Providing quality education for all pupils requires cooperation from members of the entire school community. One group of professionals is school assistants, who, together with teachers, play an important role in supporting pupils and inclusive education. Due to pupils' diverse needs, the responsibilities of school assistants in schools have…

The importance of "self-directed learning" (SDL) in a business environment has been highlighted as a way to increase an organisation's competitiveness and innovativeness. While organisations increasingly require SDL from employees, less attention is paid to the situations and frames enabling it. This study examines "self-directed…

Research relationships are often poorly understood. Why are some collaborations between research partners more productive than others? This question was a starting point of this paper. By describing their own experiences over a period of three years, the authors evaluated research relationships through collaborative self-study. At the beginning,…

Academic curriculum and curricular units that are responsive to work necessarily involve the interaction of knowledge from two different communities. In this paper a number of cases of responsive curriculum are analysed in order to answer the following questions: Can general differences between work and academic knowledge be ascribed to the nature…

The issue of the expansion of international interaction and cultural stereotypes, and their effect on the levels of communicative competence and the willingness to participate in international cooperation is addressed. One specific form of national stereotype, the reflected autostereotype, is described. An examination of reflected autostereotyping…

This six-part pamphlet examines 87 Finnish principals' personalities in terms of leadership and cognitive styles. The study's purpose is noted in section 1. Section 2 analyzes pedagogical roles and behaviors from a normative dimension perspective. Section 3 shifts to the personal dimension in discussing styles, values, and vocational preferences.…

This paper describes a study of the development of professional identity among employees in small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) participating in large-scale company-wide training programs. Managers and employees in 175 SMEs in Finland participated. These two research questions were posed: (1) are there differences in the perceptions of…