Gender Awareness in Finnish Teacher Education: an Impossible Mission?

Abstract

The need to promote gender equality within and through education has been on the agenda in Europe for decades. Similarly, Finland has also evidenced a history of hundreds of projects and reports that have repeated the same aims, ideas and practical innovations for promoting equality, challenging educational segregation and providing girl-friendly or boy-friendly pedagogies. However, the actual pace of change has been very slow. In this article I discuss some of the constraints that feminist teachers and teacher educators constantly face in this endeavour. Firstly, the paper draws on analyses conducted in studies carried out at several teacher education institutions within a context of a national project entitled “Gender Awareness in Teacher Education” (TASUKO). Secondly, I use my own experiences and documents gathered as an actor in the field of gender equality in education since the 1980s, along with findings from my own studies. Keywords: gender awareness, equality, teacher education, gender in education, equality project (Published: 1 June 2011) Citation: Education Inquiry Vol. 2, No. 2, May 2011, pp.263–276