This article presents a project, Shapes of Water, funded by the Finnish Cultural Foundation, which gave music education students the opportunity to compose children's songs about climate change with the help of artists from two fields (contemporary circus and music) and a scientist (chemistry). The article outlines the ways in which the composing…

This article describes a project called "The art based methods in developing transversal competence" funded by The Finnish National Board of Education. The article is based on the hermeneutic phenomenological approach in action research. The project developed learning environments as well as project-based learning with emphasis on the…

The Indigenized arts-based inquiry reported in this article addresses matters of equality in Finland's extracurricular arts education system, as experienced by Indigenous Sami artists, arts educators, scholars, and community leaders. Challenging national narratives of cultural homogeneity and egalitarianism, this research identifies aspects of…

This article is about a multidisciplinary R&D project in which a Canadian Learning Through The Arts (LTTA) program was imported to Finland in 2003-2004. Cultural differences in arts education in Finland and Canada are discussed. While Finland has a national school curriculum with all the arts included. Canada relies more on partnerships to…

Craft education in Finland is, in many aspects, in a state of change. This concerns the independent position of craft as a school subject, the content of the compulsory craft courses containing textiles and technical work, the implementation of the new concept of a holistic craft process in the National Core Curriculum and so on. This bears…

The purpose of this article is to describe how the Department of Art Education at the University of Lapland in Finland has developed winter art as a method of environmental and community-based art education. I will focus on the Snow Show Winter Art Education Project, a training project funded by the European Union and the State Provincial Office…

Art education is often talked about as a general good that will solve problems of every description and meet the most varied current problems. In Finland, for example, art education tends to be seen as something that fosters human growth, teaches aesthetic and ethical values, promotes self-expression and social skills, and meets the challenges of…

Student assessment is dependent on the educational views of the teacher. Arts pedagogy in comprehensive schools has several approaches, orientations, and even genres, each in turn having hidden practices of student evaluation. These stem on the one hand from the pedagogical tradition of the field (music, visual arts, drama, craft) and on the other…

Finnish educators are concerned with the affective and aesthetic aspects of environmental education, with sensitivity to the urban, as well as the natural, environment. This article, one of several in this issue on art education in other countries, describes how human environment concepts are used in Finnish art teaching. (SJL)

Art education can be used as a focal point in studying peace education and gender issues. One aspect of peace education is the field of human relations and that can include issues of gender. Basic concepts of patriarchy, sexism, feminism, and women's liberation can be studied through art. Finnish art education curriculum provides three areas for…

This document contains eight case studies of the following adult education programs in Finland: (1) an experiment combining classroom teaching and distance education and one that studied the effects of offering art courses at different levels in 1982-1985 (Virtala); (2) cooperative programs since 1981 between municipal and city levels in Mikkeli…