Life Purposes and Career Goals of International Student Teachers in Finland

Abstract

According to the international surveys such as the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), Finland has been ranked first many times in education for many years. Thanks to this accomplishment, the Finnish education system has been arousing a worldwide interest not only of researchers but also teachers from various parts of the world. Most of the studies associated this great success with the good quality teacher education programs and thus foreign teachers decide to move to Finland to experience research-based Finnish teacher education programs with the ideal of purposeful lifelong learning. This thesis is part of a Finnish-Dutch research project ‘‘Civic purpose among higher education students’’. A rather small part of the data consisting of twenty international student teachers from ten different countries with an average age of thirty-one had been analysed and interviewed within a second theory for career devotedness in this existing study. The main aim is to broaden the methodological perspective by utilizing qualitative approaches, allowing phenomena to be studied in both deductive and inductive ways for the international teacher education context. The results contribute to the literature by revealing purposes, purpose profiles, and individuality types of the international student teachers studying in Finland as well as by showing how a Finnish teacher education program creates a difference on career goals.