Saara Tuomaala
Stilling: Researcher, Assistant in European history
Uddannelse: Lic.Phil.
Institution: University of Helsinki
Adresse: Department of History, 00014 Helsinki, Finland
Tlf: +358 9 452440
Mobil: +358 050 54 30 689
Email: saara.tuomaala@helsinki.fi
Hjemmeside: http://www.helsinki.fi/historia/staff/tuomaala.html
Faglig præsentation
Becoming citizens, boys and girls. Routes in rural childhood in Finland in the 1920s and 1930s.
This study on oral history examines rural childhood and its formation in Finland after the introduction of compulsory education. The study compares (1) interview material from the 1990s and (2) archive material and pedagogical texts from the 1920s and 1930s. The majority of Finnish children grew up in rural areas until the 1960s, when great changes took place in the structure of the Finnish society. An important aspect of modernisation in Finland was the rapid urbanisation of childhood and family life.
Research material. I interviewed 67 elderly narrators from Kivijärvi (32) and Paavola (35) from one to four times during 1990-91 and 1995-96. I aimed to identify how the interviewees, who were mostly born in the 1910s and 1920s, experienced rural childhood and how childhood is continuously given various political, social and cultural interpretations. The archives and textbooks of local primary schools were used as reference material for the interview narratives. The source material of the study also includes local, regional and national archive records, from administrative records to documents owned by non-governmental organisations and industrial employers, which are used to support the micro-historical contextualisation.
Rural childhood in Finland in the 1920s and 1930s. In the study, I used narratological and micro-historical methods to examine the interaction between children, their peer groups, families and childhood institutions, at home, school and in the village. By examining school-age children in two provinces and two communities, Paavola and Kivijärvi, I try to identify the personal, local and national aspects of rural childhood: 1) Finland in the 1920s and 1930s is an interesting period for examining how rural childhood was transformed to fit the concept of a modern pupil: government-led compulsory education was introduced in 1921, after the great changes resulting from independence and civil war. 2) Schools within the system of compulsory education became a key social institution, which defined homes and families through children. 3) Children's activities changed increasingly from physical labour to pedagogical work. Modern childhood was distinguished from adulthood as a period of growth, a child citizenship, which was characterised by compulsory education.
The school was a public institution, which highlighted the differences and similarities between children. For example, rural children were shaped by heterosexual ideals and practices. In primary school, pupils were separated into two distinguishable categories and groups, girls and boys. At the beginning of the twentieth century, particularly girlhood was a politically and morally loaded field of education. In the newly independent agrarian state, country girls were to be raised to uphold the purity of the nation's heart, home. Primary school pedagogy and practices aimed to create heterosexual citizenship, which was modernising the agrarian gender system. Also, from a historical perspective, the rural childhood of early 20th century became specifically girl or boy citizenship.
Research questions. In the study, I examine how the ideals and practices of gendered citizenship are discernible in personal recollections, and above all, the identity narration therein. Childhood memories are recollected 1) as identity and citizenship formation, 2) which can be discerned from the biographical marks in the identity narration provided during the interview. Past childhood and its identity are compared with the present old age and identity.
The pedagogical texts used at school offered images and a vocabulary to interpret one's childhood and child citizenship in the national discourse, as Finnish childhood. School, home and village were attached to the context of 'fatherland' and 'mother tongue'. Social relationships, especially with one's father, mother and teachers, represented national ideals. In the interview narration, I discuss the following: 3) Why and how do people construct - experience, recollect and narrate - their own childhood in national terms? How has language of schoolbooks, spelling-books, reading books, history and geography books become autobiographical language, which has also been affected by later life experiences, such as the Second World War and the subsequent period of reconstruction?
Theory and methodology. 1) By using the oral history of rural childhood, mainly retrieved as personal recollections during interviews, I aim to add a dimension of subjective and experienced history next to official and written source material. 2) The oral history used in this study is micro-historical and life historical: in the large social structures and processes, I examine the experiences of individuals and their immediate communities. This also allows me to specify and even change conceptions concerning macro-level events, phenomena and structures. 3) I combine narrative (constructivist) and micro-historical (reconstructivist) approaches by employing narrative interpretation. I interpret the different types of source material with a narratological approach mainly based on Mikhail Bakhtin's (1981, 1986) speech analysis and concept of cultural heterogeneity or 'plurality of voices'. This concept is valuable also in the examination of historical significances in the recollections of individual narrators. Other key concepts to this study are historian Luisa Passerini (1987, 1989) and sociologist Nira Yuval-Davis' (1997, 1999) ideas about the narrative construction of national and local identity. Passerini and Yuval-Davis have examined communal and individual identities as a particular form of cultural narrative, which are constructed in the dialogue between differences and similarities. Important dimensions here are gender, age, social class and ethnicity.
Formidling
- 2001: "Home, School, Village - Relations of Rural Childhood of the 1920s and 1930s in Finland". Conference of International Sociological Association (ISA) "Methodological Problems of Biographical Research". University of Kassel, Germany.
- 2001: "´When I, a Shepherd, Became a Pupil´. Narrating Rural Childhoods of the 1920s and 1930s as a Finnish childhood". Conference of Politics and the Arts Group " Narrative, Identity, Order". University of Tampere, Finland.
- 2001: " Books of Learning - Texts for Yearning. Experiences of Pedagogical Discourse in Finnish Primary & Secondary School in 1920s and 1930s". Baltic Researcher Seminar "Etnographic Methods of Educational Research". University of Tallinn/Universiy of Helsinki, Estonia.
- 2000: "Home, School, Village - Changing Spaces of Rural Childhood in the 1920s and 1930s". International Symposium "History and Change". University of Turku, Finland.
- 1998: "Encounters, Conflicts, and Allies. Compulsory Education, Work, and Gendering Childhood in the Finnish Countryside of the 1920 and 1930s".International Research Conference " Gendering Nationalism".University of Tampere, Finland.
- 1998: "Suomalaisen maalaislapsuuden kulttuurit 1920- ja 30-luvulla"/ "Cultures of Rural Childhood in the 1920s and 1930s". International Research
Symposium "Exploring Childhood Space". University of Helsinki/ City of Karkkila,Finland.
- 1997: "Past Childhoods in the Finnish Countryside - from National Margins to Biographical Centers" The 3rd European Feminist Conference " Shifting Bonds,
- 1997: "Past Childhoods in the Finnish Countryside - from National Margins to Biographical Centers" The 3rd European Feminist Conference " Shifting Bonds, Shifting Bounds: Women, Mobility and Citizenship in Europe". University of Coimbra, Portugal.
- 1997 : "Children, Villagers, Citizens - Past Finnish Childhoods of the 1920s and 1930s". International Research Seminar of SOVA "Individualism, Identity and Difference". University of Helsinki, Finland.
- 1996: "Did the Finnish Education Cultivate a Forester Child to a Citizen in 1921-1939?" European Workshop on Reactions to the Beginnings of Modern Social Policy in Europe. University of Tampere, Helsinki.
Tidligere projekter
Titel: Gender System
Institution: Christina Institute for Women´s Studies, University of Helsinki
Igangværende projekt(er)
Titel: Modernisation and Popular Experience in Finland in 1860-1960
Periode: 2001 - 2003
Finansiering: Financing has been applied
Beskrivelse
Although modernization, popular education and nation-building have been analyzed extensively from the perspective of the cultural elite and their ideological goals, the network project Modernization and Popular Experience examines these processes from the perspectives of ordinary persons. It focuses on transformations at the level of community, household and individual, and asks: how were the norms and values of traditional agrarian society reconciled with the goals of popular reformers working within the spirit of nation-building and 'progress'?
