This thesis answers to a question “Why adolescent girls drop out of school in Northern Uganda?” In Uganda, approximately 70% of the children drop out of public school before 7th grade, the final year of primary school. In northern Uganda, girls drop out of school in more significant numbers than boys, and it happens around the age when girls reach puberty. Northern Uganda is also a particular location because it is recovering from long conflict, affecting strongly the whole population living in the area. The thesis is based on two-month ethnographic fieldwork in northern Uganda during the spring of 2015. To answer the main research question this study seeks to analyse it through taking a look how the school, the community and the girls themselves experience and talk about dropping out, education and growing up in the current post-conflict state of the social life. The thesis argues that the dropout rate is linked to the adolescence as life-stage of becoming an adult that is making the girls to make decisions about the future. The analysis is done through three different perspectives – the educational, societal and personal narratives of the youth. The first perspective is the education and schooling in northern Uganda. It explores the concept of ’educated person’ by Levinson and Holland through sexual education and gender in education. The study shows that Ugandan public primary and secondary education is deriving its ideas and understanding of educated person from the national curriculum, which often conflict with the local concepts of the educated person in the Acholi community, influencing the blamed and real reasons for dropping out. The second perspective looks into the community and the societal pressures the girls are facing when growing up. It will describe family, kinship, marriage and gender in post-conflict context and show how in these areas of life, the past conflict, “loss of culture”, generational conflicts and subsequent disobedience are presented as reasons behind the challenges to stay in school. The third perspective tells the stories of the girls met and talked to during the ethnographic fieldwork in Northern Uganda. It answers the question “What is happening in the life of a girl when she drops out of school?”. It is argued that the girls take actions of a gendered agency to further their lives and become adults. Thus, dropping out of school cannot just be explained as a simple event just suddenly happening without their own will. It will further answer the question “What makes some girls stay in school?” to show how those girls still in school manage the crosscurrents of growing up in Acholiland. The thesis argues that the girls in northern Uganda are active appropriators and social agents who through their own actions contest, struggle and penetrate the structures in their society while also at the same time reproduce them. In Northern Uganda, both the community and the state together with different international agencies will have plans and expectations for the girls’ future. The study shows how the girls navigate the school, community and peer expectations and sociocultural and economic structures to stay or finally drop out of school. These structures are state organised and aid-infused formal schooling and society in amidst of post-conflict recovery which creates a framework where the girls are acting. The school presents the modern and globally orientated educated person, and in contrast to it, the community is looking for to restore ‘traditional’ way of life. It is argued that these two sides are often in conflict and in the middle of this conflict the girls act and solve their way out of it, looking for adulthood and gaining respectable status in the society. The schools, the community and even sometimes the development actors see the girls as passively following the things they will encounter. The thesis will show that they are not. The girls either stay in school or drop out of it, but more often as a consequence of their own decisions and actions than passively because the school or the community could not support them. It is demonstrated that dropping out of school looks more of line a tactic for the future as a respectable grown-up than mere problem to be solved.

Street children is a broad topic that has been studied by various researchers often focusing on some more specific part, for example street life and activities in the street. In the previous years, the voices of the children themselves have been increasingly taken into account. In this study the focus is on the ways of helping the children and how to support them to get out of the street. The aim is to find the best practices to support the children and to see if the strategies of the centres meet the needs of the children. Therefore, it is important to study why the children have ended up in the street at the first place and what kind of survival strategies they have. Also the reasons for them to run away back to the street again are discussed. The study is an ethnographic case study. The methods used for data collection were interviews and participant observation. The field study was conducted in Lusaka, Zambia, in three different centres for street children. Some participant observation was done in the street too. For clarity’s sake the perceptions of the children and the strategies of the centres are analysed and discussed in different chapters. The findings show that there are various push factors for children ending up in the street, for example poverty and violence at home. Also not having anywhere to go to and the need to survive are pushing children to the street. Running away from the centres is linked to violence but also to freedom, addiction to drugs and alcohol as well as peer pressure. In the street the most usual activity is begging, which is considered as a mean of survival. Aside of begging, children do different kinds of piece works. Street life is hard and unsafe: there is violence, hunger, theft and addiction to glue and drugs. The friends in the street were seen as an important thing in order to survive. Among the children, the centres are generally considered as a good way to get out of the street, alongside education. However, the violence used in some centres is criticised and the child’s willingness to go to the centre is considered as important. Children who are willing to come to the centres can be found through street outreach. From the point of view of the centre staff children working and staying in the street is problematic because these children are deprived of their rights, for example right to education. Often the children do have parents or relatives but they are working in the street in order to support the families. The domestic work is considered as a normal thing whereas the work in the street is seen as abuse and exploitation. Sometimes the parents even send the children to the street to earn money. Work in the street often prevents the children from going to school but sometimes the work can help them to afford going to school. However, children working in the street are often taken advantage of. Both the street life and the work in the street has a lot of consequences for the child’s health and well-being, both physical and psychological. Despite the hardships in the street, there is also friends, belonging and freedom. A simple solution to tackle the street child phenomenon is to stop giving money to the children in the street and direct them to the facilities, where they can obtain education and life skills. The staff of the centres have a consensus of home being the best place for the child. The children’s perceptions are somewhat similar to the strategies of the centres when discussing the best ways to help the children. One simple solution is to stop giving the children money in the street. For the child to integrate to the society he/she needs a place he/she can consider as home, family or guardians, rehabilitation and education. Also the government’s intervention would be important in order to support the families to get help from the social welfare and to send the children to school. This study contributes to the discussion of street children, their lives in the street and how to help them, both from the point of views of the children and the staff of the centres.

Objectives. Attachment theory is a theory of social development and personality, known around the world. According to the theory, children have an innate tendency to develop a biologically based and central nervous system-regulated attachment bond to their primary caregivers in order to ensure safety, care, and survival. Early attachment experiences contribute to the way one sees oneself and others and lead to secure, insecure, or disorganized attachment styles, which affect rest of one’s life. Previous research has confirmed the universal nature of attachment, different attachment categories and styles, and early attachment’s links with future relationships and various internal and external problems. Attachment research has traditionally concentrated on early childhood and early childhood environments, whereas middle childhood, adolescence, and school context have been studied less. The objectives of the present study were to find out what kinds of links there are between attachment and the lives of school-aged children and youngsters, what kinds of attachment-related challenges teachers encounter at school, and how teachers could support their students with those attachment-related challenges. The aim is to explore attachment in the lives of school-aged children and youngsters, including at school, to gain a better understanding and to create a valuable foundation for future research. Methodology. The present study was conducted as a systematic literature review, which allowed the gathering of diverse and comprehensive, yet relevant research material, while also supporting objectivity and reproducibility aspects of the study. The material, available through electronic databases, was comprised of research articles from around the world, published in peer-reviewed international research journals. The material was analyzed thematically by research questions and topics, which were then used as a framework in the Results section. Results and conclusions. Early attachment and attachment styles were directly and indirectly linked to the lives of school-aged children and youngsters, including teacher-student relationships, peer relationships, family relationships, and academic achievement, as well as internal and external problems. Various attachment-related challenges and problems were visible at school, but teachers had many ways to buffer them. Current attachment research has not affected or changed school environments enough. Much more attention should be given to attachment within schools, teacher education, and in-service training programs in order to give students better support for their attachment-related problems and challenges.

The aim of this research is to study what kind of conceptions class teachers have about elementary school's festival traditions and especially Christian based festival traditions. This is a fairly topical issue at the moment. Over the last decades the Finnish society has come more plural and that has highlight the questions what festivals should school celebrate. In the centre of this discuss are Christian based festivals and festival tradition. The subject hasn't been researched much. So this study strives to answer this need of research. I approach the subject from the perspective of the pedagogics and the cultural heritage education. My research problems are: 1. What kind of conceptions have class teacher about the elementary school's festival traditions? 2. Which overtones is relation with these conceptions? 3. What kind of conceptions have class teachers about the reasons of school festivals? The nature of this study was quantitative and qualitative survey research. All together 245 class teachers of elementary schools from Satakunta (n=118) and Helsinki (n=127) took part in survey which was gathered in the fall of 2012. I chose these two areas because of their difference in population, culture and environment. By gathering large sample from two different areas I tried to conservative extrapolate these responses to all class teachers. The material was analysed by statistical analysis methods as means and factor analysis and by using qualitative research basic ideas: categorising and formulating types. According to the results of this study the teachers perceived Christian based festival tradition as part of the cultural education of the school. Teachers also thought that the school festivals were great opportunity to get to know Finnish culture tradition. The culture tradition of other cultures was also seen very important part of the school festival. Teachers' experience was that pupil's religious diversity didn't make school festival tradition significantly problematic although it has impact to the staging of the school festivals. Teachers saw that most of the meanings of the festivals were engaged to the purpose of the festival and in to the celebration of the festival. Teachers from Satakunta felt school festivals a bit more important than teachers from Helsinki. However altogether teachers' conceptions were positive against the school festival traditions. It seems that based on this study celebration of the school festival isn't that problematic thing that public conversation sometimes implies. The school festival tradition definitely needs more research. One viewpoint for the future study could be which issues teachers estimate to include in the Finnish culture heritage, which transmitting is the one assignment of the school.

In this paper, we make a case for situating the school as a geopolitical site. The geopolitical functions of schools and schooling have long been investigated by geographers: forming national citizens, promoting geostrategic discourses, and disciplining populations, to name a few. However, we advocate an approach that is “outward looking,” examining the school not just as a space where these functions are carried out by the state, but as a site where institutional structure, educators, and students exercise agency in complicating the actual implementation of state geo- political aims. We do this by examining two cases where public schooling has been leveraged by Western states in the service of the post-9/11 securitization of Muslim students in the United Kingdom and France. We argue that these two cases illustrate that schools can be examined not just as containers for state policy, but as explanatory moments in their own right in understanding state geopolitical strategy.

As computer technology evolves, both the need for knowledge workers and the pressure to increase the effectiveness of teaching with the help of ICT increase. Teaching of the skills needed by the knowledge workers requires new pedagogy, where instead facts and obedience the focus is on skills, independence and learning to learn. The use of ICT in education brings its own challenges to learning situations. Social constructivist computer supported collaborative learning (CSCL) is becoming a major challenger for the traditional teacher-centered learning. One of these methodologies is Progressive Inquiry, which is developed in Finland. Since the social constructive theory emphasizes the relations between learners more than the individuals' actions, research in this field must also take into account the interactions that occur in learning situations. While traditional psychological and pedagogical methods are not applicable, an old method of social sciences, SNA or social network analysis is designed specifically for the analysis of groups of people. Applications of SNA in psychology and collaborative learning are however few and preliminary, and no reliable evidence on the applicability nor useful results exist. The purpose of this study is to find out if SNA can be applied to this field of research. In this study SNA was used to analyze the learning situations of 23 classes in comprehensive and secondary schools that used Progressive inquiry. The results show that SNA can be applied to the study of CSCL, since the analysis produced preliminary measurements that were related to the quality of the course. The results are also in concordance with social constructivist theory: a course's usefulness increases as the several students write high quality messages and participate widely in different conversations.

This study investigates agency-structure dynamics in students and teachers' social activity in a novel design and making environment in the context of the Finnish school system, which has recently undergone major curricular reform. Understanding that agency is an important mediator of educational change, we ask the following questions: How are agency-structure dynamics manifested in the social activity of students and their teachers in a novel design and making environment? How do agency-structure dynamics create possibilities and obstacles for educational change? The data comprise 65 hours of video recordings and field notes of the social activity of students aged 9-12 years old (N = 94) and their teachers collected over a period of one semester. Our study shows how the introduction of the novel learning environment created a boundary space in which traditional teacher-centered activity patterns interacted and came into tension with student-centered modes of teaching and learning. Our study reveals three distinctive agency-structure dynamics that illuminate how the agentive actions of both teachers and students stabilized existing teacher-centered practices and, at other, times ruptured and broke away from existing patterns, thus giving rise to possibilities for educational change.