This study aimed to investigate common features and ways of understanding quality culture (QC) within higher education institutions (HEIs) in Nordic countries. While the concept of QC is commonly accepted and often used, its meaning is not always clear. This paper focuses on how Nordic universities frame QC in their internal documentation. The…

Leadership in Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC) is changing globally. We investigated ECEC leadership and leaders' interpretations of power and its realization between leaders and followers, a little researched topic in the field. Our theoretical framework consists of ECEC contextual knowledge and prior research attached with Michel…

Sustainability action at universities is complex and requires engaging multiple competences that reside on different levels outside and inside the organisation. In addition to individual competences, social communities also possess collective resources and characteristics that do not translate into a sum of individual abilities. Based on a…

Ecosystemic cooperation among the state, municipalities, and commercial actors is evident in the public education of Finland. The edu-ecosystems can include firm interdependences, value creation, co-specialisation, and co-evolution with an aim to sell products and services to the global market as well as to open up markets in a particular country.…

The Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR) has brought about significant changes in organizational leadership. However, the accelerated transformation towards digitization was not without the influence of the COVID-19 pandemic. Hence, the COVID-19 pandemic aided the digital revolution in several organizations across the globe. This paper presents…

National-level educational administrators constantly face the question of how to ensure that the basic education system successfully meets complex local, national, international, and global challenges, and what is the best way to initiate and drive systemic changes in education amid such complexity and to create value for society. Studies have…

This study uses an education in emergencies (EiE) lens and a scientometric approach to examine the educational research landscape during the COVID-19 pandemic by analyzing 95,628 publications indexed in the Web of Science Core Collection database from 2020 to February 2023. It employed descriptive and network approaches to map growth trajectory,…

The purpose of this study was to examine Finnish teachers' experiences of pedagogical activities carried out in collaboration with external stakeholders. For examining teachers' cross-sectoral networking practices, we interviewed 63 teachers across six schools in Finland's capital area, focusing on how external networks are utilized to enrich…

Amidst societal, demographic and educational changes, teachers are expected to engage in professional development and learning (PDL) throughout their careers. This study explores school teachers' mental models about their work in the framework of Senge's learning organisation, aiming to support their PDL during curriculum reform and organisational…

Over the past decade, co-supervision of PhD candidates has become increasingly common across the disciplines. However, co-supervision has been explored previously primarily from the candidates' viewpoint and in small-scale qualitative studies. We have extended the research by examining co-supervisory experience from the supervisor's perspective,…

Background: Developing a school as a learning community is a complex process necessitating active engagement from the entire school community. This paper reports on a study from Finland that focused on exploring learning community development grounded in a shared vision. Purpose: We sought to investigate the development of a school community with…

The aim of the study is to deepen understanding of educators' daily practices in the Northern ECEC through the lenses of culturally responsive teaching. The research material consists of two-staged peer interviews with 10 educators, which were selected from the whole research material for detailed analysis. The main finding of this study is…

Although Nordic countries are committed to developing inclusive education, a gap often exists between policy, ideals, and the realisation of inclusion in practice. In Finnish schools, part-time special education is an important tool for promoting inclusive education in the three-tier system. In this study, our research questions were: (1) What…

Teacher-student relationship and students' social competence were investigated in relation to the quality of educational dialogue. The data consisted of 151 video-recorded Grade 2 lessons. The teachers (N = 50) also rated their students' (N = 664) social competence and the teacher-student relationship. In terms of teacher-student relationships,…

A major part of the perplexing instances in teachers' work seem to deal with relationships. However, little is known about the role of social and emotional competence (SEC) in teachers' relationships. This study examined perplexing relational situations through Finnish primary teachers' stories, the strategies that teachers used to manage the…