Democratic deliberations in the Finnish elementary classroom: The dilemmas of deliberations and the teacher’s role in an action research project

Introduction

Although various councils and summits have recently been created to promote child participation, criticisms focusing on the transient and symbolic nature of these support structures have been presented (Lodge, 2005; Schiller and Einarsdottir, 2009), and deeper discourse-based and interactional practices have been proposed as providing a stronger basis for education for democracy (Dudley et al., 1999; Englund, 2006; Reich, 2007; Thornberg, 2010). The need to include children in democratic activities in schools is stated in curriculums and laws internationally (see Kerr, 1999) and reflects an international shift from promoting democratic values and attitudes towards motivating pupils to participate actively, constructively and competently in democratic processes (Reich, 2007: 187).

This issue is particularly interesting in Finland since international surveys on adolescent societal knowledge and competence indicate that despite being highly knowledgeable, Finnish youth – similar to young people in Belgium, Sweden, Slovenia and Norway – at the age of 14–15 years are uninterested in politics and societal participation (Torney-Purta et al., 2001; Suutarinen, 2002; Schulz et al., 2010; Suoninen et al., 2010). Thus, it seems reasonable to suggest that there is an attitudinal obstacle for Finnish youth to adopt a more active relation to society and that it would be beneficial to provide youth with more opportunities to participate in their school community, preferably from an early age. This perspective is reinforced in the aim of participative citizenship in the Finnish national curriculum (POPS, 2004). While recent political indicators in Finland suggest the need to increase direct ways to influence and build an influential discussion culture (Grönlund, 2006: 88–89), the lack of dialogue in Finnish schools has been criticized (Suutarinen, 2006). In addition, it has been argued that negative attitudes towards pupil participation – largely resulting from teachers’ negative experiences of radical initiatives in the 1970s – have only recently started to be resolved (Ahonen, 2005).

This article presents a basic structure of a deliberative-democratic model generated in an elementary classroom; it considers how a deliberative-democratic practice could be conducted in an elementary classroom, what kinds of dilemmas the practice entails and how these could be solved, and how the teacher is positioned in this process.

Democracy, deliberation and the teacher’s stance

Democracy is not one clear and unified ideal, though public rhetoric might imply thus. Nor can it be reduced to merely a political system. Recent research perceives democracy (and education for democracy) as a dynamic, open-ended process, which finds it best form through interaction and dialogue (e.g. Dudley et al., 1999; Dryzek, 2000; Fitzpatrick, 2009). Following Ahonen (2005), Dryzek (1990, 2000) and Held (1996), democracy as a concept can be scrutinized through the dimensions of width and depth. The dimension of width refers to the number of people included in the decision-making, thus posing questions on who is allowed or enabled to participate in decision-making. The dimension of depth refers to the range of negotiable issues, thus posing questions on the issues that are open to participative processes and that are not. Also essential is how real and authentic the democratic process is, that is, the question of whether it is genuinely dialogical and not merely symbolic (Dryzek, 2000: 29; Lodge, 2005).

Deliberative democracy is an account of the sovereignty (kratos) of people (demos), in which it is believed that by the careful and public weighing of different arguments, participants are able to become informed about various preferences and arguments, possibly change their presuppositions and reach mutual understanding. Democratic deliberation is seen as a learning process in which political knowledge is created, contested and renewed through reasoning about various perspectives: in this way, narrow self-interest may be transformed towards a wider perspective (Dryzek, 1990: 9–16; Habermas, 2003; Englund, 2006: 506). From a more procedural perspective, this should be combined with a number of other elements that can be seen as general presuppositions of the deliberative process: equal opportunity in making, questioning and reflecting on arguments; an inclusive approach such that all those affected by a decision are involved in making the decision; a commitment to finding the best argument on which to base decisions and an honest aim for tolerance of, and respect for, others in order to promote mutual understanding (Habermas, 1975: 108; Dryzek, 1990; Benhabib, 1996: 70–71; Habermas, 2003: 37, 106–108; Englund, 2006; Parkinson, 2006). Then again, too strict an emphasis on universal norms might leave unheard the participants who are unable to engage in a specific kind of deliberative talk (Young, 2000) and eventually make the deliberation undemocratic. Hence, pluralists – another strand of deliberative democracy – defend the perspective on democracy as a power struggle where conflict is inevitable (see, for example, Biesta, 2011). Fitzpatrick (2009) has elaborated on the benefits of both perspectives in his concept of creative agnosticism, which acknowledges both dynamism and restlessness (as pluralists do) and means for rational debate and agreement (as proceduralists do). To avoid ending up in a fruitless collapsing of dichotomies, he stresses the importance of the ability and the willingness of citizens to negotiate between these two perspectives.

The deliberative approach has been criticized as impractical, especially if it involves a large number of people (Parkinson, 2006: 5). However, the public conversation can also be thought of as an outcome of deliberations in different interlocking social systems (e.g. school, home, hobby group) (Benhabib, 1996: 73–74). Besides partaking in the formal processes of democracy (e.g. elections), citizens also need to engage in public and semi-public discourses that actually define the political issues (Dewey, 1916; Reich, 2007: 187). The deliberative-democratic perspective aims to equip pupils with the tools to understand how societal values and knowledge are produced and how they might influence this social reality and is thus attached to the critical pedagogical discourse (e.g. Apple and Beane, 1999; Englund, 2006). Even though most pupils probably have not yet developed the skills for democratic deliberation, these skills can still be practised.

The approach of this article has close relations to the perspective of the ‘new sociology of childhood’, which, instead of perceiving children as immature and developing, emphasizes their active role in their own socialization process (e.g. Corsaro, 1997; James et al., 1998; Corsaro and Johannesen, 2007) and thus aims to appreciate the knowledge that they produce concerning their own lives (Clark and Statham, 2005). A kind of creative agnosticism might be useful here, as the power asymmetry between a teacher and a pupil is inevitable. According to Roche (1999), even though children can be seen as active and competent to some degree, they are also dependent on adults for a variety of needs. Working with children and aiming to involve them more deeply in decision-making demand constant reflection on this tension (Roche, 1999).

This article uses the concept of the teacher’s stance to locate the actions and dispositions of the teacher in relation to the theoretical framework. As is argued earlier, deliberative democracy should be perceived as a form of dialogical action. To Freire (2005), dialogue is shared inquiry and problem-solving between the teacher and the pupil, whereas its opposite, monologue, treats the pupils as passive listeners into whose heads knowledge is poured or ‘banked’. Dialogue emphasizes reciprocity and the active and constructive role of both the pupils and the teacher in learning (Freire, 2005; for a critique of dialogue, see Burbules, 2005). This recalls Dewey’s (1916) distinction between merely training pupils to integrate as parts of the existing social order and educating them through communication and shared experiences as citizens who are able to critically reconstruct the social order.

Thus, democratic deliberation as a pedagogical application comes very close to the idea of the ‘community of inquiry’ in which the teacher guides pupils through a collective survey of knowledge rather than representing a source of knowledge. In a community of inquiry, education is not seen as knowledge transmission but as an outcome of participation in a community of inquiry itself (Lipman, 2003: 18–19).

Traditionally, interaction between adults and children has been argued to follow a so-called initiation–response–feedback (IRF) pattern in which adults control the interaction by asking questions and evaluating the correctness of the children’s answers (Sinclair and Coulthard, 1975; Giordan, 2003; Thornberg, 2010). Even in less dominant roles, teachers are, according to Nassaji and Wells (2000: 401–402), eager to comment or ask a follow-up question ‘that invites the student to extend or qualify the initial contribution’. They thus broaden the meaning of IRF to comprise not only monologue, knowledge transmission or the idea of the teacher as the primary knower of the supposed outcome but also the practice where there is no primary knower of the ‘right’ outcome and in which the teacher takes on the role of a manager who aims to arrive at a conclusion through the critical examination of arguments. However, in this article, the IRF pattern is used in the first sense in order to keep the concepts clearer.

Contemporary scholars have emphasized the importance of democratic practice in educational contexts for the development of democratic and political identity (Dudley et al., 1999; Biesta, 2011) and for the acquisition of essential skills and competencies to be able to take part in deliberations (Gutmann, 1999; Englund, 2006; Reich, 2007; Thornberg, 2010). However, though previous research has suggested what education for democracy should be, there have been fewer reports on actual practice in the field. This article demonstrates one alternative on how democratic experiences could be promoted in elementary classrooms.

Methods, context and the design in the classroom

The aim of the action research reported in this article was to construct, together with the elementary classroom teacher, a deliberative-democratic practice that would take the needs of the pupils into account and give them an opportunity to reflect on their school experiences. Thus, the aim was to empower the teacher and the researcher to implement a democratic practice in the classroom and to encourage research participants to engage in democratic thinking. Therefore, the research was inspired by the aim of critical action research to empower participants to practise democracy and justice through self-reflective inquiry (see Carr and Kemmis, 1986; Reason and Bradbury, 2006: 10).

In the action research tradition, theory and practice are thought to attach to each other in a continuum (or spiral) of planning, action, observing and reflecting (Carr and Kemmis, 1986; Heikkinen et al., 2006: 79–80). This spiral can, however, be too restrictive and start to dominate the research, in which the core idea should be a commitment to observe and analyse the practice in order to conduct social enquiry (McTaggart, 1996: 248–249). Hence, these phases are to be understood as overlapping features of action research. Another way to conceptualize the process is Stringer’s (1999) combination of looking, thinking and acting, in which describing and reflecting on practice involves pointing out problems and acting to formulate solutions for them. The interplay of various processes in action research aims to refine both the practice and the theory gradually over time (Dick et al., 2009). Hence, the development and the practicability of knowledge that the research has produced are the main indicators of reliability in action research (Huttunen et al., 1999: 112–119). The role of the researcher in the action research case at hand was primarily to actively observe the deliberative situations in the classroom and cooperatively reflect on and develop the process with the teacher in a dialogical manner. Thus, the role of the researcher here is understood in terms of active sense-making with the teacher about the emerging practice rather than in terms of directing the focus and topics of the research themselves.

The classroom in focus is a multicultural, integrated third-grade class in a middle-sized public elementary school in the south of Finland. The class consists of 19 pupils aged between 9 and 10 years. A normal school day consists of 45-minute lessons with a 15-minute break in between and a 30-minute lunch break in the middle of the day. In Finland, both national (POPS, 2004) and school-specific curriculums apply and structure the school day. The school in question consists of grades 1–6, that is, pupils between 6 and 13 years of age. At the beginning of the fieldwork, the teacher had been teaching the class for 1½ years. The data analysed here consist of video and observational data from nine deliberative exercises with the entire class, observational notes from evaluative discussions with the teacher (from the periods between the deliberations) and a final discussion with the teacher. In the analysis, conclusions from the observations are drawn in order to move the action research to the next cycle. The analysis reported here was a constant dialogue between theory and data, which redefined itself gradually over time, beginning with discovering the challenges of the classroom, followed by implementing deliberative-democratic theory and proceeding to a closer analysis that utilizes the categories of depth and width generated from the content analysis of the literature. In writing a content log and choosing sequences for transcription and closer analysis from the videos, the methodological writings of Jordan and Henderson (1995) proved helpful. The analysis went on to point out events where these categories were constructed (and reconstructed) and reflections on the actions of the teacher in these situations. A third category – the feasibility of democracy – was generated to explain the tensions that were found.

The action research started in October 2007 with a planning session with the teacher. Several planning sessions were held in the autumn, and in December, we discussed our ideas with the pupils. The video data analysed here were collected in January and February 2008. The teacher had felt for a long time that the questions posed by pupils at the beginning of every class took too much time away from the general working time. To enable and encourage these questions, but to create a specific space for them, we created an application called a ‘chat-box’ (see also Kiili, 2006). The chat-box was simply a box in front of the class in which members of the class could put suggestions about topics for conversations. By choosing the colour of the paper and the picture on the other side of it, the student could show whether he or she wanted to (1) inform the teacher about something, (2) discuss something privately with the teacher, (3) discuss something in small groups or (4) discuss something with the entire class. Once or twice a week, the proposed subjects for whole-class conversations were read, and the pupils were invited to discuss and decide which of the suggestions were the highest priority. This practice aimed at taking the needs of the pupils into account as the starting point for discussions. From here on, these whole-class conversations are referred to as deliberations.

Collectively constructed rules have been argued to have great importance in educating pupils to critically and actively participate in democracy (Thornberg, 2008). In order to create a common basis for acting in the deliberations, the pupils worked in small groups to decide on which guidelines would both guarantee the learning of all the members of the group (or the class) and result in as good an answer to the dilemma under consideration as possible. The suggestions were written on the blackboard, and the pupils were instructed to choose the three most important guidelines and to write arguments for them. After collecting the pupils’ choices, we had the following guidelines for deliberations: (1) everyone is listened to and noticed, (2) anyone in need is helped, (3) there is no fooling around in class, (4) arguments that justify one’s position are expected from each other in discussions and can be asked for, (5) one talks only with the pupils in one’s own group (this principle was meant for small group discussions) and (6) one focuses on the present, ongoing discussion. The process of constructing the rules enhanced the teacher’s and researcher’s understandings of the pupils as able to reflect on the social environment and on the criteria for good discussions. It is hard to say, however, how much the teacher’s own interest in the Thinking Together programme (e.g. Dawes et al., 2000) influenced the thinking of the pupils. Nevertheless, limiting outside disturbances (rules 3 and 5) and having respect for others and for the discursive situation (rules 1, 2, 4 and 6) were found to support learning for everyone and finding the best answers possible. Next, the results of data analysis are presented, and new insights into the dimensions of democracy and into the teacher’s stance are provided.

The dilemma of width: the circle of participants

In several cases, it seemed that the pupils were responding to the teacher instead of responding to each other during our deliberations. Because the issues to be dealt with came from the pupils, the decision-making could also take place primarily among the pupils. By presenting one turning point through three excerpts, a shift in the role of the teacher in the deliberations is shown.

Queuing in the corridor after the breaks and before the teacher arrived to let the pupils inside the classroom was found to be problematic because of the increased possibility to get into quarrels in that situation. In this example, we are talking about how to choose ‘traffic police’ whose job would be to prevent fights while queuing:

Although the teacher makes an assumption, Benjamin is able to clarify the situation by referring to the very rules created for our practice, namely, to the request to justify one’s position with an argument. The teacher accepts his statement with some surprise. Benjamin then causes a change in the role of turn-giver, which had been the teacher’s role. The next two samples show how the situation progresses:

It is notable that the teacher does not just dismiss the suggestion but also asks the pupil whether the given arguments are reasonable enough. This gives an opportunity for the pupil to decide whether the argument is satisfactory or not, and thus seems to widen the traditional IRF pattern. On the contrary, this opportunity can also be illusory since the pupil might feel that disagreeing with the argument would entail disagreeing with the authority of the teacher. However, the power dynamics seem to change when the teacher occupies a role of a mediator, thus giving the responsibility for evaluating arguments to the pupils:

We see how the teacher, after an opposing argument has been presented, gives the turn back to the previous proponent, asking for justification and thus mediating the pupils’ arguments. The deliberation seems to be focused on evaluating the practicability of the suggestions in order to achieve the best possible alternative. In the last example, the focus of the deliberation moves more towards being conducted among the pupils because of the role of the teacher as a mediator.

The teacher was afraid, however, that deliberations could actually widen the developmental gap between pupils by giving the more effective participants more practice and increasing the feeling of incompetence in the more untrained ones. In addition, Rossi (2006: 113) has noticed that in classroom discussions, some pupils stay quiet while others control the discussions. These notions fit into the critique presented by Young (2000) that specific styles of speech (especially the rational argumentation of deliberation) tend to exclude some participants. Teaching deliberation would then inevitably lead to silencing some pupils and benefiting those who are able to produce more rational and fluent talk (Waghid, 2005: 328). However, even though pupils’ different levels of participation may be a challenge, this issue might also be used as a tool to confront this challenge. Here, suggestions and arguments are being collected for the sports that would be played in the sport lessons:

In this sample, the teacher and other pupils provide assistance to Kristiina. Instead of the role of a knower from the IRF pattern (i.e. giving the possible arguments himself), the teacher occupies the role of a mediator, enabling peer arguments that were for the most part based on the curriculum (which we had been studying with the class in order to be able to decide on the sports lessons). The teacher aims to give Kristiina the power to decide on the adequacy of the arguments, which seems to include her more in the decision-making.

As a partial solution for the dilemma of width, I have pointed out a shift from the teacher’s more traditional stance to a deliberative-democratic stance that shifts the discussion more towards being conducted among the pupils and thus opens up a new space for pupils’ knowledge.

The dilemma of depth: the range of negotiable issues

The dilemma of depth poses the question of what kind of things pupils should be allowed to decide. Ahonen (2005: 19) suggests that the dimension of depth be restricted to issues concerning the well-being of school and community. However, there seems to be some underlying ongoing discourses to which various deliberations refer, which makes deciding on the range of negotiable issues difficult.

Despite the developmental issues, issues of social relationships and social status also influenced the participation of pupils and were articulated in our deliberations. One pupil had placed the question ‘Why do we always play football?’ in the chat-box. This question concerned the activity during breaks, so the teacher suggested that we discuss the issue under a new topic called ‘break activity’. In the discussion, it soon became apparent that one pupil always gave orders to the others about what to do during the breaks. The concern that not everyone had friends to play with was also raised. The teacher then asked the pupils to suggest what games they could play together. The following is how the deliberation resolved after the game suggestions:

Two important observations should be made here. First, formulating a question about a broader issue than mere football seems to enable the pupils to reflect on questions of social inclusion and social structure (questions of power) and to thus deepen the subject of the discussions. Second, the power relations between the teacher and the pupils come to the forefront in the teacher’s final comment where he concludes the deliberation by combining the arguments of the pupils and his own. Behind his solution is the awareness of the danger that the discussion would become a quarrel. The role of a concluder helps the teacher to move forward, though at the same time, it seems to restrict the upcoming, perhaps informative conflict.

The decision on a common break activity was revisited about 3 weeks later in a deliberation concerning the choosing of pairs. The games being played were not working well because the loudest pupils always decided which game to play. It was then decided to draw lots to find out the leader of a game every day so that he or she could decide on the game and tell the participants how to play it. What is significant here is that the pupils used a formal democratic practice to deliberate on and to influence an experienced undemocratic activity and to revisit the old issue of the break activity.

Not only was the social structure between the pupils reflected on but the power dynamics between the pupils and the teacher were also questioned. The teacher had certain presuppositions about the boundaries concerning the dimension of depth (the pupils’ power), which were revealed when they were questioned. In the following, the teacher is assigning pairs for the next task:

Note that Benjamin here is presenting the argument for the teacher’s instruction style, and the teacher accepts it by repeating it. Benjamin is reminding the teacher to give reasons, thus enforcing the rule of argumentation. After the lesson had finished, Saara and Liina put a note in the chat-box: ‘We would like to decide on the pairs on our own’. This shows that they had understood the power included in our practice. Writing a note enabled them to continue the conversation the next time that the agenda was discussed. Here, again the formal democratic practice was used to have influence on a procedure that was experienced as undemocratic or unfair. However, this time the teacher was displeased with the note. He felt that the pupils had stepped on his authority. The (hidden) idea that the teacher had concerning the dimension of depth was questioned by the pupils.

A power asymmetry between a teacher and the pupils is inevitable as teachers have knowledge about the conditions of learning that pupils do not yet have (and also vice versa). Therefore, what would be more important than considering how this asymmetry could be removed is a critical evaluation of how a teacher can most efficiently enable the participation and empowerment of pupils (Roche, 1999: 486–489). We wanted to know what this initiative was about and thus decided to deliberate on it in a constructive spirit, and we formulated it into a question: ‘How could the pairs be chosen in a way that nobody would feel bad (i.e. nobody is left without a pair)?’

To decide to let the children discuss this matter proved to be a fruitful choice because the deliberation concentrated on the social relationships of the pupils by bringing up a racial comment (‘I don’t want [to be pairs] with a foreigner’) and concentrating eventually on class spirit. As children bring values from their homes to the classrooms, schools can be perceived as vital parts of overlapping deliberations on societal issues – ‘weak publics’, as Englund (2006: 514–515) puts it.

Saara notes that if you decide on a method for choosing pairs, you at the same time lose the possibility to choose your own partner. After a short consideration of this, the teacher decides to form a new question based on Saara’s point of taking everyone into account, and Riina introduces her concern about class spirit. After this turning point, the deliberation concentrated again on the break activity as a tool to change the situation. The deliberation had resulted in contemplating questions of social inclusion and the classroom climate, which can also be seen to be behind the question of choosing pairs.

I have pointed out cases where formulating a pupil initiative resulted in deliberation about broader issues. I have also suggested that issues of power (and conflict, as emphasized by pluralists) might be underlying most of the deliberations. This emphasizes the dynamic and open-ended nature of democracy, implying that deliberation is to be seen as a learning process (it cannot result in decisions that will fit every situation) (Dryzek, 1990, 2000; Englund, 2006) and ‘a procedure for being informed’ (Benhabib, 1996: 71). Hence, formulating (or constructing) pupil initiatives into open-ended questions or issues, providing an appropriate conclusion when deliberations have reached a temporary end point and having the openness to question one’s own presuppositions (on what can be discussed) for the sake of learning can be understood as parts of a teacher’s deliberative-democratic stance.

The dilemma of feasibility: the tensions within

Issues of power were also reflected in the discussions with the teacher. According to him, ‘everything can be discussed, but everything is not necessarily decided together’. He also emphasized that ‘pupils need to learn to control their desire for influence so that the teaching can proceed reasonably and that the teacher can take care of the needs of every pupil’. Thus, there seems to be an inner tension between the deliberative-democratic stance the research project aimed at and the teacher’s need to have control over the classroom. This partly relates to the issues of depth presented earlier. However, this uneasy position of the teacher is also reinforced by his experience of the undemocratic features of the environment outside the classroom. Despite the teacher’s enthusiasm about the advantages of deliberation – according to him, it had increased motivation and engagement in the pupils and created new communicative connections between the pupils and him – he also felt that the culture of influencing and involvement of his classroom seemed to be in contradiction with the other classrooms in which the pupils studied. He found discussing these common pedagogical principles with other teachers difficult and thought that the participative culture of his classroom might result in conflict if someone else came to teach his class. This might have negative results regarding learning democratic participation. The issue of feasibility thus encompasses a temporal and a situational aspect as the teacher perceived the deliberative-democratic ethos as primarily situated inside the classroom and worried about the impact of future contexts on the development of democratic dispositions in the pupils. This affects the realness of classroom deliberations, resulting in a problem of social scale (Fitzpatrick, 2009: 324): if overlapping deliberations are not widely encouraged, the point of teaching deliberation in one classroom seems questionable. It might be tempting for a teacher to conform to the perceived school ethos in order to prevent frustration. This begs the question: how free are teachers to pursue alternative pedagogies in schools?

Another concern of the teacher was the time consumption of deliberations. In our discussions, he tied effectiveness and deliberation together (‘If you deal with something fast, it is not necessarily effective’) and reflected an understanding and valuing of the deliberative process, but he also raised concerns about time consumption (‘I could have concluded this issue earlier already and maybe I should have’) and the uneasiness of his position (‘Maybe you could take turns to also try to keep the schedule’). As argued earlier, rather than aiming to reach consensus (as we first thought), a more process-oriented perspective on deliberation seems more useful in a pedagogical setting since it recognizes the temporary nature of the conclusions.

Discussion

This article supports the view that children should be seen and supported as active participants, who not only reflect on their physical and social environment but also have a need to influence them. The practice opened up a productive way of expressing oneself, challenging prevailing power structures, making sense of the social reality and engaging in dialogue about learning. Thus, the pragmatic aim of action research can be seen to have been fulfilled to some extent (Huttunen et al., 1999). The practice described here functioned as a field in which to study skills and competencies and to achieve the motivation needed in deliberative-democratic interaction. Degree of participation varied as some of the students were active in the deliberations and others concentrated more on putting initiatives into the chat-box. Yet, more research is needed on how to involve all pupils and staff in pursuing deliberative aims (in case we see these aims as desirable ones). What other forms of democratic participation can the school offer? One might also ask why practising democracy in school seems to need a specific application, as is the case in the formal practice introduced in this article. And to what degree do new pedagogical applications and projects actually recreate tensions inside the school? By reflecting the teacher’s ambivalent experiences on the project at hand, this article highlights the possible difficulties in promoting change in a classroom if the process of change is not being more widely implemented in the school. Despite the teacher’s suggestion that the school lacked a common ground for discussing about pedagogical practices, additional interviews with other staff members would have provided a clearer account on how the project was experienced by others.

The results suggest that certain larger themes (e.g. power and social inclusion) emerge in various different deliberations. As deliberations are opportunities for learning, the teacher needs to be able to conceptualize the core of the problem presented and think about how to deal with pupils’ proposals in a productive way. Denying the opportunity to deliberate on certain issues (especially without giving an argument as to why) could be a negative lesson about democracy. Whole-class deliberations in the classroom are thus dependent on what actual deliberation the teacher allows (and how). As Englund (2006: 515) argues, it is the teacher who has to make professional judgements about the direction (‘Which issues are fruitful to be deliberated on?’), continuation (‘Are all related arguments presented?’) and the conclusion (‘Where did the deliberation end up?’) of deliberation. However, there is a danger that following only this guideline could lead to a ‘control discourse in disguise’, where school meetings are deliberative-democratic only on a rhetorical level (see Thornberg, 2010). The deliberative-democratic stance introduced in this article nevertheless enhances Englund’s above-mentioned argument. The deliberative-democratic stance comprises three objectives. The objective of widening deliberations aims at giving more responsibility for argumentation to pupils and thus opening a space for pupils’ knowledge. The objective of deepening deliberations aims at taking pupil initiatives as starting points for discussions (through thinking about how to formulate these questions into open-ended issues that are fruitful to be deliberated on) and maintaining the openness to question one’s own presuppositions of power for the sake of democratic action. And the objective of making deliberations more feasible aims at taking the responsibility for drawing a temporary conclusion (implying that issues remain discussable) when the related arguments have been given.

Regardless of the deliberative-democratic stance the teacher aimed to hold, a tension between this and the traditional control orientation was found. This tension was reflected in the teacher’s actions and thinking and in his reflections about the contrast between the classroom practice and the overall school ethos. Thus, the tension presented can be perceived as both internal and external. Despite the shift from a traditional interactional pattern towards a more deliberative-democratic one, this does not mean that the former ceased to exist. Therefore, this article does not aim to show how to eliminate certain patterns in teaching but to broaden the perspective on them. Following Fitzpatrick’s (2009) concepts, a certain kind of creative agnosticism – an ability to move creatively and reflectively between democracy and control, between pupil involvement and curriculum, between agency and structure – might be useful here. This stance would also put the teacher in the position of a learner by perceiving teaching as a ‘paradoxical quest’ (Fitzpatrick, 2009: 316), an endless search that cannot be finalized. This idea of a creative balance also contributes to the tense discussion in childhood studies. Instead of attempting to follow either the idea of children as competent agents able to participate in decision-making concerning them or the idea of children as incompetent subjects-in-process who are to be rather protected than involved, we probably need to acknowledge the coexistence of these strands and strive to achieve a creative balance between them.

As we have seen, in democratic deliberations, the expectations of professionalism from the teacher are high as he or she has to struggle between democracy and control and therefore position himself or herself as a learner rather than a knower. In order to recognize this tension in a creative agnostic way and to teach democratic deliberation, the teacher probably needs to have some experiences of or ideas about how this type of dialogical communication might proceed. As this study has mainly scrutinized classroom-level activities, further research is needed in order to understand better teachers’ own experiences of democratic encounters and decision-making among school staff and parents. In teacher education, experimenting with deliberative-democratic ideas could mean, for example, encouraging deliberation between students and teachers about the curriculum, teaching methods and course content. Reflections on the uncertain position of the teacher could be used as a tool for young teachers to widen their perspectives on teaching and on the school as a community. However, recent Finnish research indicates that students in teacher education experience politics and societal influence as unwanted topics in schools, and in addition that teacher education does not provide the tools needed for active citizenship (Syrjäläinen et al., 2005: 71). These results reflect the findings of the IEA Civic Education Study (CIVED) and the IEA International Civic and Citizenship Education Study (ICCS) on societal knowledge and the competence of youth (Torney-Purta et al., 2001; Suutarinen, 2002; Schulz et al., 2010; Suoninen et al., 2010) and the overall prejudice against student participation and dialogue about societal and political issues in Finnish schools (Ahonen, 2005: 20–21). Interestingly, evidence from the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) study has been argued to promote the ideal of the obedient and subjected student, an ideal especially predominant in Finland (Simola, 2005: 466).

This article raises questions about the power and control exercised in schools in general. How free is the teacher actually (not symbolically) to try different pedagogies in his or her classroom? In a country where a strong emphasis on student achievement exists, is there space for time-consuming projects based on dialogue and deliberation? The tension presented in this article might not be solvable, but rather characteristic of education for democracy in Finnish elementary schools. If so, then the first question might not be how to change various educational contexts to follow certain democratic principles but more how to use this tension to unveil and scrutinize the nature of an increasing number of educational practices that aim at the involvement or participation of children and youth. This kind of critical examination might also increase our understanding about the ideals and ‘hidden curricula’ behind these projects.