Towards community oriented curriculum in Finnish literacy education

Abstract

Finland’s successful PISA literacy results reflect the foundation of the Finnish education system, which could be characterised by the words equality, equity and individual support. However, international interest in this PISA success has not focused on curricular aspects, and yet the core curriculum specifies teaching and learning practices in Finland. This article presents a study on the development of the Finnish National Core Curricula for Basic Education (NCC), published in 1985, 1994 and 2004. Based on inductive document analysis, the article discusses the changing conceptualisations of the curriculum designers and contributes to an understanding of the roles that the literacy core curriculum has in defining the purposes of literacy education, as well as the cross-curricular intentions of literacy education from the 1980s to the present day.

Keywords:

• curriculum design
• communicative language teaching
• teacher education
• Finland

Notes

1. The concept of literacy does not exist literally in the Finnish language. Since the construction of the 2004 curriculum, the term ‘literacy’ has been introduced and translated as ‘tekstitaidot’ (text skills). I use the term ‘literacy’ throughout the article except in quotations.