Conference Agenda

What kind of an educational context is Finland? The answer depends on who is speaking. Internationally, Finland is often framed through the narrative of the “PISA miracle” (Simola, 2005; Thrupp et al., 2023). Since Finland’s top-tier performance in the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) in 2000, the country has become a global projection screen for competing imaginaries of “good” education (Santos & Silova, 2015; Takayama, Waldow & Sung, 2013). Finland has been celebrated for its progressive pedagogies, digital innovations, and world-renowned teacher education, and this reputation has been further amplified through Finnish development cooperation, which has helped consolidate Finnish education as a global brand (Doyle, 2017).

Yet within Finland, recent public debates have increasingly centered on crisis narratives, particularly regarding declining PISA scores (PISA 2022 Results, Volume I and II – Country Notes, 2023). A different set of critiques portrays Finnish education in less flattering terms: as a system where teachers are conservative and authoritarian (Simola, 2005), and where teaching and assessment rely heavily on traditional pedagogies and student compliance (Nieminen et al., 2025). Scholars have also questioned Finnish education’s exceptionalism (Rastas, 2016), its colonial entanglements (Vuorela, 2016), and persistent challenges related to digitalisation, the growing influence of private actors, racism, and the mental health of students and teachers.

In a post-truth world, what counts as the “truth” about Finnish education? This panel does not aim to adjudicate between narratives of success or decline. Instead, it examines how Finland—and Finnish education as a “context”—is constructed and mobilised by diverse actors, including media organisations, development practitioners, teachers, students, and researchers. Drawing on sociomaterial traditions such as Science and Technology Studies (STS) and assemblage thinking, we explore how the “context” of Finland is actively produced, and how our own research practices participate in this contexting. By bringing these enactments into dialogue, the panel highlights how different forms of contexting shape research agendas, policy imaginaries, and transnational education development work, as well as what they obscure or foreclose.

The symposium addresses the following questions:

1. What is the “context” of Finnish education?

a. How is Finland contexted as an ideal education system?

b. How is Finland contexted as a system in crisis?

2. What do these forms of contexting enable, and what do they preclude?

“Context” is a ubiquitous concept in social science and education research. The social sciences are often defined by their commitment to contextualisation, situating objects of study within meaningful settings (Mjøset, 2009; Asdal & Moser, 2012). Yet critical, post-humanist, and irreductionist traditions challenge the assumption that contexts are pre-given. Instead, they emphasise that multiple contexts are enacted simultaneously by different actors (Mol, 2002). Contexts are continually made and unmade through disciplinary, textual, technoscientific, political, legal, and administrative practices that extend beyond academic research (Asdal & Moser, 2012).

Building on scholarship that conceptualises contexting (Asdal & Reinertsen, 2021; Piattoeva, Klutas & Suominen, 2018), this symposium applies this lens to research on Finland and Finnish education. We resist treating Finland as a stable educational context waiting to be described. Instead, we interrogate the multiple global enactments of Finnish education in three national contexts: Japan, Kenya, and Portugal, through media representations, international organisations, development cooperation, and the education export industry. By adopting contexting as a methodological move, we aim to shift discussion away from binaries such as global/local or good/bad practices and foreground the multiplicity, fluidity, and productive tensions shaping conceptualisations of Finnish education across diverse settings.