmes, but also for practitioners seeking optimal ways to support student development. This study investigates integration as it takes place in the context of collaborative writing in the classroom. Drawing on conversation analytic methodology, text production is investigated as a social and sequentially evolving phenomenon. The analysis focuses on interactional sequences through which secondary school students produce and revise written task answer formulations. Sequential analyses of selected interactions describe the interactional organisation of the focal practice and show how, in their negotiation about what and how to write, students integrate content and language in everyday school work. It is argued that an investigation of what is at stake to students when they produce texts can shed light on their practical orientations to content and language integration. Based on such perspectives, integration appears a more complex phenomenon than the interface of form and meaning.

Researchers often find themselves reflecting on either/or questions. This article examines the multiple discursive reality of gender equality, a topic comprising several juxtapositions connected to either/or thinking which also provide the topic its legitimacy. The examples come from the context of gender equality work and gender equality policy, which has been shaped in Finland by public bodies focused on equality, the Government and Government bodies, ministries, political parties, labour market organizations and NGOs, particularly the women's movement. Our aim was to establish a discursive-deconstructive reading that would allow us to move from either/or thinking to a both/and approach. This kind of approach enables to consider and acknowledge differences as cultural categorisations enabling to categorize and hierarchise people.

Relying on theories of journalistic ideals and critical discourse analysis, a case study was conducted to investigate how journalism students (re)define journalism ideals in the era of social media. Data were gathered from focus group interviews with European and African students participating in a joint journalism program. The results indicate that the renegotiation of journalism occurs in the discourses of open and collaborative journalism, accountable digital journalism, and challenging and contextualized journalism ethics, where an autonomous journalism profession moves toward collaboration with citizens. An accountable and transparent news process and public awareness of the need for journalism ethics are vital.