This research seeks to understand the role of teacher education in advancing equity and social justice education in Finland. Globally and in Finland, it is critical that teacher education prepare teachers for increasingly pluralistic societies (Goodwin & Darity, 2019). Finland’s commitment to equity and equality is long-standing. The Equality Act of 1986 provided a legal foundation for promoting gender equality. In 2014, the Non-Discrimination Act expanded equality protections with a mandate for educational institutions to develop strategic planning for equity promotion and inclusion. The 2014 Act includes protections for gender identity and explicitly prohibits discrimination based on age, nationality, language, religion, sexual orientation or trade union activity. The Finnish Government has provided a legal framework and resource documents to assist educational institutions’ equity planning and implementation. 

These movements have been taken into the Finnish national curriculum of 2016 and also the teacher training curricula in Finnish university education faculties.  In large part, current equity planning in Finland draws on previous work and scholarship promoting gender equality. However, other social issues such as inequalities in family wealth, wages and parental education are increasingly contributing to divergent student outcomes in Finland (OECD, 2018; Vettenranta et al., 2016). Contemporary research on  gender equality in Finland has considered heteronormativity in  teacher education from a pedagogic perspective  (Brunila & Kallioniemi, 2017) and gender equality challenges resulting from the national populist movement (Askola, 2019). Recent research has also shown that even in Finnish schools where the student population has been diverse for many years, teachers’ levels of knowledge and awareness are relatively low, and teachers themselves express a need for more information about meeting their students’ needs (Acquah, Tandon & Lempinen, 2015).

This research considers how teacher educators and preservice teachers exercise agency in the co-construction and development of social justice education for diverse students. The research takes a sociocultural approach, understanding that agency is socially mediated and shaped by historical and cultural contexts (Moll, 2014). In studying articulations of social justice from a sociocultural perspective, the research is interested in revealing what socially available discourses the preservice teachers and teacher educators draw on in order in co-constructing shared meanings of equality and non-discrimination.  A central goal of the research is to understand how teacher educators and pre-service teachers actively participate in the co-construction and elaboration of meanings of gender diversity, equality and social justice.  This paper investigates how the aims of equity and non-discrimination are facilitated between teacher educators and preservice teachers in a Finnish teacher education program.  

This qualitative study adopts a sociocultural approach to the study of teacher education in Finland. The program under study has been selected because of its expressed commitment to, and faculty expertise in, equity and diversity training. Data consists of individual interviews with teacher educators, dialogues between teacher educators and cohorts of preservice teachers, written reflections by the preservice teachers and curricular documents. Data has been collected online during the 2019-2020 and 2020-2021 academic years. Analysis is conducted using thematic and discourse analysis (Aguinaldo, 2012; Clarke & Braun, 2013).

Findings of this research elaborate socially situated discourses of equality and equality in a Finnish teacher education program. Tentative findings suggest that immigration, human rights and disabilities discourses are mobilized in the co-construction of meanings of social justice through the sharing of personal stories and biographies. The teacher educators’ roles in these framings emphasize the reflexive and contextual nature of pedagogical practice. However, preservice teachers also express a sense of powerlessness in making change in their primary white middle-class school placements and dismay at the lack of criticality among their primarily white, heterosexual, middle-class peers and senior teachers.

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