This summary part of my dissertation deals with the conflicting gender equality discourses in the recent curriculum process for Finnish basic education. From the perspective of radical democracy, the study investigates the potential of an open curriculum process to bring discursive conflicts into light. Despite the study focuses on the Finnish context, it provides a global perspective on the open and inclusive curriculum processes.

The latest Finnish curriculum process provides a compelling perspective on the curriculum drafting and to struggles related to gender equality in basic education for two significant reasons. Firstly, the curriculum process demonstrated greater openness compared to its predecessors, which offered a possibility to members of society to voice their opinion on education policies during the process. Secondly, the Finnish National Core Curriculum (FNCC) for basic education underwent revision at the same time with the amendment (1329/2014) of the Act on Equality between Women and Men (609/1986) in 2014. Following the revisions, Finnish comprehensive schools are now required to formulate equality policies, and the understanding of gender was extended from a binary concept to gender diversity. In the latest curriculum process topic of gender gained visibility when both national and local policies had to adapt revisions.

Finland is well-known for being a model country of gender equality (Edström & Brunila 2016; Lahelma, Öhrn & Weiner 2021). Because of this reputation, there is a perception that gender equality achieved state of affairs. As a result, Finnish educational policies have stressed gender-neutral discourse, taken binary essence of gender for granted and avoided challenging gendered power relations (Edström & Brunila, 2016). Thus, the amendments to the Act on Equality may raise conflicting views on gender equality within a context accustomed to gender-neutral discourses.

The study critically examines discursive construction of gender equality (see Fairclough 1992; 1995), and asks, how gender equality is discursively shaped and what kind of conflicts between discourses arise at different phases of the curriculum process, in 1) FNCC 2004 and 2014, 2) the FNCC2014 draft and feedback comments given on it and 3) school-based gender equality policies (n=140).

The study also explores the notably open curriculum process, investigating how discursive conflicts on gender equality are addressed within the process and examining the transformative potential linked to these conflicts from the standpoint of radical democracy. Previous studies on curriculum process have assessed the success of the processes from the perspectives of shared meaning making, coherence, validity, transparency and consensus (e.g. Pietarinen et al. 2016; Säily 2021). However, deliberative democracy has been criticized for instance by policy researcher Chantal Mouffe. She (2013; 2020) argues that the principles of deliberative democracy often supersede the interests and ideologies linked to political matters. Furthermore, in the deliberative model, policymaking focuses more on the outcome rather than the conflicts that emerge during negotiation. Mouffe challenges deliberative understanding of democracy with her own model of radical democracy.

Within radical democracy, ideological conflicts are viewed as essential for the politicization of issues and for exposing the underlying power dynamics. Mouffe argues that consensus solutions do not eliminate power relations. Alongside with these notions made by Mouffe, feminist policy researchers (Lombardo et al., 2009; Prügl, 2011; Rönnblom, 2017) have emphasised the need of politicisation of gender. Then gender is to be articulated in terms of conflicting interests and as a matter of power relations (Rönnblom, 2017, p. 162; Elomäki & Ylöstalo 2021). 

The study adopts a critical perspective on the tradition of deliberative democracy within Finnish curriculum studies. It assesses the capacity of radical democracy to effectively handle discursive conflicts and address the social power relations in the curriculum process.

In this study I have examined education policy documents which represent three different phases of Finnish curriculum process: 1) Finnish national core curriculum (FNCC) 2004 and 2014, 2) the draft of FNCC2014 and feedback comments given on it and 3) school-based gender equality policies (n=140). I have utilized Faircloughian discursive approach to make visible gender equality discourses and the hierarchy between the discourses. Fairclough approaches discourse three-dimensionally as a text, discourse practice and social practice. He perceives discourse intertwined with non-discursive social structures and institutional practices, which are approached via theoretical concepts and previous studies. I approached the documents as social events, which construct and reflect understanding of gender equality, but also maintain or challenge gendered power relations (see Fairclough 1992). In first phase of the analysis, I read carefully the vocabulary and expressions of the sentences dealing with gender equality. In second phase, I focused on the gender equality interpretations. In the three sub-studies, I utilized different feminist policy theories (Squires 1999; 2001; Fraser 2005; Lombardo et. al. 2009), to make visible discursive practices on gender equality: These theoretical frameworks helped me to interpret how words construct and reflect different kinds of understanding of equality. In the last phase of analysis, I explained the discursive construction of gender equality to its societal and institutional practices, such as decontextualization of educational sciences, hegemony of gender binarism in educational equality policies and strategic managerialism in equality work. Finally, I structured the order of discourses in each sub-study and reflected on the conflicts that arise between them. Finally, I assessed how these conflicts evolve within the curriculum process.

The analysis of the feedback comments given on core curriculum draft illustrates that gender equality is a contested concept in Finnish education policies. The process perspective illustrates that the neoliberal discourse emphasizing individuality, and anti-feminist discourse neglecting gender diversity, had the most significant impact on the published FNCC2014. As a result, the comments which challenged gender binarism were bypassed in the published version of FNCC2014. In the school-specific equality policy documents, 50% of the 140 schools avoided mentioning gender, while the remaining half fixed it to depoliticised measures that did not conceptualize gender in terms of power. The issue with these documents was their failure to politicize gender. Altogether, these phases of curriculum process illustrate that the relatively open and collaborative curriculum process can offer a stage for conflicting discourses to combat over meaning of equality. In the preparatory phase, post-modern, neoliberal and anti-feminist discourses were conflicting, because they approached gender binarism differently. However, only discourses, which emphasized neutrality and individuality changed published FNCC2014. The discursive conflicts of preparatory phase were still apparent in published FNCC, but they are mitigated compared to preparatory phase. This might reflect consensus-seeking tradition of deliberative democracy, which avoids conflicts and the hegemonic power intertwined with them (see Mouffe 2013; 2020). On the local level, it seems that schools have difficulties to approach gender as a matter of power relations and to handle conflicting views on equality. It seems that schools emphasise consensus-policies, which do not trouble current school culture or serve interests of anybody (see Rönnblom 2017). From a radical democratic standpoint on the curriculum process, I propose that curriculum processes should recognise the transformative potential of discursive conflicts, no to vanish them. Therefore, these conflicts should be critically assessed at higher levels of policymaking, providing schools with opportunities to deal with politicised topics.

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