The structure and changes of the conceptualised teaching profession in the Finnish national curricula of early childhood education and pre-primary education during 1972–2022

Authors

• Heidi Chydenius Itä-Suomen yliopisto, Helsingin yliopisto
• Eeva-Leena Onnismaa Helsingin yliopisto
• Jarmo Kinos Turun yliopisto
• Jaana Lahdenperä-Laine Tampereen yliopisto
• Arniika Kuusisto Helsingin yliopisto
• Jonna Kangas Helsingin yliopisto

DOI: https://doi.org/10.33350/ka.129229

Keywords:

teaching profession, early childhood education, pre-primary education, curriculum, text analysis

Abstract

This article examines the structure and changes of the conceptualised teaching profession as they are expressed in the national curricula of Finnish early childhood education (ECE), which includes pre-primary education, spanning the years 1972–2022. The analysed data consists of curriculum documents and other comparable national guidelines for Finnish ECE. The primary objective of our article is to depict the structure and changes in the conceptualised teaching profession through a historical text analysis informed by the perspective of sociology of education. The research task is to describe how the conceptualised teaching profession was constructed and how it evolved from 1972 to 2022 in relation to the basic task expressed in the ECE curricula. The findings illuminate how, in the early years of the studied period, the texts reflect an ambivalent positioning of the teaching profession at the intersection of teaching, education, and social care. The formal administrative transfer of ECE from social welfare administration to education administration under the Ministry of Education in 2013 clarified the place and task of the teaching profession in ECE in a new way. The analysed documents exhibit ambivalence, contradiction, and evasion in addressing the teacher's task and role in ECE. In general, talking about teaching was avoided. Ambivalence also appears in the documents in how they discuss the ECE teaching profession. The teaching profession is, to some extent, more clearly structured in the curricula by the Finnish National Agency for Education, especially in the guiding texts for pre-primary education, but also for ECE for ages 0–6. In the conclusion, the authors reflect on societal factors connected to the ways of presenting both the tasks and the role of the teacher in the curricula during the studied period, and how these societal factors have influenced the structuring of the conceptualised teaching profession in ECE.