The education in Finland and other countries has gone and is still in the process of going through many changes. Both basic education and high school education were introduced with new curricula that are gradually put into service in the beginning of August 2016 for basic
education and in the beginning of August 2021 for high school education (Finnish National Board of Education, 2016). These two new national curricula brought new challenges to schools, urging schools and educators to work across subject boundaries. Therefore, our master’s thesis is focusing on finding out how teachers within basic education work across subject boundaries and integrate other subjects into their teaching of English language, combining two or more subjects into integrated entities. Briefly described, curriculum integration is a teaching method where the purpose is to structure the subject and teaching situations into meaningful entities (Kujamäki, 2014, p. 1) and correlate subjects and their themes (Brough, 2012). This helps students to make connections between subjects and facilitates them to understand complex and vast learning units (Psaltou-Joycey, Mattheoudakis, Agathopoulou & Mattheoudakis, 2014).
As educators are facing the new national curricula, they are obligated to bring democracy into the classroom by letting the pupils participate in choosing the themes for lessons which increases motivation and self-direction remarkably among them (Kujamäki, 2014, p. 16).
However, the renewed curricula do not come without challenges. Kujamäki (2014) states that learning through curriculum integration needs to be planned and implemented with the learning goals in mind because they are to be met by every student (p. 25). In addition to this, educators need to be conscious of the fact that young learners need to be aware of the learning goals and to be equipped with adequate knowledge and skills to be able to engage in lessons that are based on curriculum integration and the lessons are to be built on real-life phenomena that enhance pupils’ comprehension (Imbimbo, 2009, p. 2). These new challenges might result in structural challenges and affect schools’ operating culture and educators’ attitudes as well as lead to negative attitudes from the pupils’ guardians that are not supportive of the curriculum integration. (Kujamäki, 2014, p. 29.)
Another phenomenon that our master’s thesis will focus on is to compare how curriculum integration is implemented in Finland and in Sweden, and what types of curriculum integration methods are being utilized in teaching. The Swedish and Finnish national core curricula differ in emphasis of the concept of curriculum integration. Curriculum integration is included in the Finnish national curricula as a concept, and the implementation of curriculum integration is one of the goals that Finnish primary schools are required to have (Kujamäki, 2014, p. 1). Curriculum integration does not have as distinctive role in the Swedish national curricula as it is not stated there as clearly. The concept of the curriculum integration can be interpreted as a goal that makes a request for educators to “integrate knowledge in its various forms” (Skolverket, 2018, p.
11). This means that there are potentially some differences in how educators implement curriculum integration in these two countries. Also, the implementation of curriculum integration is likely to be more regular and prominent in Finland as it clearly stated in the national curricula. Due to this reason, the comparison on this concept between these two countries is significant.
Integration of school subjects has become quite topical and prominent in the school world and has also been included in the new core curricula in Finland (see e.g., Finnish National Board of Education, 2016). Curriculum integration as a teaching method has also a significant importance especially in teaching of English as a foreign language since the phenomena that the students are expected to comprehend are very often connected to one other in one way or another.
Finnish National Board of Education (2016) sees that integration promotes the ability to see connections between disciplines and facilitates the understanding of these connections and dependency between phenomena within different school subjects (p. 31). In addition, English language has never played this significant role in Northern Europe’s school system before, as the pupils now begin their English studies already in the first grade in many countries. Another reason this topic is worth examining is that according to prior studies, the student-centred teaching methods benefit pupils by facilitating their ability to make connections between discipline areas and providing authentic learning contexts. What is more, it also enhances students’ achievements and increases engagement during lessons. (Brough, 2012.)
1.1 History of integrated curriculum
Before it is possible to understand curriculum integration, we need to look at the subject separation and why this division has happened in the first place. In classical times, the focus of education was to produce widely read, well-spoken individuals through general education on those topics. As such, education approached subject integration rather than subject separation.
This was, however, changed by a 5th century scholar Martianus Capella that indicated that there would be seven distinct liberal arts that would together form the basis for education. (Anderson, 2013, p. 2.) This idea of specialization was accepted as the basis for curricula and so it remained until the latest decade. A problem with that kind of disciplinary approach, however, is that it promotes the segmented and compartmentalized views of knowledge (Bautista, Tan,
Ponnusamy, & Yau, 2016, pp. 610-611). This kind of approach seems to fail to address the reality where the boundaries between subjects and matters do rarely exist.
The idea of integrated curriculum was first idealized in the beginning of the 20th century as an alternative to the disciplinary approach. It emphasizes the learner and learning rather than discipline, and it also corresponds to the holistic view of the world itself. The roots of curriculum integration are progressivism and constructivism (Bautista et al., 2016, p. 611). Progressivism is a historical educational approach that is based on John Dewey’s educational theory where each experience is based on the interaction between a human and an object. In such educational idea, the child’s experiences are central, and the learning focuses on providing the learner with different types of projects and problem-solving exercises. (Radu, 2011, pp. 85-88.)
The other central educational theory that has affected the birth of curriculum integration is constructivism. It is an approach that is based on Piaget’s concept of cognitive development that emphasizes the learner’s participation in the learning. That theory supports different types of student-activating tasks and problem solving as well as teamwork and interaction.
Constructivism also diminishes the role of a teacher as the supreme master, and instead, emphasizes the meaning of the learning process for both the teacher and the student. (Judova, Chudy, Neumeister, Plischke & Kvintova, 2015, pp. 345-347.) With the ideas of progressivism and
constructivism it has been possible to build such educational approaches that are student-centred and that are based on general knowledge and ideas without subject boundaries. A learning environment where the teacher is viewed as a supreme master and where learning is mainly teacher-centred is perceived as outdated with newer student-centred theories gaining more support. This phenomenon can be seen in the content of the modern curricula. For
example, Finland and Sweden have made some changes in their national curricula to make them reflect the contemporary needs of teaching and learning.
1.2 Curricula for basic education in Finland and Sweden
A curriculum is a document that sets frames for education. In Finland it is the Finnish National Board of Education (FNBE) that creates new curricula for basic education and high school education every tenth year. There are national curricula for every educational grade, yet the schools are required to form their own individual curricula that are based on the national
curricula (Finnish National Board of Education, 2016). In this research we will utilize two national curricula for education in Finland and in Sweden: National core curriculum for basic education 2014 in the case of Finland, and the Curriculum for the compulsory school, preschool class and school-age educare 2018 for Sweden.
In the general section of the Finnish National Core Curriculum for Basic Education, there is a description of how education and different subjects within it should aim for extensive learning:
“[c]ompetences that cross boundaries and link different fields of knowledge and skills are a precondition for personal growth, studying, working and civic activity now and in the future”
(Finnish National Board of Education, 2016, section 2.5). This means that all the disciplines should be in dialog with one another rather than work as their own units. To make this kind of approach easier, FNBE has set six transversal competence areas for basic education that are: 1) thinking and learning; 2) cultural competence, interaction and self-expression; 3) taking care of
oneself and managing daily life; 4) multiliteracy; 5) competence in information and
communication technology; and 6) participation and involvement (Finnish National Board of Education, 2016). These sets of general, broader goals for education, should be targeted in different subjects to build such competences that will be needed in all spheres of life in future.
Another description of curriculum integration can be found in section 4.3 in the Finnish National Core Curriculum for Basic Education. In this section, the national curriculum describes
curriculum integration, what its goals are, and what kinds of methods there are for curriculum integration. These goals and methods are described further in chapter 2 in this paper. What is noticeable, however, is that the curriculum obligates every school to accomplish at least one multidisciplinary learning module each academic year. These learning modules are ones that integrate different subjects into larger entities that work together around a theme. The theme, learning goals and subjects for the learning module can be decided locally. (Finnish National Board of Education, 2016.)
In the Swedish Curriculum for compulsory school, preschool class and school-age educare, there does not seem to be any specific mentions regarding curriculum integration. Instead of
describing methods of integration, the curriculum sets broader aims and goals for different subjects that might require curriculum integration but without mentioning it straight (Skolverket, 2018). In such, the Swedish curriculum does not support curriculum integration in the extent that the Finnish curriculum does. Due to this difference between the Swedish and Finnish curriculum, it is worth researching to find out whether this dissimilarity has any effect on how educators actually implement curriculum integration in Finland and Sweden.
1.3 Purpose of the study
The purpose of this master’s thesis is to investigate how classroom teachers that also teach English language implement curriculum integration in their teaching of English as a foreign language. Another purpose of the thesis is to explore the ways that curriculum integration is implemented at schools in Finland and Sweden as well as to compare how curriculum
integration is executed in these selected countries. The investigation on this topic is done with the idea to map out how integration is implemented to facilitate learning, especially when integrated and combined with English language studies. Furthermore, there will be a cross-national comparison to find out how Finnish teachers utilize integration and how it is done by their colleagues in Sweden. In the final result discussion chapter of our master’s thesis, we will withdraw conclusions regarding the results as well as discuss the meaning of these results. As curriculum integration is extremely vast as a research topic, we have narrowed it down to
exploring how teachers exploit integration in their teaching of English as a foreign language. The compression of the research topic to integration of English language was done in order to gather more detailed information about integration and how it is considered to facilitate learning of English language.
Customarily, teachers have relied on traditional book- and subject-centred teaching methods as the subject boundaries have defined what should be learned in which lesson (see e.g., Atjonen, 2008). Ever since the new curricula became common in schools, teachers have been required to utilize curriculum integration in their work. Our aim is to discover how curriculum integration takes place in the Finnish and Swedish classrooms today. Recently, book- and subject-centred education has been seen as an outdated way of teaching (Brough, 2012). Following this and the new educational ideologies, this old-school practice is beginning to be left aside by educators as they are adapting to the new curricula. In previous studies on curriculum integration, educators have been trusted in collaborative and more child-centred methods, such as group work,
discussions and project-based learning (Kujamäki, 2014) as well as themes and phenomena from real-life (Brough, 2012). Along with mapping out curriculum integration methods used in English language teaching in Finland and Sweden, the focus of our research is on which collaborative
and child-centred methods are being utilized, what sorts of new integrations methods are put into effect in these countries, and how the Finnish and Swedish differ in their practices of curriculum integration that they utilize in the teaching of English language.