Abstract
The article examines if and how gender diversity and queer are present in the policies guiding Finnish art education and how these documents might influence praxis. The authors explore relations between policy and practice through a close study and analysis of the Finnish national core curriculum for basic education as it relates to the broader Finnish culture of power and politics. The authors approach the topic using epistemic injustice as the framework, and suggest that current international and national policy and guidelines that define human rights, gender equality, the rights of gender and sexual minorities, and education have created a broad and deeply seated normative, binary mindset that not only impairs the actualization of equity in education but also makes it a paradox. To unpack the suggested epistemic injustice, the authors contextualize their arguments through a critical study of policies and guidelines for human rights and Finnish compulsory education and frame this with particular theories, the capability approach and feminist and critical pedagogy.
Introduction
The authors of this article argue that dominant, normative socio-cultural ideologies directly influence how policies for education are written and, in turn, how these explicit but abstract documents are understood, implemented and practised in education. The ‘epistemic injustice’ (Fricker, 2007) caused by this cyclical relationship continues to be dominated by heteronormative values and directly influences education policy-making and its implementation, which is a central point in this article. The authors specifically examine if and how gender diversity and queer are present in the policies guiding Finnish art education and how these texts might influence praxis. The authors further argue that there is an urgent need for a critical reading and re-evaluation of ideologies that guide the writing of governing policies for the United Nations (UN) and their further interpretation and implementation in education in Finland through the Finnish national core curriculum (Table 1).
The authors endorse a turn towards an anti-oppressive education that acknowledges the need for an active stance in advocating gender equity. This entails disrupting and dismantling normative thinking and policies that have created and continue to reinforce epistemic injustice and that enable marginalization. Battling deep-seated injustice also involves a demand to change laws and policies that guide government offices and educational institutions at all levels of society.
Despite the excellent reputation of the Finnish education system, the authors claim that the policies directing Finnish art education are abstract and disable true advancement of social justice. Given the abstract nature of the policy documents (discussed and analysed later in this text), there is ample room for differing understandings of the objectives of social justice, but further domination of binary gender notions continue to direct practices left vacant by abstract policies. This is why the authors claim that a critical approach to policies with regard to Finnish art education is not enough. The article focuses on revealing and examining the conflicts and disconnects within the policy documents as well as the influence of the disparity embedded within and between policies and their implementation in practice, which stems from the fact that policies are not the only things that govern practice. Even though education policies and guidelines for implementing curricula direct educators towards promoting equality and awareness of gender diversity, binary gender norms still hegemonize the classroom culture, and queer voices are constantly marginalized.
To examine the presence of queer possibilities in Finnish visual art education on a national level, we will concentrate on visual art education in Finnish comprehensive schools, as this is where compulsory and publicly funded single structure basic education is carried out. In addition, among the different institutions providing art education, unquestionably, comprehensive schools have the strongest societal impact by engaging all children through compulsory education.
The authors use the capability approach (CA) as a framework and utilize feminist, queer and critical pedagogies (Hooks, 1994, 2010; Kumashiro, 2000; Neto, 2018) to analyse how the education policy documents are implemented to provide ‘equal’ opportunities and to show there is an urgent need to centralize the queer perspective in order to produce veritable equity instead of a token emancipation. The starting point for the CA-based critical analysis and a feminist and queer reading of the national core curriculum for visual arts and its accompanying publications is the proposition that normative values and morals have created a deeply seated epistemic injustice that has influenced policies and their implementation. These arguments are founded on theories put forward by Butler (1999, 2011) and Barad (2007).
The authors of this article have diverse backgrounds and experiences from the fields of research and gender issues. All four are members of a learning, research and advocacy collective called Feminism and Queer in Art Education (FAQ), and we identify ourselves as genderqueer, gender fluid or non-binary gender researchers and/or advocates for equal rights in education. Within the FAQ collective, there is a diversity, yet at the same time a social cohesion around a shared thematic core that has created a strong atmosphere of solidarity (De Beer and Koster, 2009; Laitinen and Pessi, 2010; Suominen and Pusa, 2018). Commitment to solidarity requires that this principle guides all our actions: as scholars, we do not speak or write on behalf of others but we take a position and make propositions with others.
Beginning with an understanding of and commitment to solidarity, our aim is to critically reflect on gender norms in education and influence a change towards a curriculum and practice in which queer is centralized. Our acquired knowledge is emancipatory and founded on critical, feminist and queer theory (Keinänen and Vadén, 2011; Kiilakoski and Oravakangas, 2010; Rodriguez and Pinar, 2007; Talburt and Steinberg, 2000). According to our understanding, gender is an aspect of personhood that is fluid, contextual, discursive, embodied, felt and performative. This leads us to identify gender and gendering as an active process, influenced by the norms and frameworks of the social world. Our aim, therefore, is to enable emancipation for both marginalized students (e.g. non-binary queer pupils) and also, importantly, for those who do not feel the urgency to break the norm (e.g. cisgendered heterosexual pupils), but are regardless influenced by the dominant normative thinking, beliefs and materializations of binary, norms-based societies and cultures. According to a recent study, over 5% of pupils in the 8th and 9th grades do not identify with their gender defined at birth, and it should be noted that this does not include other marginalized groups (Statistics Finland, 2018). Although the need for the diversification of gender may be at its most acute among marginalized subjects, it creates space and possibilities for anyone and everyone.
In Finland, the personal risk for researchers and educators addressing queer themes and advocating diversity is rather low compared to countries in which people face much more drastic problems related to democracy and freedom of speech. As our positions are, thus, privileged, we have an ethical responsibility to research generally silenced issues and advocate change.
We begin this article by briefly discussing the theories that guide our understanding of gender and queer. Subsequently, we discuss some of the key global policies that influence the Finnish national core curriculum and visual art education. We then introduce the importance of the Finnish national core curriculum for compulsory education and undertake a detailed queer reading of the curriculum and its supporting materials. Finally, we conclude with some suggestions that would facilitate the centralizing of queer in Finnish art education.
Defining notions, concepts and theories that guide understandings of gender and queer
The project of queering education requires a radical mending of the notion of gender, thereby facilitating the actualization of queer potential that is hindered by heterosexism. It also requires the dismantling of some gendered suppositions often taken for granted. When gender is thought to have importance for any given matter, it does not suffice to critically reflect upon or ask questions that already presuppose normative gender structures, because this makes the enquiry merely reproductive of normative notions of gender. Questions that involve unexamined, normative presuppositions of gender can only reproduce limited, pre-biased information. In other words, normativity pre-excludes emergent relevant knowledge that could further our understanding of why and how the complex and varied dimensions of gender are involved in the matter. Rather, gender needs to be examined as a complex phenomenon in itself.
The focus on centralizing queer entails a reconfiguration of gender. Our understanding of gender draws from Judith Butler’s (1999) influential theory of gender performativity, as we see gender neither as a predetermined category of identity related to the sex assigned at birth, nor an attribute of a fixed individual (being something), but rather as doing (an active verb). Quoting Butler (1999: 45): Gender is ‘the repeated stylization of the body, a set of repeated acts within a highly rigid regulatory frame that congeal over time to produce the appearance of substance, of a natural sort of being’. The regulatory frame refers to the heterosexual matrix, the ‘institutional heterosexuality [that] both requires and produces the univocity of each of the gendered terms that constitute the limit of gendered possibilities within an oppositional, binary gender system’ (Butler, 1999: 31).
In a way, the theory behind queering culminates in the sex/gender distinction. The term ‘gender’ was first used in this sense in the 1960s, so that psychologists could distinguish between the biological traits of and the aspects of masculine and feminine societal roles in transsexuals (Mikkola, 2017). In a heterosexist society, sex and gender appear complementary, and almost three decades after Butler’s Gender Trouble was published, it is still a popular view that sex is a simple, neutral biological factor that divides people into two separate, or even ‘opposite’ physical categories, and that gender is then constructed upon this physical surface. Butler (1999: 10) argues against the sex/gender distinction in pointing out that the supposed precedence and immutability of biological sex is, in fact, also discursive: ‘Gender ought not to be conceived merely as the cultural inscription of meaning on a pre-given sex (a juridical conception); gender must also designate the very apparatus of production whereby the sexes themselves are established’. The naturalization of sex as a biological fact, according to Butler, is part of the normative discourse of the compulsory heterosexuality of gender and, therefore, the presumed ‘immutability’ of sex is contested. ‘Sex’ is also discursive, and shaped by heteronormativity.
This view turns a common conception of gender around: the everyday understanding of the body as a sexed and stable physical reality is conceived by looking at it through the lens of normative gender. Specific parts of the body are identified as pertinent to sex because of gender norms, and this process of normative gendering of an individual usually starts at birth or even before (Barad, 2007; Butler, 1999). Butler’s theory has received criticism with regard to its understanding of body and materiality, as it may seem to suggest an ontological departure from the material basis of the world to one of radical constructivism and linguistic determinism (Barad, 2007; Butler, 1999; Mikkola, 2017).
Feminist physicist Karen Barad writes that the accusations of conceiving physical bodies as mere language are a ‘gross misunderstanding’ and that the theory ‘does provide us with an insightful and powerful analysis of some discursive dimensions of the materialization of real flesh-and-blood bodies’ (Barad 2007: 192). Barad introduces a very substantive account of materiality as a discursive process, providing an extensive ontological theory called agential realism that bridges the philosophy of physics and poststructuralist thought in a way that arguably avoids dead-end philosophical debates of constructivism and representationalism altogether. Barad argues that ‘matter does not refer to a fixed substance; rather, matter is substance in its intra-active becoming – not a thing but a doing, a congealing of agency’ (Barad 2007: 151). Intra-activity is a term coined by Barad to signify the ontological status of the various material processes of becoming. It crucially differs from interaction, which presupposes ontological subject–object separability as its precondition, in that subjects and objects do not actually pre-exist their intra-action, but rather come into existence only through intra-action (Barad, 2007).
Barad’s agential realism is a new materialist, performative account of (no less than) the physical universe itself, based strictly on contemporary physics. This creates an important posthumanist revision of Butler’s theory of performativity in such a way that it provides an account of bodies in their materiality that does not subscribe to the view of passive physical bodies. Thus, Barad’s theory offers a crucial improvement on theories on the nature and plausibility of performativity and on the ontological basis of our understanding of gender, along with its intersections with other defining normative categories such as race, class and ability.
It is on this theoretical foundation that we propose to centralize the notion of queer in art education. Queer as a word is a political appropriation from its historically abusive use that has been made into an identity celebrating all things anti-heteronormative. As a concept, it defies comprehensive definition and emphasizes the becoming-ness of the world (Muñoz, 2009). As a political and theoretical framework arising from the performative understanding of sex and gender, it enables considerations of the multiplicity of gender by pointing out the weak points of heterosexist ideas and practices that fervently divide the world into a binary opposition of two gendered categories maintained by the normative dichotomies of sex/gender, nature/culture, physical/social, etc. Importantly, these strict divisions cannot account for the diversity of bodies, sexualities, physical realities and their potentialities. Crudely shaping the world, these dichotomies exclude existing realities that are rendered unintelligible, suppressed by the normative ideal. Butler (1999) claims this ‘constitutive exclusion’ inadvertently produces the anti-normative and unintelligible realities outside the norm – the queer.
As queer thinking in itself is a deconstructive, anti-oppressive practice, centralizing queer represents facilitating the materialization of queer potentials, in a similar way to Greteman (2017: 195), who discusses ‘how art education can help kids turn out queer’. Because gender lacks linguistic status, Finnish discourses of equity and equality can easily claim a broader inclusivity than the (pedagogical) practices imply, as discussed later in the article. In order to attain a greater level of inclusivity, a thorough deconstruction and ending of the materialized and embodied practices that perpetuate heterosexist, white supremacist and ableist ideals is needed.
Queering structures and education entails learning how to question and confront injustice to advance the goals of social justice, equity and equality in a way that does not produce further marginalization and create unnecessary exclusions at the expense of the most marginalized groups. Queering is a way of opening up possibilities of inclusivity and reducing the need for categorization that leads to alienation. The inherent open-endedness of queer is a crucial part of queer pedagogy that we claim ought to become the leading politics of all education, as it enables true inclusivity. This open-endedness as an epistemic and pedagogical orientation guides us in learning how to advance and actualize the goals of social justice, equity and equality. Kumashiro (2000) writes about the state of crisis often induced by unlearning oppression, and that the anti-oppressive education that aims to change the world for the better needs to tackle this crisis instead of avoiding the subjects or pedagogies that cause it. Avoidance of the crisis is often built into pedagogical thinking as a need to control the learning process from beginning to end, not leaving enough space to break the norms that might be invisible to the educators themselves. Thus, in centralizing the unknown possibilities of inclusivity, the practice of not knowing along with the open-endedness of queer require an active change in oneself, as a teacher, as a pupil and as a policy-maker.
The global policy frame
The Global Sustainable Development Report (United Nations, 2015) issued by the UN depicts a broad perspective for current multi-layered global challenges. One of the main statements in the report is that interaction between science/research and generating policy is crucial for the whole planet (United Nations, 2015: 19–21). The second chapter of the report, which is focused on integrated perspectives in relation to the sustainable development goals (SDGs), utilizes data to analyse connections between SDGs and then further explains these connections using text and visual representations. The connections between poverty and education are strong, as well as those between poverty and gender and, furthermore, between gender and education. Combined, these three pairings create a triangle of concern. As our focus in this article is to centralize queer in art education, we interpret the aforementioned concern in relation to the Report of the Independent Expert on Protection Against Violence and Discrimination Based on Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity by Victor Madrigal-Borloz (2018), which was submitted to the UN General Assembly in accordance with Human Rights Council Resolution 32/2. The document is mentioned further at the end of this section.
Two global-level documents specifically address the field of art education: the Road Map for Arts Education (UNESCO, 2006) was produced as a result of the World Conference on Arts Education held in Lisbon, Portugal, in 2006; and the Seoul Agenda: Goals for the Development of Arts Education (UNESCO, 2010) (hereafter Seoul Agenda) was an outcome of UNESCO’s Second World Conference on Arts Education held in Seoul, in the Republic of Korea, in May 2010. The relationship between these two documents is stated in the Seoul Agenda (2010: 2) as follows: A central goal of the Seoul Conference was to reassess and encourage further implementation of the Road Map. The Seoul Agenda will serve as a concrete plan of action that integrates the substance of the Road Map within a structure of three broad goals, each accompanied by a number of practical strategies and specific action items. It is hoped that this Road Map will be used as a template, a set of overall guidelines for the introduction or promotion of Arts Education; to be adapted – changed and expanded as necessary – to meet the specific contexts of nations and societies around the world. (UNESCO, 2010: 14)
The UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights has a global role as a set of guiding policies. When planning the national core curriculum for Finnish comprehensive schools, the UN human rights ‘are taken into account in the provision of education’ (Finnish National Agency for Education, 2014: 22). We are certainly not the first to critically read the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, as these have been criticized, for example, for being based on a Western worldview and morals. The recent report submitted to the UN General Assembly by Madrigal-Borloz (2018: Summary: 1) ‘examines the process of abandoning the classification of certain forms of gender as a pathology and the full scope of the duty of the State to respect and promote respect of gender recognition as a component of identity’. Gender identity refers to each person’s deeply felt internal and individual experience of gender, which may or may not correspond with the sex assigned at birth, including the personal sense of the body (which may involve, if freely chosen, modification of bodily appearance or function by medical, surgical or other means) and other gender expressions, including dress, speech and mannerisms. In addition, the mandate holder takes into account the distinct life experience of individuals based on the interlinkage of their gender identity with other factors, such as race, ethnicity, migrant status, education and economic status. Political, legal, social and economic contexts are also taken into consideration to understand systemic patterns, such as institutional violence and impunity. (Madrigal-Borloz, 2018, Section 1.2)
We contemplate what these general arts education principles and practices mentioned in goal-setting might entail. Another issue that requires further contemplation and clarification is what the verb ‘apply’ might signify. The Seoul Agenda presents an instrumental role for art education, implying that something is fostered and contributed through it. Art education is seen as a tool for something other than art education itself. We see this as closely connected to our intent to centralize the queer potential through art pedagogy. This approach embraces open-endedness and uncertainty and explores what might be possible in terms of changing societal structures to promote equity in society, as stated in the Finnish Basic Education Act (Basic Education Act, 1998/628: Section 2). More specifically, we aim to make room for actual queer materializations among the principles and practices of art education.
As the next section of the text concentrates on the Finnish national core curriculum, the global art education policies introduced above form the foundation of our reading of it. Further, we believe that each national policy may and should, in turn, contribute to the future rewriting and revisions of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Thus, influences should not be seen as top-down policies but as tools to foster intra- and inter-revisions of policies at all different levels.
Queer reading of the national core curriculum
As is the case in many other countries, visual art education in Finland engages a myriad of institutions and organizations providing art education and, thus, centralizing queer is certainly necessary throughout the field. The quality of the education is intended to be equal throughout the country to ensure that the accessibility of quality education is not defined by factors such as the economic make-up of the school district or community and its allocation of tax revenue, or the financial status or social class of a pupil’s family. Being a national institution, the comprehensive school is broadly connected to the values of Finnish society and politics. Considering this, we find a closer study of the national core curriculum is justified because the position of queer in the comprehensive school also directly and indirectly reflects the position of queer within the whole of society.
The compulsory nature of comprehensive schooling presents a serious demand for equal practices within comprehensive schools. Basic education consists of Grades 1–9, meaning that for almost a decade, Finnish children and young people spend a major period of their lives influenced by the comprehensive school, specifically: its guiding curriculum, the physical school building, the education system and the culture of the school community. During this time, they build their knowledge and sensibilities of self, learn to cope with the various situations that arise in their daily lives and face challenges within the complex web of social situations, as well as absorb (un)consciously the power structures of society – the power structures reproduced by the school institution itself. The immense effect the institution has on pupils’ lives is also addressed in the policies guiding the institution: the social task of basic education is to ‘promote equity, equality and justice’ (Finnish National Agency for Education, 2014: 30).
Basic education is guided by the national core curriculum, published by the Finnish National Agency for Education and formulated based on the Basic Education Act. The objectives of education, as stated in the Basic Education Act (1998/628: Section 2), include:
The purpose of education referred to in this Act is to support pupils’ growth into humanity and into ethically responsible membership of society and to provide them with knowledge and skills needed in life. Furthermore, the aim of pre-primary education, as part of early childhood education, is to improve children’s capacity for learning. Education shall promote civilization and equality in society and pupils’ prerequisites for participating in education and otherwise developing themselves during their lives.
In addition to the Basic Education Act and government decrees, the national core curriculum is influenced by several national policies, including the Non-Discrimination Act, and several international ones, most significantly the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the Convention on the Rights of the Child (Finnish National Agency for Education, 2014). The national core curriculum does not mandate strict content or didactics or instructions for schools, but all local curricula and practices must align with its contents. It is a strong political tool for guiding the direction of school culture and education and is also a pedagogical tool, because it is ‘a framework to help with planning teaching’ (Kallio-Tavin, 2015). The national core curriculum is updated regularly, approximately every 10 years, so that it can respond to the requirements, challenges and needs of the changing world and Finnish society; the current one has been effective since 2016.
As a whole, the national core curriculum is a broad document that presents ‘not only regulations applicable to its goals and contents but also descriptions that elucidate them’ (Finnish National Agency for Education, 2014: 11). However, these elucidating descriptions are articulated through rather abstract language, which leaves the actual meaning of the goals ambiguous and open to different interpretations. Due to this abstractness, evaluating success in reaching the goals is difficult, especially as decisions with regard to the ways of monitoring the implementation and evaluation of the curriculum are made locally (Finnish National Agency for Education, 2014). This, of course, reflects the general trust in highly trained and skilled teachers and administrators, prevents the education system from becoming overly rigid and delegates much-needed and appreciated flexibility to the local education authorities. However, it also increases the risk of unequal implementation of the curriculum. If equality between genders is understood as equality between two opposing genders, the binary norm leads to a very limited understanding of gender.
To support the implementation of the national core curriculum, the Finnish National Agency for Education also publishes guides and handbooks that complement the abstractness of the curriculum text, supplying more detailed and additional information. The perspective of the guidebooks is practical compared with the viewpoint presented in the national core curriculum, and they include concrete examples of the core issues. Some of the guidebooks are available in English, but many are published only in Finnish and Swedish, the two official languages. Within the context of this article, the most essential of these guidebooks are Tasa-arvotyö on taitolaji (Finnish National Agency for Education, 2015), a guide concentrating on gender equality within educational institutions (note this guidebook is published only in Finnish, not in Swedish or Sami), and Prevention of and Intervention in Sexual Harassments at Schools and Educational Institutions – Summary [of the Finnish version] (Finnish National Agency for Education, 2018).
In addition, it is important to consider the realities according to which the content of the national core curriculum is actualized. As a national institution, the comprehensive school is highly affected by Finnish politics as well as the hegemonic values and norms of Finnish society, which are inevitably also transferred into the culture of the comprehensive school. The socialization process taking place in the comprehensive school is not only guided by the national core curriculum, but also by the multiple customs internalized through repetition within the daily practices of school life (Törmä, 2003). Despite the equity-promoting policies guiding the comprehensive school, the practices of Finnish schools are found to be heteronormative and heterosexualizing in various ways (Lehtonen, 2003), for example, by assigning toilets and locker rooms exclusively to ‘boys’ or ‘girls’.
Although we have witnessed a slow turn towards a more inclusive society, the progress towards gender equity is hindered significantly by the tradition of heteronormativity in society, both in and out of school institutions. An illustrative example of the gendered atmosphere of Finnish society is the report entitled Sukupuolten tasa-arvo Suomessa 2018 (Statistics Finland, 2018), which presents statistics about gender equality in Finland. The introduction to the publication states that its old name, Men and Women in Finland, has been updated to include all genders. Unfortunately, and similar to the documents identified above, the gender-aware approach is not applied to any of the contents of the report, as all statistics are presented through factors and most of the content is identified as relating to men and women.
CA-based analysis of the national core curriculum and its supporting materials
Analysing policies and their defining documents from the point of view of social justice may be done in different ways, respective to different ethical premises. Economist and philosopher Amartya Sen proposes a framework that could account for the moral information that is excluded from the consequentialist theories of welfare which view utility as the sole intrinsic value (Robeyns, 2016): The CA brings into focus a person’s ‘actual ability to achieve various valuable functionings as a part of living’ (Sen, 1993: 30), thus, recognizing the important interpersonal differences in abilities to achieve wellbeing, and accounting for the moral dimensions overlooked by utilitarianism. Assessing wellbeing as an aggregation of various morally significant dimensions of life makes the CA an important interdisciplinary tool and, as such, it has become a paradigmatic approach in human development studies (Robeyns, 2016). The CA relies on two core notions: functionings and capabilities. Functionings are the things that a person can do or be in their lives; capabilities are the real possibilities for a specific person to achieve these functionings: ‘the approach is based on a view of living as a combination of various “doings and beings”, with quality of life to be assessed in terms of the capability to achieve valuable functionings’ (Sen, 1993: 31).
Assessing educational policies using the broadened sense of measuring the quality of life is crucial in seeing how some of the important functionings are achieved, or if they are achieved at all. The CA enables the moral assessment of those dimensions of life that utilitarianism overlooks. We focus especially on justice and equity based on the extended, performative, lived and flexible notions of gender. The right to exist and live outside the gender binary is of crucial importance for many genderqueer or trans people, and the right to express gender without the threat of violence or exclusion must be considered a significant element of human rights (see also Madrigal-Borloz, 2018).
Overwhelmingly, the policy documents present internal and inter-document contradictions, as the national core curriculum explicitly names the goal of gender equality and gender diversity awareness but, paradoxically and repeatedly, relies on terms that reinforce the binary notion of gender in its language and propositions.
To unpack the potentialities for queer in the policies guiding the Finnish comprehensive school, we concentrate on analysing the current Finnish national core curriculum for basic education from the viewpoint of social justice and gender awareness. Through our analysis of this guiding document, we point out how the curriculum manages to promote the importance of equality while it simultaneously fails to recognize queer members of school communities and further marginalizes them. Of special interest in the analysis of the national core curriculum is how normative cultures continue to shape the articulation of the policies guiding basic education.
Like all subject-specific chapters in the national core curriculum, the chapters focusing on the visual arts are divided into three sections: Grades 1–2, Grades 3–6 and Grades 7–9. Interestingly, none of these three chapters focusing on the visual arts in basic education take gender issues into account. Certainly, the contents of the subject are presented on a rather general level; however, it is still worth noting that the choice of the few issues that are concretized is based on value judgements. It is also noteworthy that in the field of Finnish visual art education, gender-related issues are not often discussed in a way that would encompass a broader understanding of gender production and the multitude of possibilities and performatives therein, including queer. Similar to what is proposed by Greteman (2017) in the context of the USA, the role of the teacher, the sexuality of young people or topics that are considered morally inappropriate for discussion in the context of education are dismissed with overly generic statements.
As gender or gender issues are not identified in the specific visual arts chapters, the following analysis focuses on the chapters that lay the foundation of the values and school culture within basic education: Chapter 2 ‘Underlying values of basic education’; Chapter 3 ‘Mission and general goals of basic education’; and Chapter 4 ‘Operating culture of comprehensive basic education’ (Finnish National Agency for Education, 2014).
In general, gender is given a very marginal position within the curriculum text. Instead of verbalizing the multiplicity of identities and positionalities adopted by both students and teachers, the curriculum text speaks about educating an abstract pupil and the responsibilities of equally abstract teachers. Gender is brought up mainly as one aspect of an equal society and is listed among other elements of (utopian) equality through titles and slogans such as, ‘Education contributes to promoting economic, social, regional and gender equality’ (Finnish National Agency for Education, 2014: 24). However, the national core curriculum does not take a stance on what is meant by ‘equality’ within these issues, thus avoiding stating an opinion or unpacking its meaning. Also worth noticing is that although equity and equality are promoted throughout the curriculum text, especially in the chapters ‘Underlying values of education’ and ‘Mission and general goals of basic education’, only isolated sections are specific about including gender equity within the broader objectives of equality.
Inevitably, ‘The respect for life and human rights’ as well as ‘Well-being, democracy and active agency in civil society’ (Finnish National Agency for Education, 2014) can be – and should be – read as including the necessity of gender equity. Still, the vague and abstract tone of the text is problematic, considering the existing gap between policies and practices. The abstract overtone ignores the complexity and the restrictions of the contexts in which the content of the national core curriculum is promoted and, for example, overlooks the structural limitations of the comprehensive school and, therefore, dismisses the significant societal and institutional aspects of the problems of evident injustice, assigning responsibility for solutions solely to school communities and individuals.
A few notes on addressing gender awareness can be found in Chapter 4, ‘Operating culture of comprehensive basic education’, specifically in Sections 4.1, ‘Significance of school culture and its development’ and 4.2, ‘Principles that guide the development of the school culture’. As the national core curriculum states, ‘school culture plays a key role in implementing comprehensive basic education’ and ‘affects those who are within its sphere, regardless of whether its significance and impacts are recognised or not’ (Finnish National Agency for Education, 2014: 46). So, concentrating on the gender issues within this context is, indeed, deemed crucial. The viewpoints presented within this chapter are also applicable and seem gender aware. For example, the text points out how the use of language transfers values and attitudes to the pupils. The chapter also states: The pupils’ conceptions of their gender identity and sexuality evolve during their time in basic education. A learning community promotes gender equality by its values and practices and supports the pupils in forming their gender identity. The approach of the instruction is characterised by gender-awareness. The community encourages the pupils to recognise their potential and to study various subjects, make choices and commit to studies without gender-related role models. (Finnish National Agency for Education, 2014: 46) Each pupil is unique and valuable just as he or she is. Each pupil has the right to grow into his or her full potential as a human being and a member of society. To achieve this, the pupils need encouragement and individual support as well as experiences of being heard and valued in the school community. (Finnish National Agency for Education, 2014: 52, italics added by the authors)
Despite the general abstractness of the national core curriculum, there are also parts in which this illusion of neutrality is entirely shattered. Perhaps the most blatant example of this is the following statement from the chapter describing the mission of basic education: ‘The mission of basic education is to prevent inequality and exclusion and to promote gender equality. Basic education encourages girls and boys to study different subjects equally and promotes information and understanding of the diversity of gender’ (Finnish National Agency for Education, 2014: 23).
Disguised as an act of equality, the statement indeed reinforces the binary approach. Gender multiplicity is presented as an addition to the hegemonic norm, a deviation or abnormality that information will be given about. Thus, gender diversity is presented as belonging outside the daily life of the school, in the spirit of ‘Education about the Other’ (Kumashiro, 2000: 30), while simultaneously further marginalizing and othering the queer inside the school institution. The chapter entitled ‘Mission of basic education’ literally describes the mission of the national core curriculum as being to advance equality between binary norms while oppressing everyone who differs from this.
Not surprisingly, the handbook published by the Finnish National Agency of Education to support work towards gender equity, Tasa-arvotyö on taitolaji (Finnish National Agency for Education, 2015), reproduces the same inconsistency and contradiction that is present in the national core curriculum. Although the handbook repeatedly promotes the importance of gender awareness, it continuously underlines the notion of ‘both genders’. Even the chapter focusing on gender multiplicity in educational institutions is presented through a viewpoint in which the heteronormative two genders are the norm and other gender identities are presented in the light of something other than the norm. The text states that other gendered means ‘something outside or in-between feminine/womanhood or masculine/manhood’ (Finnish National Agency for Education, 2015: 13).
The ways in which the national core curriculum and its supporting materials continuously marginalize and overlook the existence of queer pupils are contradictory to the objectives of equality and social justice presented in these documents. In moving towards equality, policies and school communities not only need to acknowledge the presence of queer pupils but, furthermore, the people writing and delivering these policies should become self-critical of the treatment of such pupils. The handbook focusing on sexual harassment in schools and educational institutions that is published by the Finnish National Agency of Education states: Members of special groups, including sexual and gender minorities, young people of foreign origin, those with a restricted functional capacity, and young people placed outside their homes reported significantly more experiences of sexual harassment. These groups additionally had more experiences of sexual violence. It would also appear that a significant part of the sexual harassment encountered by these young people takes place at educational institutions. (Finnish National Agency for Education, 2018: 7)
Conclusion and suggestions for queering the national core curriculum
As the national core curriculum declares, ‘The mission of basic education is to prevent inequality and exclusion and to promote gender equality’ (Finnish National Agency for Education, 2014). To align with the UN Universal Declaration on Human Rights and the Convention on the Rights of the Child, as well as the specific improvement goals mentioned in the social report by Madrigal-Borloz (2018), and to work towards true equality, education needs to become equal for all by abandoning ‘both genders’ and working with true gender diversity. The authors suggest the following action points:
Queer reading of the national core curriculum, which is effective 2016–2026. This may work as a tool for educators to include queer subjects and diverse gender performatives within the curriculum. This queer reading could include further education in what it means to be non-binary and resistance towards accepting or a complete refusal to accept the phrase ‘both sexes’ or other binary terms, instead constructing a more inclusive notion of equity and equality in terms of gender within the abstract frame of the curriculum. Such a queer reading would require commitment to critical institutional and pedagogical analysis and long-term self-reflection and creativity, because the queer possibilities that are presently absent need to be carved, realized and repeatedly concretized. Engaging specialists in training and reflection. Continued professional education is needed, because anti-normative morals, beliefs and practices are easier to accept as abstract ideologies and harder to admit and change in relation to praxis and core personal, cultural and societal values contextualized in history. Using the CA as a tool in classroom situations, thereby centralizing important dimensions of quality of life in education not only the results of learning or competencies. Due to the situational nature of oppression, improving policies alone will not be enough to centralize queer in classrooms or fix the gap between policy and practice. The actualization of the national core curriculum happens through the ever-changing situations of daily life within comprehensive schools, making the detailed interpretations of the curriculum situational as well. Identifying the underlying political and theoretical foundations of the curricula and policy, rather than disguising them as ‘neutral’. Queering future curricula. The critiques presented in this article are of critical importance and need to be engaged with in future revisions of the national core curriculum. One of the simplest corrections would be to start using truly inclusive language, such as the singular ‘they’, in addressing pupils. This modification is frequently misunderstood as ‘gender neutrality’, which deprives cisgendered pupils of their rightful gender expression. However, it actually leads to the exact opposite: all pupils have the right to express their gender, and this right needs to be secured at all levels of education. Taking an activist stance to influence broader change within socio-cultural change.
Footnotes
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.