Teachers’ Expectations and Expectations of Teachers: Understanding Teachers’ Societal Role

Abstract

Being a teacher is an esteemed position in Finland. Finnish class teachers are academically educated professionals in five-year masters level programmes, where only a small percentage of applicants are accepted. However, in recent years, more teachers have reported having intentions to leave the profession, and there has been a slight decline in the number of applicants to teacher education programmes too. In this chapter, we elaborate Finnish expectations of teaching as a profession, set by society on the one hand, and teachers themselves on the other. Society sets both explicit and implicit expectations for teachers: teachers’ work is defined by a national curriculum as well as current policy aims, but is also moulded by the surrounding culture and norms. Teachers themselves are likely to have expectations of a personally fulfilling career; expectations that have begun to form already in their years as students in school, observing and learning what teachers and school are like. Schools, ideally, function to both maintain and reform society. We argue that expectations concerning teachers-normative expectations learned through observation in particular-act as part of the way schools maintain society. We ask whether Finnish teacher education today does enough to help teachers to assume their teacher role in society broadly and navigate the constantly changing field of education.