Tensions in collaborative research with teachers in the context of language education policy change in Finland

Abstract

Schools in Finland faced a major policy change in language education at the beginning of 2020, when the age to start learning the first foreign or second domestic language was lowered from third to first grade in primary school. With the aim of examining how practices are formed in this new situation, we planned a case study with one school. The outbreak of Covid-19 forced us to change our original plans in order to maintain contact with the school, and our perspective on the emerging new practices was broadened by including the language teachers’ collegial network in online interviews. In this chapter, we analyse these interview data. By paying specific attention to the researcher-practitioner collaboration as it was realized in the interviews, we identified different strategies that the teachers and researchers used in points where tensions in the interviews seemed to arise.