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…

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…

How parents spend time with their children, what they teach their children and how they raise them in the early years have again become topics of policymaking and public debate. There is an intensive discussion about parental involvement in early childhood education and care (ECEC). The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development's…

School-home communication is a growing research field in social sciences, particularly in education sciences and communication studies. While previous studies have paid much attention to the importance of school-home interaction in supporting primary academic socialisation and progress of elementary school pupils, the role of teacher-parent…

This paper examines the ways in which parents talk about their participation in Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC), and the factors that, according to them, promote parental participation. Although parental participation has been studied to an extent as regards children's academic attainment, up-to-date knowledge on the broader phenomena…

This study examined trust in educational partnership in the context of early childhood education and care (ECEC) in Finland, from the viewpoint of parents of a child with challenging behaviour. Typically, such children have difficulties in regulating their behaviour and emotions. Semi-structured interviews with 23 parents were content-analysed in…

The article discusses parent-teacher relationships in school micropolitics based on beginning teachers' stories. We employ a narrative approach and investigate how micropolitical conditions and strategies are portrayed in beginning teachers' stories of parent-teacher relationships. The research material consists of narrative interviews with seven…

The Finnish National curriculum obligates teachers to give parents encouraging feedback about their children's learning and development, the aim being to build a constructive relationship between homes and schools and to encourage close collaboration among all parties. Teachers in Finland nowadays use digital platforms that allow effective online…

In Nordic and Finnish teacher education, emphasis has often been placed on the teaching process and content over the teachers' ability to handle and take responsibility for relationships within the profession. This study aims to explore teachers' experiences of their relationships with pupils and parents, as well as their relational competence…

This study investigates principals' viewpoints on the support needs of newly qualified teachers. As pedagogic leaders, principals play a central role in organizing support activities for new teachers at local level and can offer insights into new teachers' situation and support needs. On that basis, the authors investigated how Finnish principals…

We argue that teacher autonomy should be conceptualised differently from its current form, that confines teacher autonomy to the individual, or to freedom from control. Here, we investigate the role of trust concerning teachers' perceptions of their own autonomy, embedded in differing contexts and relations. To display contextual variations, we…

Cooperation between home and school benefits pupils' wellbeing in many ways. Hence, it is of utmost importance that teachers are able to cooperate with families in early childhood education as well as in primary and secondary education. In order to work effectively with the diversity of families, teachers need to develop their skills and knowledge…

This case study explores how Finnish primary school teachers orchestrated school days and how teachers and headmasters organised virtual workplace collaboration and collaborated with parents during a period of distance education forced by the COVID-19 crisis in Spring 2020. The data was collected by interviewing primary and secondary school…

The advantage of pedagogical documentation has been widely documented in the field of early childhood education and care (ECEC). However, little research points out how and why professionals are using pedagogical documentation from the staff's perspective itself. Therefore, this research aimed to examine how pedagogical documentation is employed…

The purpose of this study was to investigate how computer-assisted use of Reading-through-Writing (RtW) method relates to the level of literacy and reading motivation of school children in grades 1 and 2 (N = 261-385). The research also explored the extent to which the RtW method was perceived as useful among teachers and by school children with…