The article studies the expectations placed on teachers' exemplariness in Finland in the first half of the twentieth century. Finnish elementary school teachers have traditionally been described as model citizens, embodying the qualities of loyalty, diligence, impeccability, and piety. Those who lose their model status have been ignored in…

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…

This article addresses the question of how global citizenship, often an aim of international schools, is conceptualised as interculturalism by students and teachers. It presents selected findings of global citizenship expressed as interculturalism and perceptions of learning through interculturalism, from a larger empirical study which…

The purpose of this study is to examine profiles of students' attitudes toward citizenship norms and inclusiveness in the political process, focusing on changes in the frequency of particular profiles and in the strength of predictors across a decade. Using data from 16 countries participating in the 1999 and 2009 International Association for the…

This book presents a global overview of discourses of globalization, current research in education and education policy reforms. It first examines globalisation, education and policy research and reforms in education, including coverage of main trends in education and policy reforms globally, as well as specific policy issues such as equity,…

This paper explores the work of a particular document in issuing educational values. The document is the report "Embedding Values and Attitudes in Curriculum": "Shaping a Better Future", launched in 2021 and published by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). Inspired by a practice-oriented method of…

The urgency for education to participate in the plan of action of the UN 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development (SD) poses challenges to language education in university language centers. This paper discusses the potential of Higher Education (HE) language center courses to provide students with the knowledge and skills of inclusive, respectful,…

The aim of this paper is to explore the history of Finnish religious education (RE) from the perspective of civic education. The research is based on a historical and content analysis of the data, which consist of written pedagogical and curricular material on Lutheran RE from the last 150 years. The analysis, which employs the Foucauldian concept…

This article asks how the site-specific parameters of pro-environmental behaviour can be seen in educational doctrines and in the practices of science education, and what impact they have on the development of environmental citizenship. Environmental citizenship as an agent of change is key to sustainability transition. Our viewpoint is that a…

As schools are increasingly expected to develop their students' political and social engagement in order to promote good citizenship, they are struggling to define what good citizenship is. In this article, we put forward a way of formulating perspectives on citizenship that specifies the normative aspects of good citizenship in a systematic…

Integrating twenty-first century competencies into the curriculum has become an important issue for education reform worldwide. This study examines and compares twenty-first century competencies demonstrated in mother tongue curriculum standards in China, the United States and Finland. It identifies key similarities and significant differences…

This study examines negotiations on Muslims' inclusive citizenship in Finnish and Swedish comprehensive schools. The data include interviews with Muslim parents and Muslim teachers (n = 8 in both countries), who serve as cultural brokers in public schools and mediate negotiations on the terms of inclusion. The study utilizes the notion of…

This study investigated whether a country's policy context for immigrant integration was related to native adolescents' attitudes towards ethnic minorities in European countries, using data from the International Civic and Citizenship Education Study. We found that students in a country with more inclusive and multiculturalist policies for…

To obtain a better understanding of country-specific policies, a country-specific literature review was undertaken. The search entailed key-terms focusing on relevance and the three higher education relevance dimensions. The main outcomes of the country-specific literature review are discussed in this chapter. We do so by analysing the typically…

This article investigates Sámi elementary education in early twentieth-century Finland, Norway, and Sweden. The main focus lies on cultural contexts that frame and limit language use. The key analytical concepts are "useful citizen" and "useful citizenship". Through these concepts the article probes the ways in which…