The foreign language teaching profession in Finnish and Japanese society: a sociocultural comparison

Abstract

Kentän koodi muuttunut 2 The social basis of a teaching profession is created through behavioural and cultural patterns, specific artefacts, and their connection to certain institutional practices. The purpose of this study is to discover the conditions that structure the teaching profession in one cultural context and to find out what it is to be a foreign language teacher in Finland and Japan. Both countries have high educational equality but with contrasting patterns of management policies that are manifested in their teacher education curricula. Educational policy documents as well as teacher interviews and classroom observations were conducted in both countries and the findings compared by one Japanese and three Finnish researchers. The research themes are as follows: the foreign language teaching profession, teacher education paradigms, teachers' professional development, and pedagogical orientation in teaching. The results show that the cultural context and its strong implications for the teaching profession are prominent in both cultures.

Finnish and German student teachers’ motivations for choosing teaching as a career. The first application of the FIT-Choice scale in Finland

“…According to TALIS 2013, Finnish teachers feel that their work is valued by society, they are satisfied with their job, a vast majority of them would choose the profession again, and they trust their own expertise (OECD, 2014). Within the Finnish educational context, teachers have a high level of autonomy in their work and are trusted as professionals without being subject to inspection or accountability regimes (Sahlberg, 2011;Sarja et al, 2017).…”

“…So far, the framework has mainly been utilised in single country contexts and less from a cross-cultural comparative perspective. Such a comparative perspective including more than one country, however, is crucial, since the social basis of a teaching profession is created through behavioural and cultural patterns, specific artefacts, and their connection to certain social and institutional practices (e.g., Sarja, Nyman, Ito, & Jaatinen, 2017). Thus the comparative perspective allows us to understand how different cultural patterns and national practices shape the motivations of young people to become teachers.…”