Experiences of Finnish teachers working with immigrant students

Abstract

Compared with many European countries, Finland has a shorter history of immigration. During the last 20 years, Finland has become a more multicultural society. Together with rising levels of immigration, teachers’ concerns regarding how to manage an increasingly diverse school population have arisen. There are an increasing number of students with different cultural and native language backgrounds in Finnish schools. However, the school system is far from being an all-encompassing multicultural environment for all. Notwithstanding, there are already many practices that do work. In this study, we aimed to find existing practices that, from the point of view of teachers, make immigrant education work. The data consists of interviews with nine teachers who work with immigrant children in schools where the educational language is Finnish. The interviews have been analysed to classify good practices in Finnish immigrant education. Our results show that in addition to adequate lingual support, fluent co-teaching and co-planning in schools, utilising school assistants’ working time and skills in various and creative ways have turned out to be effective for the learning and social integration of multicultural students. Carefully and individually planned transitions from preparatory classes to general education also seem to be important. Most of the good practices that teachers mentioned were associated with transplanting the Finnish language and culture onto the ‘others’. Scrutinising the thoughts and attitudes behind these good practices would help to create even better, more multicultural ways of arranging education for cultural diversity, which is inclusive of native Finnish students.