Finland is Not an “Education Wonderland” (II)

Cultural differences

Hardware, facilities, and institutions are easy to be observed and learn from in a short time. However, culture takes a long time to be cultivated. Understanding culture difference and a reflection in the context are essential when making comparisons.

• EQUALITY AND EQUITY

In the context of social development scale, equality is an important social consensus in Finnish society. It can be observed in every dimension of Finnish society. Education is not an exception. Everyone can access totally free and good quality of education with less effort no matter her/ his family’s social-economic backgrounds. Almost every school is a public school and the quality of them is averagely good so that “school shopping” seldom happen.

• TRUST

Based on equality and equity as the core of designing the educational system, the key factor to running the system efficiently is trust. In Finland, teachers have high autonomy to design lessons and learning activities under the umbrella of the core curriculum, local consensus, and school curriculum goals. In my experience, when I was developing lesson plans for teaching practice, my mentor teacher always trust me. He didn’t wipe out any of my activities or contents. Instead, he gave me constructional feedback and more detailed information about the class for me. Although I always sent him the lesson plan quite late (I am sorry…just want to make class more interesting), I was surprised that he always support what I planned to do. “Because I believe you can do a good job, and you just did.” said my mentor teacher.

• Classroom interaction

The class is not always peaceful. Hence, it examines a teacher’s patience and tactics of classroom management to make sure students are learning. In my observation, teachers always use non-violence languages and “I message” to communicate with students. It doesn’t mean to plead students as if they are teachers’ business clients. But to deliver the messages straight forward but gentle. When a student did something unexpected or interrupt the learning tempo of the classroom, a teacher will first listen to the students’ need by giving him/ her opportunity to explain. Later, if needed, the teacher will meta-analyze what would/ may happen consequently, to help a student think about it.

• Creating more opportunities for students to make decision

When doing hands-on projects, students are offered roles in team collaboration. Teachers will facilitate students to go through the decision-making process and make decisions on their own. It ensures the autonomy of students and cultivates a sense of self-discipline and responsibility.

• A Culture of Dialogue

Dialogue as a school culture can be observed in Turku Teacher Training schools between everyone. Communication, negotiation, and compromise can be observed in the daily interaction of teachers, students, and staffs. The culture of dialogue is based on mutual respect and intersubjectivity. It cultivates a habit of listening to others and a sense of empathy.

My learning process

Meeting my teacher mentors

During my journey as a teacher trainee, I am fortunate to have two teacher mentors and both of them are supportive. They are both English teachers. Mr W mainly teaches 5th graders and is an expert in coordinating video/ drama projects as teaching and learning activities. In Mr W’s class, I also learn from teaching assistant Mr J. Mr J is a versatile teaching assistant. He had worked in the film-making industry and excels at technologies. However, what impresses me the most is his gentleness and patience with students. In Mr H’s class, we learn how to think and act

on global issues such as gender equality, poverty, wars, stereotype, prejudice, and discrimination through reading English novels. Moreover, Mr H is an economics teacher in the IB program as well. It is my greatest pleasure to work with these three impressive educators and of course, learn precious experiences from them.

My teaching stories

My three teaching practices all happened in Mr H’s 7th grade English class. We are working on an Afghanistan novel called the Breadwinner. This is my first time teaching in a classroom that students are composed of such different nationalities and cultures. Although I have been trained for teaching for over 4 years and taught in several schools as a student teacher (as Finnish pre-service teachers do), I still felt worried and somehow anxious about teaching. “Will the students listen to me talking?” “what if I forgot what to say and that could be an embarrassing scene.” Luckily, most of my students are friendly to their student-teacher (although at first, we are all too shy to interact). The result of these lessons are all better than I have expected. On the basis of the reading material, The Breadwinner, we learned what are the definitions of stereotype, prejudice, and discrimination with students’ favourite Kahoot game. Later, we explore further on what is microaggression and discuss how to be aware and deal with it. For the final teaching, we had a mini-workshop of understanding the United Nations sustainable development goals (SDGs) and tried to analyze the story of The Breadwinner with these goals.

Taking off my rose coloured glasses

The longer I stay in classrooms, the clearer I see the reality. I try not to describe too pessimistic because everything is still good, but now I understood what does the quote from the website’s first page really mean. After several weeks of observing in classrooms and teaching in person, I admit that there are still problems happening. Less engagement, bullying (especially cyber-bullying), inappropriate behaviours and languages can still happen in a Finnish classroom. A teacher should always be alert if anything goes wrong with students’ interactions.

Conclusion

Going through the process of school experience, I acknowledge this is not an educational wonderland because teaching can still be complicated and challenging even if in Finnish schools. However, a well functioned educational system can support teachers to solve these problems in a more systematic way. The first thing I bear in mind is that the system has to be developed from grass-root based on a culture of effective communication/ dialogue/ mutual understanding and most importantly, trust. A teacher support system based on a culture of dialogue, communication, negotiation, and even compromise has to be developed. The system doesn’t necessarily to be stubborn. It can be dynamic, flexible, and resilient.

The basic core ideology of equity in Finnish society contributes to building a more equal education system for everyone to learn regardless of their social-economic backgrounds in the past. In a world of globalization, the changing student demographics bring more challenges to relatively monotonous population of Finland. However, Finnish teachers still are working to respond to students need positively with a mindset of problem-solving. Teacher training programs also emphasise the importance of linguistically and culturally responsive teaching by enhancing school teachers; multicultural competence and sensitivity to build a more inclusive and comfortable learning environment for everyone. In my opinion, “awareness” is taking the first step of the problem-solving process. Compare to Finland, Taiwan has a more diverse demographics and also attracted immigrants to live in throughout the past decades. However, we have to work more, no matter what subjects. Fortunately, our new curriculum now includes the content of multicultural education to build a more inclusive society. Nevertheless, now the questions can be: how well trained are the teachers? Did they have opportunities to develop their multicultural competence at universities courses? Did they have a chance to teach in a multicultural classroom?

In addition, it is worth mention that the meaning of comparison is not to tell which is better or worse but about to get more understanding of oneself’s (e.g. Taiwan) opportunities and challenges and to evaluate /examine our strategies and practices. Although Finland boasts good-quality of teachers and the educational system, Finnish educators still have problems and challenges to face. So first of all, a mindset and culture of “problem awareness and solving” is critical for improving the educational system. About teacher training and good teachers, we of course also have numerous of excellent teachers in Taiwan, however how to support teachers to learn and develop and raise average teacher competencies is an institutional problem. In the teacher training program, the process of recruiting and train student teachers seems to be not rigorous enough. The word “rigorous” here doesn’t mean to be harsh and mean. In Finland’s case, we can say the teacher training system is rigorous but supportive to make sure the quality of teachers in a trust-based and friendly way. I think that’s one of the points we can think about in the context of Taiwan. To conclude, no matter where we are, the process of education is always dynamic and challenging to realize the vision of offering good and equal education for everyone. And the mission of educators can be facilitating student learning and at the same time solving daily problems through a diversity of strategies.

References

Acquah, E.O. (2015). Responding to Changing Student Demographics in Finland: A Study of Teachers’ Developing Cultural Competence. Doctoral Dissertation. University of Turku. Turku, Finland.

Halinen, I (2018). THE NEW EDUCATIONAL CURRICULUM IN FINLAND.Improving the Quality of Childhood in Europe · Volume 7 (pp. 75–89) Editors: Michiel Matthes, Lea Pulkkinen, Christopher Clouder, Belinda Heys.