Accepted Visibility of Worldviews in Finnish Basic Education – Teachers’ Attitudes in Boundary Setting

Abstract

This study examines the attitudes of teachers toward the visibility of worldviews in public education as well as how teachers negotiate the boundaries of acceptability based on these attitudes. The question raised several issues: on the one hand, the clashing of increasingly complex, diverse, and secularized worldviews and, on the other hand, the strong roots of Christian hegemony in Finland. Twenty in-service teachers were interviewed for this study. The study was implemented using a qualitative attitude approach. The results show that teachers’ attitudes differ in setting boundaries around the visibility of worldviews in schools.

Keywords:

• Worldviews
• visibility of worldviews
• teachers
• teachers’ autonomy

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by a grant from the Finnish Cultural Foundation.