Teachers’ voices about being a teacher: comparative studies in England, Finland and Sweden

The aim of the article is to present and discuss a study in which Finnish, English and Swedish teachers and student teachers described the implications of being a teacher. It is cross-national and consists of multiple case studies. Data were collected through twenty-four focus group dialogues, and 110 teachers/student teachers participated in the study. According to the study, we have found that teachers and student teachers in all three countries promoted pupils’ development of critical thinking, which is another way of saying that they focused on ‘the attitudes and values’ aspect of citizenship education; however, this was most evident in the Finnish and the Swedish focus groups. In England there is a subject emphasis to the professional role, the three countries ranked the topics (the pupils; the subject; the organization; the society; teacher identity; parents) equally, in Finland the teacher role did not appear to be as post modern as in the two other countries.

Motivating farmers: insights from social psychology

We are social beings. What we do and don’t do, what we think, the decisions we take are all influenced by those around us. Sometimes we are conscious of those influences, often we are not. Those who influence us are not just our close family and friends, our own social and professional networks, but the wider societies and cultures to which we belong. The goals we espouse, the values we hold, the image we have of ourselves are all molded to a large extent by our interactions and relationships with other people. The social sciences offer a range of concepts and tools for exploring these influences. In this paper, I introduce some of these and illustrate them with recent research I and my colleagues have been doing at the University of Reading among livestock farmers in the UK, with a view to providing insights that can then be used to plan and implement more effective interventions.