The discussion on multiculturalism has increased in Finland in the result of enlarged immigration since 1990’s. Multiculturalism has been seen as a new phenomenon compared to the earlier illusion of a homogenous society. Usually multiculturalism has been understood as ethnic differentiation – not to interaction or to ideology of multicultural society. The Finnish majority culture has been seen separate from multiculturality. As the result of changes in the ethnic structure of the society, also the Finnish educational policy has paid attention to multiculturalism. The school culture plays an important role for pupils as a model of the society they are socializing into. On the other hand, schools have an important function in the promotion of a society that reflects multicultural ideology. In practice the content of multicultural education can, however, differ a lot depending on municipal directions, pupils background and specialisation of a school. A crucial element in the way of implementing multicultural education is the ethnic or linguistic background of pupils. It can force schools to consider multiculturalism when they have to give teaching in various mother tongues and religions. But this does not mean that the school culture itself represents ideology of multicultural education. Moreover, the schools having mainly pupils from Finnish majority culture do not definitely understand the importance of multicultural education. It can be seen separate from “Finnish” context and understood only as special pedagogy for immigrants. Helsinki is an especially interesting scene to research multiculturalism and multicultural education because there are big differences in the proportion of foreign language speakers between the residential areas. Koskela (2002) has considered these differences through a hypothesis of “multicultural pockets”. According to her ethnically dissimilar – even if contiguous – residential areas can offer very different surroundings for children to grow up. Children living in “ multicultural pockets” encounter daily people having various skin colour. They grow up in a multi-ethnic environment and have a possibility to become ”colour blind” in a positive way in a meaning that they do not see people of other skin colour somehow different. The hypothesis is based on observations of everyday life. It does not claim that children would become “colour blind” but that growing up in multicultural environment makes it possible to develop insider’s viewpoint into multicultural reality. The differences between residential areas seem even larger when examining them on school level. In some schools even 50 percent of pupils are in “Finnish as a second language” teaching whereas in some schools there is not any foreign language speaking pupil. This means that schools are in different situation. In my on-going Ph.D. research I examine ”multicultural pockets” from the perspective of primary schools. As a starting point I use James Banks’ model of multicultural education which states that multicultural education should be included in all contents of teaching and school practices and it should be implemented to all pupils. I will appraise how the different elements of multicultural education are presented in everyday practices and how the elements of multicultural competence are evolved in pupils. I have chosen two primary schools from neigbourhood residential areas in Helsinki. One school has mainly Finnish speaking pupils when the other have around a quarter foreign language speaking pupils. The selections are based on statistic analysis concerning the linguistic structure of residential areas and schools. My purpose is to produce new information about educational practices in the context of multicultural education. Because the earlier Finnish researches have mainly focused on schools having already foreign language speaking pupils, I am also interested in schools not having many foreign language speaking pupils.

I examine the existence of “multicultural pockets” in everyday school practices using participant observation. I do participant observation in the primary schools in several periods during two and half school year. I have also researched the curricula of these schools. My idea has been to enter into schools through teacher community but the context that I am interested in is much larger. I will research and take part in all everyday activities. This means both actual teaching and other daily activities such like breaks, lunch and meetings with parents, and the personnel of the whole school community.

In my presentation I will discuss the participant observation process and preliminary results of this phase. Two different school contexts and various roles as a researcher and as a teacher colleague offer an interesting but also a challenging research frame.