Työn muutoksen haasteet kulttuurialan korkeakoulutuksen työelämäpedagogiikalle

Authors

• Miikka Pyykkönen Jyväskylän yliopisto
• Kaisu Kumpulainen Jyväskylän yliopisto
• Sanna Vierimaa Jyväskylän yliopisto

Keywords:

cultural studies in higher education, working life relevance, working life pedagogy, connective pedagogy

Abstract

The aim of this article is to investigate changes in working life from the perspective of cultural studies in higher education. Our data consists of observations of eight study programmes in Finnish cultural studies. We examine their curricula and analyze how employability skills have been perceived in the context of teaching. As a result we found three different orientations: ‘field specific employability skills’, ‘generic skills’, and ‘research and expertise skills’. The first orientation was visible in arts-related education, the second one in vocational schools’ cultural production programmes, and the third orientation in the research-oriented programmes of universities.

We found that the working life relevance of cultural studies was visible primarily in the vocational schools, which emphasize a generic skills orientation. In the study programmes focusing on the arts or on research, the connections to working life depended mostly on students’ own interests and activities, as they could participate voluntarily in internship programmes or take working-life-oriented minor subjects. The working life relevance was even weaker when examined from the perspective of connective pedagogy, that is, the means by which these skills were integrated into the teaching of courses. The curricula show that ethical responsibility and critical perspectives on working life are not taught as a part of the study programmes. Graduating students should have the opportunity to analyze and observe changing and complex aspects of working life holistically, and to make suggestions on how to flexibly improve work and working life conditions through different kinds of tasks. This requires that connective pedagogy and curricula will be more actively linked to working life, and new combinations of theory and practice, that can be applied to it, created.