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The national core curriculum is renewed in Finland approximately every ten years, the most recent one being 2016. The core curriculum sets the general goals, providing the foundation for district- and school level curriculum development work (Finnish National Board of Education, 2016). The messages from transnational educational policy (e.g. OECD) are apparent in the core curriculum. However, districts, schools and teachers are highly autonomous in upholding, resourcing and deciding about the curriculum making at the local sites of activity. Accordingly, the curriculum making relies heavily on shared sense-making as a tool for cultivating transformative learning throughout the educational system. The chapter draws on the results of the national “School Matters” research project (2014-2018), to provide the meta-analysis of the sense-making in national curriculum making. Results suggested that the shared sense-making focused on engaging educational practitioners in learning at all layers of the system. However, the means for facilitating shared sense-making between the different layers of the system and curriculum was perceived to be less coherent by the stakeholders at the district and school level, than at the state level. This implies that the educational providers should not only be involved in co-creation of the aims, contents and values of the curriculum document, but also in designing novel and ecologically valid ways for orchestrating the complex and dynamic curriculum making.

Academic engagement is considered to be a hallmark of an optimal studying experience and a key to academic success for all students, including those from abroad. Accordingly, creating an engaging learning environment for higher education students is among the most pressing issues currently facing universities. This essay first summarises authors’ research perspectives focussing on international students’ engagement in university studies. The authors especially have attempted to understand to what extent international students from different backgrounds engage in their studies and whether the impacts of factors in students’ learning environment on their academic engagement vary between different international student cohorts. Second, we introduce three emerging perspectives: students’ academic engagement in relation to their future self-visions, doctoral education and short-term study abroad programs, which are all closely tied with international education. Third, the essay proposes several gaps in the literature that the authors find important for future investigation to contribute to students’ academic engagement in globalising higher educational institutions.

This chapter provides a synthesis of the literature having to do with the moral matters of teaching. It is organized around three themes: (a) teacher’s professional ethics and values, (b) teacher’s moral sensitivity, action, and judgment, and (c) school ethos and community. Each theme is first dealt with separately. Then, the themes are related to one another to show the interconnectedness between and among them. Exemplars in this work are drawn from the authors’ and others’ substantial body of research conducted in Finland. The research findings, however, have an applicability that extends beyond national borders. The intent of this work is to stimulate discussion and to advance what is known about the moral nature of teaching through using a range of research methods and conducting studies in live school settings.