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Early childhood/educational environmental imaginations transmit national, global and planetary views of the world through texts, visual representations and material objects. These representations produce politics, including nationalism and globalism, and play a part in policy making as well as in how children learn to view and relate to the world. Education, however, needs a new political attractor during anthropogenic climate change that differently orients political engagement with the world for education. In this article, we think with the four political attractors Latour describes: the national, global, planetary and Earth, and Cobb's notion of the child's primary relatedness to the world. We explore children's environmental imagination in their drawings and associated stories to highlight the kinds of politics present in their views promoted by current imaginations. Then, we spin these stories further with speculative experiences our own relation with the world with Latour's ideas and point to a new political object the Earth and Earthly politics for education.

The focus of this article is on the history and current trends of feminist ethnography in Finland. It highlights the impact of feminist ethnography in Finnish educational research and illustrates how feminist ethnography has succeeded in asking novel questions and developing methodologies by drawing on multiple feminist theories. The article is based on a review of studies, selected to represent the multiplicity of themes, theoretical approaches and methodological epiphanies, as well as earlier analyses and memories of researchers who launched feminist educational ethnography in Finland. Drawing predominantly from the British feminist educational ethnography, in Finland feminist ethnography in education took its first steps in the 1990s and achieved a stable position in the early 2000s. Feminist ethnography has contributed to a debate on social justice by highlighting the hidden modes of discrimination and exclusion in educational institutions, thus 'troubling' the national self-image as a forerunner of equality and social justice.

In Finland, the vocational education and training (VET) qualifications lead into work. Also, active citizenship is one of its aims, and qualification enables application to tertiary study. In terms of these aims, literacies are central. In the context of competency-based VET, we analyse how a curriculum of literacy is realized during literacy lessons. The theoretical background lies on sociocultural understanding of literacies as social practices, and this article discusses the school subject of literacy representing theoretical knowledge in competency-based education. Methodologically, the paper draws from feminist ethnography, and the analysis focuses on examining language use in recurring classroom events. We analyse ethnographic data from the literacy lessons for the car mechanics and building construction programmes (2018-2020). These are programmes with an overrepresentation of male and working-class-based youth. The analysis highlights that during the lessons, the value of literacy manifested as market-oriented and work-relevant 'usefulness', and the literacy curriculum was realized as delimited to labour contexts and topics. There was an imperative of motivation for conducting literacy schoolwork which draws on stereotyped notions of students who are seen as not interested in literacy but in longing to labour. Based on this analysis, the literacy curriculum was realized as 'literacy for labour'.

This review investigates how the scholarly fields, themes and concepts of 'inclusive education' are applied in the research and educational contexts of Finland, Iceland and the Netherlands. It identifies and outlines which thematic areas of research and sub-fields of study are referenced in each country by applying a systematic, multilingual approach. We reviewed literature in the local languages of each of these countries over the past decade, from 2007 to 2018, paying particular attention to (a) micro-level, in-depth, classroom interactions; (b) social and political contexts; and (c) social categories. Results of this review emphasise that across all three countries (a) there are similar conceptualisations of inclusive education dominated by categories of disability and special needs, and (b) there is a similar lack of attention to modes of exclusion based on social class, gender, ethnicity and geography as well as to how these can be addressed by more advanced research on inclusive education in these local spheres.

Public debates in Finland on the unwillingness of boys to learning literacy have called for masculine role models to promote reading. This article analyses a privately funded project where two adult males lead a series of gangsta rap workshops during the Finnish language and communication lessons. The workshops were aimed at students in male-dominated fields in vocational education and training (VET). From a methodological perspective, this study contributes to the field of feminist ethnography, and the article draws from sociolinguistic research on swearing. The analysis demonstrates how the workshop leaders profile the students as 'laddish', which justifies the leaders' swearing and thus creates an affiliation to working-class, anti-school masculinities. The article concludes by reformulating the concept of "antipedagogy" that intersects the 'failing boys' discourse with neoliberal mentalities of education. This involves a necessity for leaders to please by performing 'laddism' and drawing distinctions within the educational context.

This article focuses on how students make use of different spaces in one compulsory school in Iceland and how gender is produced through activities in these spaces. Ethnographic fieldwork was conducted for three months in 2016 among 8th and 9th graders at one public school in Iceland. Our analysis is based on poststructural and material theorisation in a country with one of the most progressive curricula in the world. It indicates that the school environment favours dividing practices between boys and girls in both overt and subtle ways, with a relative lack of resistance to gender division. The division and gender order are maintained through discourse and practices that support particular forms of masculinity with an emphasis on athletic embodiment and sports knowledge. This gender division affects power relations in the classroom, hindering the facilitation of gender-inclusive environments and gender-sensitive practices that are obligatory in Icelandic education policy.

Drawing from critical disability studies and cultural studies, this article unpacks cultural understandings of digital abilities. We analyse policy documents on digital education as cultural texts which communicate cultural values. Methodologically, we understand policy ideas as deriving from the larger culture. Our analysis first explores how abilities are connected to economic growth, as well as what kind of history of ideas frames this presumption. Second, it explores the assumption of constantly changing technologies and the workers who must adapt themselves to such a situation. Third, the article interrogates citizenship as a cultural idea within the current policy ideas about digital skills. Our account offers new perspectives on the analysis of biocapitalism and provides a specific analysis of how able-mindedness is foregrounded in digital education. It argues that digitalisation, as a policy matter, intensifies discourses emphasising the development of abilities and that this social tendency is neither value neutral nor necessary. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigates how nation is taught, learned, practiced, and performed in early childhood educational settings in Australia and Hungary. Analysis, based on comparative multi-sited ethnography, reveals nationhood as a taken for granted, unreflexively promoted framework for organizing social life. The "pedagogy of nation" operates in different ways in these two settings. In Australia, it draws on contemporary patterns of lifestyle, whereas in Hungary it rekindles past traditions within contemporary global flows of culture. The paper concludes by calling for the relevance of revealing everyday nationalism in institutions for young children and for reflexivity to trouble its exclusionary forms.

The article examines policies intended to promote the basic education of Roma and Traveller minorities in Finland, Sweden, and Norway by analysing key national Roma and Traveller policy (n = 5) and education policy documents (n = 3). Analysis shows how the Finnish, Swedish, and Norwegian Roma policies translate the general policy aims of improving the social positioning of people identifying as Roma consistently into policy measures responding to the special needs of Roma pupils. These policy measures are validated by problem representations regarding Roma parents and families. All the policies also problematise the relationship between Roma and Traveller cultures and schools. It is argued that the focuses of the current policy measures constrain opportunities for a change in terms of equality.

This article provides a meta-analysis of what characterises existing ethnographic research on gender and class in the context of Nordic early childhood education. The encompasses research on education and gender or social class in the Nordic countries published in Nordic and non-Nordic scientific journals as well PhD theses published in the Nordic countries. The analysis suggests that even though Nordic countries have a reputation for being 'role model countries' in terms of equality and social justice, gender and especially social class have rarely been explicitly the focus of ethnographic research in the context of early childhood educational research. In terms of methodology, many of these studies make use of post-qualitative approaches to research, whereas fieldwork practices have been guided by the spirit of interactionism.

Educational equality has been a central tenet framing educational policy in Nordic welfare states and stimulating school reforms in the 1960s and 1970s. However, the conceptualisation of equality has fluctuated, reflecting the changing economic and political climate within which policy statements have been made. In this article, we analyse policy and curriculum documents relating to upper secondary education from the 1970s to the 2010s in two Nordic countries. Drawing on Nancy Fraser's theorisation of different forms of injustice, we focus on the aims and goals that are attached to the concept of educational equality, analysing how ideas about society and educational equality have changed over these decades. Our analysis suggests that over this period there have been quite dramatic shifts in how equality is conceptualised, inter alia shifting from a focus on economic inequalities to questions of sexuality and ethnicity. Furthermore, ambitions about tackling economic inequality have largely been replaced with ambitions about promoting employability, which is particularly visible in the curriculum of vocational upper secondary education. The Finnish general upper secondary education (GUS) curriculum has gone against the tide. In the 1970s the GUS curriculum had the most conservative tone in terms of equality, whereas the current curriculum requires an agentic stance against discrimination and a critical stance towards marketisation.

Although Finnish politics relating to the Roma tend to be perceived internationally as fairly successful, several obstacles exist for the Roma in education and the labour market. Training of Roma mediators has been actively promoted in Finland to improve the school performance and equality of Roma pupils. This article, based on ethnographic research, focuses on exploring how the current discursive terrain around the topics of tolerance and prejudice functions in the everyday work of mediators. It is argued that the present discourses in school expose the mediators to unequal power relations of tolerance. The terms for being tolerated are set by the potential tolerating actors, the school community. The mediators aim to supply knowledge about the Roma and try to address prejudices as representatives of the Roma. The study identified three different strategies that the mediators used when encountering prejudice: making sure one does not seem too different, parody and feigning naivety. The analysis suggests that the present discursive terrain creates obstacles to addressing inequalities, discrimination and racism in educational contexts. The responsibility for tackling discrimination is placed on the shoulders of individual Roma -- not the whole school community.

Disability studies in education (DSE) is an interdisciplinary field derived from the need to re-conceptualise special education dominated by a medical perspective on disability. In this article we identify what characterises DSE research and consider whether there is a case for arguing for a specific field of DSE in Finland and Iceland. Our analysis is based on a review of 59 studies published by Finnish and Icelandic scholars during the time period of ratification process of the UN Convention on the Rights of People with Disabilities from 2007 to 2016 in Finland and Iceland. We suggest that DSE has emerged as a dynamic area of research in both countries. It has provoked researchers to analyse disability in social contexts and turn the gaze from individual person with disabilities to the social structures and educational policies and practices. The fields of DSE in Finland and Iceland have not developed in identical ways and both have fluid crossovers to related fields such as disability studies and inclusive education. We argue for the potential of DSE to contribute to the discussion on educational equality and social justice. However, this requires opportunities to bring together scholars across disciplinary borders.

Drawing on Foucauldian genealogy and the methodological approaches of cultural studies, the authors address the question of how assumptions of citizenship have functioned in Finnish cultural texts on swimming. The analysis is developed from texts from the early twentieth century to the present day. Based on a theoretical approach that combines the perspectives of disability studies and post colonialism, the article traces how the ability to swim has been articulated as a common objective, and as latent potential in everyone. It also shows how assumptions of appropriate behaviour in public pools function in a way that reinforces specific visions of Finnishness. These discussions are rearticulated, and an approach is proposed that encapsulates the functioning of 'latent potential'. The authors further develop theorizations of ableism that facilitate specific investigation of its connections with orientalism.

Vocational education has a historical legacy of being low-status and aimed at producing skilled workers. Students with low marks in comprehensive school are still often guided to the vocational educational track. In this article we examine how mathematics teaching in a vocational educational context is framed (henceforth VET). Therefore, our aim with this article is to explore how teacher responses come into play in school mathematics classes, and the teacher-student interactions within those practices. The empirical material is based on educational ethnographic research, i.e. classroom observations and interviews, conducted in three upper secondary institutions, two in Sweden and one in Finland. The results indicate that both teachers and students seem to remain in what might be called their "comfort zones", i.e. that pedagogic practices tend to strengthen the idea of a vocational learner as being practically oriented; using their hands instead of their heads and in need of care and surveillance. The analysis focuses on mathematics teaching rather than on the content and was chosen because it is associated with general qualifications and the notion of lifelong learning. In this respect it exemplifies the growing tension in VET between workplace and academic knowledge.

Assurance of citizens' social rights and minimization of social differences have been central tenets that have framed the educational policy of Finland and the other Nordic welfare states. Equality has been on the official agenda in educational politics and policies since the comprehensive school reforms of the 1960s and 1970s. However, the conceptualization of equality has fluctuated, reflecting the political climate in which the policy statements have been created. In this article, we analyse Finnish curricular documents concerning upper secondary education from the 1970s to the 2010s in order to find out how the aims of educational equality are presented. Drawing on different conceptualizations of equality and social justice, as well as feminist theorizations of intersectionality, we scrutinize how gendered, classed and ethnised patterns are emphasized, challenged or muted in documents. Through the longitudinal data of this study it is possible to analyse the growing impact of this neo-liberal educational restructuring into Finland, which has a reputation for equal education and excellent records in the Programme for International Student Assessment tests. Hence, we ask how the Finnish society as an imagined community is reflected in the documents of different decades.

In this article, we are interested in how employment--or employability--is connected to citizenship, and how the ideal subjectivity of worker-citizens is discursively constructed in curriculum texts. The "worker-citizen" is a social construction that connects closely the notion of worker and the notion of citizen. Our analysis is based on Finnish national curricula for upper secondary vocational education. We consider upper secondary vocational education as a field in which individuals learn the new orders of the labour market. Curriculum texts define desirable goals and ideals for what future citizens and future employees should be like. As a result, we argue that flexibility characterises the ideal subjectivity that is discursively attributed to worker-citizens in accordance with neo-liberal reasoning: they have internalised the ethos of entrepreneurship and lifelong learning, and are capable of accepting changes and crossing national borders in order to follow the needs of the labour market. Worker-citizens are willing to accept a minimal level of social security provided by the state, and to look after their own health and employment. However, as consumers they express national loyalty. Personal objectives of worker-citizens are congruent with the objectives of industry and the workplace.

In this article, we discuss the usefulness of collaborative, multi-sited and cross-cultural ethnography. Giving three examples from our work, we suggest that it is possible to find new kinds of interpretations by joint reflections that draw from several studies with their own research questions. The cases presented discuss teachers' embodiment and sexualisation, construction of normality in educational settings and gendered patterns in post-compulsory educational routes. We suggest that the reflections on issues that "tickle our brains" have methodological value when formulating research questions, as well as in analysis and interpretation. They might set an ethnographic gaze in new directions thereby revealing cultural patterns. Combining data-sets generated in different decades also provide possibilities to spread the time span of the analysis. Finally, we also discuss some of the problems and challenges in the methodological perspectives that we have adopted.

In this article, we discuss teachers' reflections on the relation between teaching and care in the two most gender-segregated sectors of vocational upper secondary education in Finland, namely Health and Social services and Transport and Technology. We first discuss the concepts around education, teaching, taking care for and caring about students, using theoretisations of care and feminist pedagogies. Using teacher interviews and field notes, we then analyse teachers' ambivalence about care work in the context of teaching, placing special emphasis on care as a gendered task, and then discuss the "moral panic" or "worry speech" about young people in vocational education from the perspective of caring about. The findings are reflected through earlier studies in lower secondary schools. We argue that even if teachers in vocational education, especially male teachers, tend to feel awkward about caring work, they cannot avoid it, and they do care about their students and regard care as a general responsibility.

In the current economic order, the basic duty of citizens is to find placements in the internationalising labour market. Internationalism has been a common educational objective throughout Europe. Previously associated as a feature of middle-class subjectivities and academic education, it is implemented in the agenda of vocational education as well. In this article, I analyse how vocational students in the Finnish educational context of social services and health care see their future in the presumed internationalising labour market. The analysis is based on three years' ethnographic fieldwork in one vocational institute of social services and health care. The dataset consists of field notes, the interviews of students and teachers, and documents produced by the institution and organisations involved, and in this article five case studies are presented in order to make visible the multiple ways in which young people make sense of their placements in the global labour market. This analysis suggests that the imagined futures of the vocational students are mainly tied with the local context. However, the global labour market is involved and in some cases actively mobilised with their subject formations, and makes the negotiating between individual desires, resources, dependences and interdependences in everyday life even more complex than it used to be.

In this article our focus is on the persistent gendered divisions in educational routes of young people who choose a vocational path after compulsory education in Finland. We analyse how gendered subjectivities are constructed within the practices of educational and vocational guidance and within student cultures in the comprehensive school, as well as the way in which young people process understandings of themselves and their expectations during and after vocational education. In addition, we explore young people's ways to negotiate with disciplinary practices of the educational system. The paper draws on three ethnographic studies, and on feminist post-structural and materialist theories, intertwined with contextualised ethnographic perspectives. Our analysis reveals some patterns that might work as obstacles in the process towards reducing gender segregation in education and the labour market. We suggest that whilst gendered choices are sometimes taken for granted, gender dichotomy is often emphasised even if young people choose "differently". (Contains 4 notes.)

This article analyses how Finnish vocational teachers make sense of the meanings of gender in their work. The context of the study consists of the two most gender segregated environments of vocational education: the female-dominated Sector of Health and Social Services and the male-dominated Sector of Technology and Transport. Our analysis draws on 23 teacher interviews conducted in two vocational institutions, offering vocational upper secondary education and training to both young and adult students. The data is analysed from post structural and material feminist theoretical positions, using various conceptualizations of gender. Our findings suggest that both male and female teachers have adopted the idea of gender neutrality, whilst they simultaneously provide dichotomical and hierarchical perceptions of men and women as vocational teachers. Consequences of minority position in the staff room are different for females and males. In the field of technology and transport, women in the minority, on the other hand, need to struggle continuously with masculine vocational hierarchies to gain professional respect.

This article is based on ethnographic studies in the context of vocational education: two in Sweden and one in Finland. The Swedish data originate from the Vehicle programme and the Child and Recreation programme; the Finnish data originate from the social and health-care sector. In this sense, the authors' perspective is cross-cultural. The article focuses on temporal and spatial dimensions of these three educational contexts and analyzes how young people exhibit their agency when negotiating their time and constructing their own space. The authors' analysis elucidates how time-space paths in the context of vocational education are classed and gendered. In the female-dominated fields of vocational upper secondary education, disciplinary practices related to time and space are more visible than in the male-dominated fields. Moreover, it is argued that the political atmosphere in Sweden has been more favourable for promoting equality than that in Finland. Despite this, divisions between students and pigeonholing exist in everyday school life. (Contains 7 notes.)

This paper focuses on embodied practices in processes of nationalization among preschool children at the age of 6. It analyses how children define themselves and others, how they characterize and frame Finnishness through embodiment. The analysis is based on an ethnographic study in two preschool classes. It is argued that nationality works in a gendered way as a source of inclusion and exclusion in children's peer relations: those children who manage to perform Finnishness by continuously proving their cultural flexibility through "proper" embodiment are included more fluently. The analysis suggests that, particularly in the context of Finland, where cultural diversity is only recently recognized, multiculturalism as a pedagogical framework is insufficient for the promotion of equality in education. (Contains 5 notes.)

In children's lives the start of school is a turning point: compulsory education is their first encounter with civil duties. This important step in the process of becoming individual citizens is permeated with strong emotions and ambivalent expectations. However, the representations of school are created, established and negotiated in educational experiences preceding the start of school. In this article I explore the ways in which school is constructed in a Finnish preschool context. I build on ethnographic data generated in two preschool classes. First, I focus on how school is constructed in the social practices of teaching and in the physical space of preschool. Second, I analyse how children construct themselves as future school children and citizens by taking up available discourses and cultural practices. I argue that in official preschool, an ethos of individual survival characterises representations of school. Psychological, social and physical challenges are emphasised. Although preschool teachers in interviews and informal discussions sometimes problematise the ways in which school operates, in their teaching school practices are represented as natural. However, children actively exhibit their agency by collectively reworking of discourses and cultural practices and by renegotiating their informal relationships. (Contains 5 notes.)

This article analyzes how professionals of early childhood education define Finnishness and how they deal with ethnicity. It illustrates how nationality and ethnicity are actualised in the everyday practices of preschool. As part of a one-year ethnographic study in two preschools, the study reveals that the liberal version of multiculturalism adopted in Finland strengthens the boundaries of the nation-state. Finnishness gets conceptualised within the discipline and order of everyday life. When individuals considered as Finnish are evaluated, individual discourses are mobilised. When individuals considered as "others" are under scrutiny, cultural discourses work as sources of interpretation. (Contains 5 notes.)

This article is part of an ethnographic study in two preschool classes, which aims to explore issues of nationality, ethnicity, gender, and citizenship. It explores firstly, the ways in which nationality, ethnicity and gender are discussed and negotiated by preschool girls at the age of six and how they become positioned in national space and secondly, how gendered citizenship is constructed in the educational practices of the preschool. The article draws on field notes and interviews with children, teachers, and parents. The theoretical starting points have been the sociological theorisations of childhood, poststructuralist feminist research and postcolonial theorisations. The article specifically looks at the interpretational resources, which girls have in their subject formation, and explores how preschool as an educational institution deals with ethnicity and gender. (Contains 5 notes.)

In recent decades, disability policy programmes and conventions have been underlining how improving educational opportunities, especially for post-compulsory education, improve the employability and independence of disabled people, and thus their position in society and as citizens. However, little attention has been paid to actual educational practices and how they relate to these policy objectives. This article focuses on post-compulsory education for students with learning disabilities in Finland, more precisely on a vocational training programme called Preparatory Education for Work and Independent Living (PEWIL). In our ethnographic study of the programme, we scrutinise how daily educational practices govern citizenship for its students. We argue that even though these students are perceived as 'trainable' mainly in sheltered work and as only able to live in an institutionalised setting—thus reproducing their marginalisation—they have internalised the idea of a neoliberal labour market citizen with an emphasis on independence and employability. The subject of this article is a vocational education and training programme for young people with learning disabilities. The aim of the programme is to give students skills for working and independent living in mainstream society. We are interested in how citizenship is understood on the programme. The first author participated in the everyday life of the programme and interviewed students. We found that the programme prepares students to work in sheltered workshops and to live in group homes. In interviews, the students said they want to have regular paid jobs and live independently in their own flats. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]