Additional information
by Martin Thrupp (Editor), Piia Seppänen (Editor), Jaakko Kauko (Editor)
Back Jacket
This open access book provides academic insights and serves as a platform for research-informed discussion about education in Finland. Bringing together the work of more than 50 authors across 28 chapters, it presents a major collection of critical views of the Finnish education system and topics that cohere around social justice concerns. It questions rhetoric, myths, and commonly held assumptions surrounding Finnish schooling.
This book draws on the fields of sociology of education, education policy, urban studies, and policy sociology. It makes use of a range of research methodologies including ethnography, case study and discourse analysis, and references the work of relevant theorists, including Bourdieu and Foucault. This book aims to provide a critical, updated and astute analysis of the strengths and challenges of the Finnish education system.
Author Biography
Martin Thrupp has been Professor of Education at the University of Waikato in New Zealand since 2006. Prior to that, he held posts at King's College London and the Institute of Education, University of London. Thrupp has also worked in Finnish education circles since 2016, including visits to Finland in all four seasons. His research interests are in education policy, with a particular focus on school reform as it plays out in different local and national settings. He has authored a number of books, including 'The Search for Better Educational Standards: A Cautionary Tale' (Springer, 2018), and has also co-edited collections about New Zealand's education system published in 2010 and 2019.
Piia Seppänen is Professor of Education, especially on comparative education and education policy at the University of Turku in Finland where she also works as Vice-Dean for research in its Faculty of Education. Her research with research groups at the Centre for Research on Lifelong Learning and Education (CELE) focuses on pupil selection, urban social segregation, and classed practices within comprehensive schooling. Seppänen also studies commodification in public education systems and its connections to the global education industry.
Jaakko Kauko is Professor of Education Policy at the Faculty of Education and Culture, Tampere University, Finland. His research focuses on the fields of education policy and comparative education, and he has recently been researching transnational knowledge networks in higher education. Kauko is co-author of Dynamics in Education Politics: Understanding and Explaining the Finnish Case with Hannu Simola, Janne Varjo, Mira Kalalahti, and Fritjof Sahlström (Routledge, 2017), and co-editor of Successful Public Policy in the Nordic Countries: Cases, Lessons, Challenges with Caroline de la Porte, Guðný Björk Eydal, Daniel Nohrstedt, Paul 't Hart, and Bent Sofus Tranøy (Oxford University Press, 2022).
