Community-based development practices have been seen as the prevailing paradigm for rural development. Rural community development practices are employed especially through local non-governmental organisations, such as village associations, to ensure that rural communities are vital and attractive places to live. In this article, we explore how community development practices affect and shape rural places. The data were collected in three Finnish villages that each have an active village association and that have adopted community development practices as their method of keeping their village viable. According to the results of our study, the impacts of community practices on rural places can be classified in terms of three interconnected phenomena: the strengthening of entrepreneurial culture, the increase of networking and institutionalisation, which refers here to processes by which rural communities become incorporated in formal rural governance programmes. All of these phenomena indicate that community actions have become more goal-oriented and emphasise the responsibility of community agency in developing rural areas.
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The Village Action Association of Finland (SYTY) organizes the Village of the Year competition annually to award active rural communities. The competition has taken place since 1985, but after the village action movement was integrated into Finnish rural policy networks in the 1990s, it also became a part of rural policy instruments. The competition can be considered a governing technique that constructs norms and an ideal model for rural communities to pursue. In this article, I study the representation of an ideal rural community by analysing the criteria of the competition. I also look for changes to see whether the integration of the village action movement into rural policy is reflected in the norms and representations of ideal rural communities. The results show that an ideal rural community consists of five characteristics: strategic planning, development projects, responsibility for local welfare, cherishing cultural heritage, and village spirit. They also reveal that the requirements for active villages have expanded, which reflects the increasing responsibility of communities for service provision and local development in rural areas.
Today's political ambitions are based on the neoliberal aspiration to diminish the state's role and responsibilities, and to transfer those responsibilities to local communities and individuals in ways that idealise those communities, promising to 'give power to the people'. Instead of highlighting individualism, neoliberalism now celebrates communities and participation. This article deals with the effects of this ideology with regard to Finnish rural policy objectives. Drawing on Finnish village action programmes as data, we argue that these ideological views aim to transform individuals and create new moral actors. Our research indicates that Finland's rural policy objectives invoke actors that are responsible for their communities, have an 'enterprising spirit', and are change-friendly and innovative. However, the ideology disregards the economic and social preconditions and resources necessary for building affluent communities and villages, which are difficult to attain when there is less government involvement. Thus, rural communities face increasing demands and less government involvement.
The article examines the challenges university teachers face when adopting connective pedagogy in organizing teaching. Instead of studying the learning outcomes of the method, we decided in this research to focus on the teachers’ experiences when doing things differently in a fairly traditional pedagogical institution like a university. In spring 2019, as a part of our new degree programme entitled Culture, Communities, and Change (KUMU) at the University of Jyväskylä, we implemented a multisensory ethnography course in collaboration with a third sector development project promoting village tourism in Central Finland. On the course, we applied a problem-based approach to implement the connective pedagogy through which we wanted to increase the students’ working life skills and public engagement. While the main objective of the multisensory ethnography course was to develop village tourism and teach the students how to do ethnographic research, we also scrutinized our own teaching experience in developing higher education pedagogy through documenting our own activities in field diaries and analysing our own roles through self-reflexive ethnographic practice. The group discussions and the diaries of the teachers during the course are the data that has been analysed by means of social practice theory. The three elements of social practices—material, competence, and meaning—helped us to identify the important factors that should be taken into consideration when trying to change everyday practices in our work, in this case to organize collaborative teaching with a third sector development project. According to our results, a problem-based approach is an effective tool on a collaborative project course between the university and a third sector organization because it enabled us to practice connective pedagogy at a very practical level. There are also challenges in applying a new method. Studying our diaries and notes of group discussions and reflecting our experiences, we identified the following critical stages and weak spots: Planning and co-ordinating the course took a lot of time and resources and teachers must tolerate a certain amount of uncertainty. The competence of the teachers was also challenged; they needed to be open, for example, to dealing with unfamiliar research topics. Even if the teachers’ meanings, motivation, and values were in accordance with the principles of connective pedagogy, there are still many contradictions in the meaning element of problem-based teaching practice. Above all, the teachers were compelled to question their role as experts when taking third sector actors as equal partners in producing new knowledge.
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