Multilingual Early Language Transmission (MELT) - Mercator ...

9. “Early childhood teacher education focused on multilingual and
multicultural issues”
Dr. Gunilla Holm
Professor of Education, Institute of Behavioural Scicences, University of Helsinki
Introduction
A new early childhood teacher education program in Swedish at the University of Helsinki
started in September 2011. There was a great need for this program to be located in
southern Finland where a third of the Swedish speakers live. One other early childhood
teacher education program exists in Swedish as part of Åbo Academy University but it is
located in a small town at the northern end of the coastal region where most the Swedish
speaking population lives in Finland. The town is 467 km north of Helsinki. This meant that
most of the applicants to this program came from the surrounding Ostrobothnian region.
Despite various recruitment efforts few students from the Helsinki metropolitan region (with
about 70 000 Swedish speakers) have been willing to go north to this little town of less than
20 000 inhabitants. The students graduating from this program tended to stay in their home
region where each job opening had many applicants. At the same time the need for certified
Swedish-speaking teachers in the larger metropolitan Helsinki region was enormous. In
2009 the percentage uncertified early childhood education teachers was as high as about
50% in a couple of municipalities and 20-30% in three other municipalities out of seven
(Sydkustens landskapsförbund, 2009). There is a parallel daycare/preschool system for
Finnish and Swedish speakers in Finland. Even though this had been a problem for years,
politicians and decision makers had only nominally reacted to the situation.
All teacher education in Swedish had until 2006 been part of Åbo Academy University. Due
to a change in law in 2006 other bilingual universities can now share the responsibility for
educating teachers in Swedish. This change in law made it possible for the University of
Helsinki to express its willingness to establish a new program for early childhood education
in Swedish when approached by local representatives for an organization of municipalities in
southern Finland (Sydkustens landskapsförbund). The work for a new early childhood
education program located in Helsinki, where the need was, became a common cause for
local activists and educators, some politicians, university administrators and university
teachers. This program would not have been made possible without the different actors
working together for the common cause.
The political struggle
The establishment of this program produced a fierce struggle internally among the Swedishspeakers.
It was the northern part of the Swedish-speaking community supporting the
existing early childhood teacher education program at Åbo Academy University in the north
versus the Swedish-speaking community in the metropolitan Helsinki region supporting the
University of Helsinki. The fear was that the Åbo Academy program would suffer, which it in
fact has not and the risk for competition is very small since the student recruitment areas
are very different.
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