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Jaakko Kauko

Professor, kasvatustiede, alana koulutuspolitiikka
Tampere University
jaakko.kauko [at] tuni.fi (jaakko[dot]kauko[at]tuni[dot]fi)
phone number+358503187788

About me

I am Professor of Education Policy at Faculty of Education and Culture. Together with Nelli Piattoeva, we lead the reserch group focusing on the Knowledge, Power, and Politics in Education (EduKnow). 

My core idea for research is to analyse dynamics in politics, the ways in which political action is always tied to longer term socio-historical developments, constrained or enabled through institutional rearrangements, and actors are both entangled in and empowered by the dynamics that develop in these conditions. 

Thematically I have focused on quality and evaluation in education and the use of knowledge and power in policymaking and its networks. 

The research contexts for these phenomena have varied: Brazil, Chile, China, England, Finland, the Nordic countries, and Portugal.

Selected publications

Recent open access publications:

Kauko, J. (2019). The Finnish Comprehensive School: Conflicts, Compromises, and Institutional Robustness. In Paul t’ Hart & Mallory E. Compton (Eds.) Great Policy Successes: How Governments Get it Right in a Big Way at Least Some of the Time. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 122-142.

Kauko, J., Rinne R. & Takala, T. (Eds.) (2018) Politics of Quality in Education: A Comparative Study of Brazil, China, and Russia . London: Routledge.

Dovemark, M., Kosunen, S., Kauko, J., Magnúsdóttir, B., Hansen, P. & Rasmussen, P. (2018). Deregulation, privatisation and marketisation of Nordic comprehensive education: social changes reflected in schooling . Education Inquiry 9(1), 122-141.

Kauko, J. & Wermke, W. (2018). The contingent sense-making of contingency: epistemologies of change in comparative education . Comparative Education Review, 62(2), 157–177.

Complete list of publications from 2016 onwards is stored in Research portal of Tampere University, and publications before 2016 are listed onthe University of Helsinki webpage.

Latest publications