M Kaukko
Biographic Data
| ID | 28150 |
|---|---|
| NAME | M Kaukko |
| GIVEN NAMES | M |
| FAMILY NAME | Kaukko |
| SIGNATURE | KAUKKO M |
| AFFILIATIONS | Tampere University |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-8233-1302 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 33 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 126 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 31 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 2 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2017 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
Civic purposes in teaching: A study among Finnish and German student teachers
This study explored Finnish ( n = 379) and German ( n = 477) student teachers’ professional purposes – meaningful long-term intentions to contribute beyond the self through the teaching profession. Due to global crises and calls for social reconstructionism in teacher education, we were especially interested in how civic purposes manifested in student teachers’ thinking. Qualitative content analysis of written responses showed that student teache…
Refugee education for living well in a world worth living in
Like all education, refugee education is prefigured by the cultural, material and political conditions of broader societal contexts and realised in local classroom practices. Utilising Habermas’s notion of system and lifeworld and theories of practice, this article explores how teachers in Finnish, South African, and Australian schools work towards the double purpose of education; that is, supporting refugee students to live a good life in a worl…
For the Nation and the Future: Historical Snapshots into Refugee Education during the Last 100 Years in Finland and Sweden
The role of education for school-aged refugee children has evolved throughout history, influenced by time, geopolitical contexts, public perceptions, and ideas about the purposes of education. This article examines refugee education in Finland and Sweden over the past century, focusing on three periods. The first is the 1920s, when newly independent Finland agreed to the migration of large groups of refugees from Russia. The next phase is the 194…
Academic practices: What really matters
Academic practices in Western universities continue to be reshaped by shifting and emerging conditions, including dramatic changes like the massification of higher education, digital transformation of teaching and learning, globalisation of university education, and accountability-driven reform. This article asks what really matters in academic practice—what do academics themselves regard as essential to sustaining their professional and ethical …
Doing gender in the playground: An intersectional lens on newly arrived migrant students’ practices
Drawing on video data collected by newly arrived migrant children in a Finnish primary school, this article explores how children’s practices of gender are enmeshed in site-specific arrangements that enable or constrain their access to certain places and activities at the school playground. Combining feminist theories with theories of practice, we show how children’s participation in play is shaped by a combination of intersecting social categori…
Hospitality and Agency in Young Refugees’ Everyday Relationships: A Study of Mutual Becoming
This study asks how former unaccompanied minors in Finland practice hospitality and reciprocity with those they value, both locally and transnationally, and how agency emerges in these encounters as they rebuild sustainable lives despite challenges. Previous research often frames unaccompanied minors and other young refugees primarily as aid recipients within support systems, overlooking their agency and capacity to shape their own social worlds.…
The role of mindsets in culturally responsive teaching: Pedagogical strategies among Finnish preservice teachers
This research explores how Finnish pre-service teachers’ beliefs about malleability (mindsets), inform their pedagogical strategies in culturally responsive teaching. The study is part of a larger mixed-methods project which includes survey data and follow up interviews with a smaller group of participants, utilizing vignettes. Qualitative results based on interviews reveal that pre-service teachers primarily focus on supporting the development o…
From 'I-Poems' to 'Pronoun Poems: Listening for the Collective Voice Through a Voice-Centred Relational Methodology
In this article we present our development and use of pronoun poems when using a voice-centred relational methodology (VCRM). The use of I-poems has been demonstrated as valuable when 'listening' for the voices of research participants through a VCRM approach. Through focussing on the 'I' pronoun, previous VCRM scholarship has argued that the use of I-poems can facilitate listening for the authentic inner first-person voice of research participan…
‘It is a university where I felt welcome’: Poems of asylum-seeking students’ sense of coherence in Australian higher education
Current social and political arrangements of higher education are inequitable for students from asylum-seeking backgrounds. In many countries, their access to university is limited and if they are accepted, their status as forced migrants puts them at multiple disadvantages. This inequity is in contrast with the universal aim of higher education institutions to serve all people and their societies. Utilising a voice centred relational method (VCR…
Forced Migration: A Relational Wellbeing Approach
In this Special Issue, we consider the ways in which a relational wellbeing approach can be used to understand the lives and trajectories of refugees in general and young refugees in particular
Keeping Each Other Safe: Young Refugees’ Navigation Towards a Good Life in Finland, Norway, and Scotland
The metaphor of navigation has been used to investigate the social and moral movements people make in changeable or fluctuating circumstances, as well as to shed light on the intersection of people, practices and the changing contexts and social forces around them. In this chapter, we first provide a short overview of navigation as a metaphor, and how the situations of young refugees might add to the multiple meanings of navigation. Using empiric…
(Im)possibilities of parity of participation in school settings in the lives of unaccompanied youth
Despite the rhetoric of inclusion and equal participation, educational practices end up producing social exclusion. In this research, we are interested in practices where outcomes fail to match efforts with respect to students’ opportunities to participate equally. The research was carried out as a focused ethnography with young people who arrived in Finland as unaccompanied asylum-seeking youths. The results show that separated learning environm…
Diversity beliefs are associated with orientations to teaching for diversity and social justice: A study among German and Finnish student teachers
This mixed methods study explored German (n = 477) and Finnish (n = 379) student teachers' color-blind, multiculturalist, and polyculturalist diversity beliefs. Statistical analyses identified polyculturalism and multiculturalism as the most prominent diversity beliefs among the student teachers and detected associations between diversity belief profiles and student teachers' orientations to teaching for diversity and social justice. Polycultural…
Preservice teachers’ professional beliefs in relation to global social change: Findings from Finland and Germany
This article presents empirical findings on orientations that guide Finnish and German preservice teachers’ professional action in the face of global social change. Drawing on group discussions interpreted with documentary method, the findings show that education under the conditions of global social change is discussed in relation to four thematic categories: the self in the world-relation, culture, social change and teaching praxis, each of whi…
Living Well in a World Worth Living in for All: Volume 1: Current Practices of Social Justice, Sustainability and Wellbeing
This open access book is the first of a two-volume series that focuses on people's current experiences within the world
Faceless, voiceless child - Ethics of visual anonymity in research with children and young people
The anonymisation of research participants is a standardised ethical practice, but researchers sometimes struggle to find an ethical balance between the practice of anonymisation and participants' wishes to reveal their identities. In the Australian and Finnish studies utilising visuality, the participating asylum-seeking and refugee children and youths wished to reveal their faces and claim ownership for their work. The hindrance of this caused …
Migrant-Background Student Experiences of Facing and Overcoming Difficulties in Finnish Comprehensive Schools
This article considers what students with a migrant background in Finnish comprehensive schools report as difficult, and how they succeed in overcoming these difficulties. We draw on two sets of school wellbeing and learning surveys for migrant students, conducted in 2016 and 2021 in comprehensive schools (grades 1–9) in and around two major cities in Finland. We pay attention to student answers to three questions: What is difficult in school? Ho…
Breaking down the walls of the ‘Ivory Tower’: Critical reflections on how co-teaching partnerships can bridge the gap between inclusive education theory and practice
For decades, the gap between theory and practice has remained the central problem of teacher education. This study will present an alternative approach in an attempt to try to bridge the gap between theory and practice in a teacher education course focused on inclusive education. The approach is based on a model that integrates a university-based and school-based curriculum to promote collaborative partnerships through an arrangement that involve…
Creating spaces of learning in academia: Fostering niches for professional learning practice
This paper analyses the move by an Australian university faculty to a new building featuring open plan and alternative workspaces. Through the lens of the theory of practice architectures, the paper examines how the new built spaces both enabled and constrained the professional learning practices of academics. Drawing on a case study of the transition, the paper explores the ways in which the move to the new building disrupted existing ecologies …
Pockets of love. Unaccompanied children in institutional care in Finland
This article discusses how needs for loving relationships are met for unaccompanied asylum-seeking children in Finland. The data was collected through a focused ethnography with 13 unaccompanied children. The findings show that institutional protocols and practices fail to consider the need for love of these children, hindering their possibilities to create or maintain loving relationships. The findings also suggest that new loving ties could be …
This is our treehouse: Investigating play through a practice architectures lens
This article explores a child-led project of building a treehouse through the theory of practice architectures. It draws on video data collected by 13 children wearing microcameras (GoPro) in a multicultural Australian primary school. The data was co-analysed with the children. The article illuminates how play practices emerge, diffuse, persist and/or disappear with time. This knowledge is needed to understand the different facets of free play an…
How to be a ‘Good Asylum Seeker’? The Subjectification of Young Men Seeking Asylum
This research focuses on the subjectification of young asylum-seeking men. By subjectification, we mean the effort an individual invests in detecting, negotiating, meeting and contesting the surrounding discursive expectations. The underlying question is: if someone wants to fulfil the position ascribed to them, that is be a ‘good asylum seeker’ and respond to the surrounding demands as much as possible, what would then, in fact, be a ‘good asylu…
Learning to survive amidst nested crises: Can the coronavirus pandemic help us change educational practices to prepare for the impending eco-crisis
The ongoing ecological crisis and the more recent Coronavirus crisis challenge the grand narrative of Enlightenment that human beings are ‘masters of nature’. For millennia, human social learning has allowed Homo sapiens to outpace most of our competitor creatures and live a comfortable life, but this competitive success has resulted in cataclysmic failure for the ecosystem. However, people’s unique ability to learn gives us hope that we can over…
Storycrafting refugee children’s lives. Presenting Ali and the Long Journey to Australia
Refugee students may come to schools with fragmented educational histories and other exile-related stressors, but many also settle fast, enjoy school and live rather ordinary childhoods. These more positive stories are not told because they get overridden by well-meaning but counterproductive stories of victimhood. This article presents a storycrafting project with 13 primary school aged refugee children in Australia, with an aim to problematise …
Recognition and precarious mobilities: The experiences of university students from a refugee background in Australia
Belonging and participation in liminality: Unaccompanied children in Finland and Sweden
This article investigates children's participation and sense of belonging from the perspective of unaccompanied children, based on two qualitative research projects with unaccompanied children in Sweden and Finland. The results show that the unaccompanied children's own understanding of their participation and belonging in different positions was fluid; for instance, the borders between childhood and adulthood, and striving for independence or wa…
The Management of Time and Waiting by Unaccompanied Asylum-Seeking Girls in Finland
This article considers how asylum-seeking girls in residential care in Finland construct their everyday lives while waiting for asylum outcomes. These girls, from various African countries, are shown to experience waiting as both debilitating and productive. First, our findings confirm the established picture of asylum-seeking young people being in limbo, unable to influence the resolution of their claims. Second, we explore more hopeful ways in …
Living Well in a World Worth Living in for All: Volume 1: Current Practices of Social Justice, Sustainability and Wellbeing
This open access book is the first of a two-volume series that focuses on people's current experiences within the world
Learning how to go on’: Refugee students and informal learning practices
This article explores the social and historical formation of ‘successful’ refugee students’ learning practices utilising in-depth, critical incident interviews with primary school aged, refugee-background students in Australia. Employing a practice lens, this article firstly explores the informal learning practices the students identify from their past; secondly, examines the arrangements which hold these learning practices in place, and thirdly,…
Widening University Access for Students of Asylum-Seeking Backgrounds: (Mis)recognition in an Australian Context
Diversity beliefs are associated with orientations to teaching for diversity and social justice: A study among German and Finnish student teachers
This mixed methods study explored German (n = 477) and Finnish (n = 379) student teachers' color-blind, multiculturalist, and polyculturalist diversity beliefs. Statistical analyses identified polyculturalism and multiculturalism as the most prominent diversity beliefs among the student teachers and detected associations between diversity belief profiles and student teachers' orientations to teaching for diversity and social justice. Polycultural…
Confined in Waiting: Young Asylum Seekers Narrating In and Out of Temporary Shelter
This research considers the waiting and confinement experienced by young asylum seekers during and after their stay at a temporary shelter in Finland. The data for this research consists of interviews and ethnographic ‘hanging out’ with nine young asylum seekers throughout their asylum process. In order to generate new knowledge about the situated and fluid experiences of young adult asylum seekers’ confinement, this article focuses on four in-de…
Learning to survive amidst nested crises: Can the coronavirus pandemic help us change educational practices to prepare for the impending eco-crisis
The ongoing ecological crisis and the more recent Coronavirus crisis challenge the grand narrative of Enlightenment that human beings are ‘masters of nature’. For millennia, human social learning has allowed Homo sapiens to outpace most of our competitor creatures and live a comfortable life, but this competitive success has resulted in cataclysmic failure for the ecosystem. However, people’s unique ability to learn gives us hope that we can over…
Storycrafting refugee children’s lives. Presenting Ali and the Long Journey to Australia
Refugee students may come to schools with fragmented educational histories and other exile-related stressors, but many also settle fast, enjoy school and live rather ordinary childhoods. These more positive stories are not told because they get overridden by well-meaning but counterproductive stories of victimhood. This article presents a storycrafting project with 13 primary school aged refugee children in Australia, with an aim to problematise …
Recognition and precarious mobilities: The experiences of university students from a refugee background in Australia
The crc of Unaccompanied Asylum Seekers in Finland
According to the un Convention on the Right of a Child ( crc ), all children in Finland have the right to participate in decision-making concerning them. This article shows how the conceptualisation of childhood affects the implementation of the crc , especially Article 12 on participation, focusing on unaccompanied asylum-seeking children in Finland. Universalist notions of childhood and children’s participatory rights overlook the specific soci…
Forced Migration: A Relational Wellbeing Approach
In this Special Issue, we consider the ways in which a relational wellbeing approach can be used to understand the lives and trajectories of refugees in general and young refugees in particular
Faceless, voiceless child - Ethics of visual anonymity in research with children and young people
The anonymisation of research participants is a standardised ethical practice, but researchers sometimes struggle to find an ethical balance between the practice of anonymisation and participants' wishes to reveal their identities. In the Australian and Finnish studies utilising visuality, the participating asylum-seeking and refugee children and youths wished to reveal their faces and claim ownership for their work. The hindrance of this caused …
(Im)possibilities of parity of participation in school settings in the lives of unaccompanied youth
Despite the rhetoric of inclusion and equal participation, educational practices end up producing social exclusion. In this research, we are interested in practices where outcomes fail to match efforts with respect to students’ opportunities to participate equally. The research was carried out as a focused ethnography with young people who arrived in Finland as unaccompanied asylum-seeking youths. The results show that separated learning environm…
Pockets of love. Unaccompanied children in institutional care in Finland
This article discusses how needs for loving relationships are met for unaccompanied asylum-seeking children in Finland. The data was collected through a focused ethnography with 13 unaccompanied children. The findings show that institutional protocols and practices fail to consider the need for love of these children, hindering their possibilities to create or maintain loving relationships. The findings also suggest that new loving ties could be …
This is our treehouse: Investigating play through a practice architectures lens
This article explores a child-led project of building a treehouse through the theory of practice architectures. It draws on video data collected by 13 children wearing microcameras (GoPro) in a multicultural Australian primary school. The data was co-analysed with the children. The article illuminates how play practices emerge, diffuse, persist and/or disappear with time. This knowledge is needed to understand the different facets of free play an…
The Management of Time and Waiting by Unaccompanied Asylum-Seeking Girls in Finland
This article considers how asylum-seeking girls in residential care in Finland construct their everyday lives while waiting for asylum outcomes. These girls, from various African countries, are shown to experience waiting as both debilitating and productive. First, our findings confirm the established picture of asylum-seeking young people being in limbo, unable to influence the resolution of their claims. Second, we explore more hopeful ways in …
The crc of Unaccompanied Asylum Seekers in Finland
According to the un Convention on the Right of a Child ( crc ), all children in Finland have the right to participate in decision-making concerning them. This article shows how the conceptualisation of childhood affects the implementation of the crc , especially Article 12 on participation, focusing on unaccompanied asylum-seeking children in Finland. Universalist notions of childhood and children’s participatory rights overlook the specific soci…
Belonging and participation in liminality: Unaccompanied children in Finland and Sweden
This article investigates children's participation and sense of belonging from the perspective of unaccompanied children, based on two qualitative research projects with unaccompanied children in Sweden and Finland. The results show that the unaccompanied children's own understanding of their participation and belonging in different positions was fluid; for instance, the borders between childhood and adulthood, and striving for independence or wa…
Learning how to go on’: Refugee students and informal learning practices
This article explores the social and historical formation of ‘successful’ refugee students’ learning practices utilising in-depth, critical incident interviews with primary school aged, refugee-background students in Australia. Employing a practice lens, this article firstly explores the informal learning practices the students identify from their past; secondly, examines the arrangements which hold these learning practices in place, and thirdly,…
Pedagogy, Education, and Praxis in Critical Times
Recognition in the lives of unaccompanied children and youth: A review of the key European literature
This integrative literature review studies well‐being of unaccompanied asylum‐seeking children through the three modes of recognition—love, rights and solidarity—as conceptualized by Axel Honneth. The analysis shows that the children's basic needs, such as safety, shelter and nutrition, are mostly recognized; however, the systems responsible for the care of unaccompanied children seem to misidentify other essential needs, such as the need for sta…
Confined in Waiting: Young Asylum Seekers Narrating In and Out of Temporary Shelter
This research considers the waiting and confinement experienced by young asylum seekers during and after their stay at a temporary shelter in Finland. The data for this research consists of interviews and ethnographic ‘hanging out’ with nine young asylum seekers throughout their asylum process. In order to generate new knowledge about the situated and fluid experiences of young adult asylum seekers’ confinement, this article focuses on four in-de…
Widening University Access for Students of Asylum-Seeking Backgrounds: (Mis)recognition in an Australian Context
How to be a ‘Good Asylum Seeker’? The Subjectification of Young Men Seeking Asylum
This research focuses on the subjectification of young asylum-seeking men. By subjectification, we mean the effort an individual invests in detecting, negotiating, meeting and contesting the surrounding discursive expectations. The underlying question is: if someone wants to fulfil the position ascribed to them, that is be a ‘good asylum seeker’ and respond to the surrounding demands as much as possible, what would then, in fact, be a ‘good asylu…
Learning to survive amidst nested crises: Can the coronavirus pandemic help us change educational practices to prepare for the impending eco-crisis
The ongoing ecological crisis and the more recent Coronavirus crisis challenge the grand narrative of Enlightenment that human beings are ‘masters of nature’. For millennia, human social learning has allowed Homo sapiens to outpace most of our competitor creatures and live a comfortable life, but this competitive success has resulted in cataclysmic failure for the ecosystem. However, people’s unique ability to learn gives us hope that we can over…
Storycrafting refugee children’s lives. Presenting Ali and the Long Journey to Australia
Refugee students may come to schools with fragmented educational histories and other exile-related stressors, but many also settle fast, enjoy school and live rather ordinary childhoods. These more positive stories are not told because they get overridden by well-meaning but counterproductive stories of victimhood. This article presents a storycrafting project with 13 primary school aged refugee children in Australia, with an aim to problematise …
Recognition and precarious mobilities: The experiences of university students from a refugee background in Australia
Migrant-Background Student Experiences of Facing and Overcoming Difficulties in Finnish Comprehensive Schools
This article considers what students with a migrant background in Finnish comprehensive schools report as difficult, and how they succeed in overcoming these difficulties. We draw on two sets of school wellbeing and learning surveys for migrant students, conducted in 2016 and 2021 in comprehensive schools (grades 1–9) in and around two major cities in Finland. We pay attention to student answers to three questions: What is difficult in school? Ho…
Breaking down the walls of the ‘Ivory Tower’: Critical reflections on how co-teaching partnerships can bridge the gap between inclusive education theory and practice
For decades, the gap between theory and practice has remained the central problem of teacher education. This study will present an alternative approach in an attempt to try to bridge the gap between theory and practice in a teacher education course focused on inclusive education. The approach is based on a model that integrates a university-based and school-based curriculum to promote collaborative partnerships through an arrangement that involve…
Creating spaces of learning in academia: Fostering niches for professional learning practice
This paper analyses the move by an Australian university faculty to a new building featuring open plan and alternative workspaces. Through the lens of the theory of practice architectures, the paper examines how the new built spaces both enabled and constrained the professional learning practices of academics. Drawing on a case study of the transition, the paper explores the ways in which the move to the new building disrupted existing ecologies …
Pockets of love. Unaccompanied children in institutional care in Finland
This article discusses how needs for loving relationships are met for unaccompanied asylum-seeking children in Finland. The data was collected through a focused ethnography with 13 unaccompanied children. The findings show that institutional protocols and practices fail to consider the need for love of these children, hindering their possibilities to create or maintain loving relationships. The findings also suggest that new loving ties could be …
This is our treehouse: Investigating play through a practice architectures lens
This article explores a child-led project of building a treehouse through the theory of practice architectures. It draws on video data collected by 13 children wearing microcameras (GoPro) in a multicultural Australian primary school. The data was co-analysed with the children. The article illuminates how play practices emerge, diffuse, persist and/or disappear with time. This knowledge is needed to understand the different facets of free play an…
Keeping Each Other Safe: Young Refugees’ Navigation Towards a Good Life in Finland, Norway, and Scotland
The metaphor of navigation has been used to investigate the social and moral movements people make in changeable or fluctuating circumstances, as well as to shed light on the intersection of people, practices and the changing contexts and social forces around them. In this chapter, we first provide a short overview of navigation as a metaphor, and how the situations of young refugees might add to the multiple meanings of navigation. Using empiric…
(Im)possibilities of parity of participation in school settings in the lives of unaccompanied youth
Despite the rhetoric of inclusion and equal participation, educational practices end up producing social exclusion. In this research, we are interested in practices where outcomes fail to match efforts with respect to students’ opportunities to participate equally. The research was carried out as a focused ethnography with young people who arrived in Finland as unaccompanied asylum-seeking youths. The results show that separated learning environm…
Diversity beliefs are associated with orientations to teaching for diversity and social justice: A study among German and Finnish student teachers
This mixed methods study explored German (n = 477) and Finnish (n = 379) student teachers' color-blind, multiculturalist, and polyculturalist diversity beliefs. Statistical analyses identified polyculturalism and multiculturalism as the most prominent diversity beliefs among the student teachers and detected associations between diversity belief profiles and student teachers' orientations to teaching for diversity and social justice. Polycultural…
Preservice teachers’ professional beliefs in relation to global social change: Findings from Finland and Germany
This article presents empirical findings on orientations that guide Finnish and German preservice teachers’ professional action in the face of global social change. Drawing on group discussions interpreted with documentary method, the findings show that education under the conditions of global social change is discussed in relation to four thematic categories: the self in the world-relation, culture, social change and teaching praxis, each of whi…
Living Well in a World Worth Living in for All: Volume 1: Current Practices of Social Justice, Sustainability and Wellbeing
This open access book is the first of a two-volume series that focuses on people's current experiences within the world
Faceless, voiceless child - Ethics of visual anonymity in research with children and young people
The anonymisation of research participants is a standardised ethical practice, but researchers sometimes struggle to find an ethical balance between the practice of anonymisation and participants' wishes to reveal their identities. In the Australian and Finnish studies utilising visuality, the participating asylum-seeking and refugee children and youths wished to reveal their faces and claim ownership for their work. The hindrance of this caused …
‘It is a university where I felt welcome’: Poems of asylum-seeking students’ sense of coherence in Australian higher education
Current social and political arrangements of higher education are inequitable for students from asylum-seeking backgrounds. In many countries, their access to university is limited and if they are accepted, their status as forced migrants puts them at multiple disadvantages. This inequity is in contrast with the universal aim of higher education institutions to serve all people and their societies. Utilising a voice centred relational method (VCR…
Forced Migration: A Relational Wellbeing Approach
In this Special Issue, we consider the ways in which a relational wellbeing approach can be used to understand the lives and trajectories of refugees in general and young refugees in particular
Sociology (24 works) · Political science (22 works) · Psychology (18 works) · Migration, Health and Trauma (17 works) · Migration, Refugees, and Integration (14 works) · Pedagogy (14 works) · Education and experiences of immigrants and refugees (13 works) · Refugee (13 works) · Law (11 works) · Gender Studies (10 works)