This study explores the quality of school life of Finnish and Korean adolescents. First, it investigates adolescents’ perceptions of their quality of school life by identifying the crucial aspects of quality of school life (general satisfaction, peer relations, and teacher-student relations). Thereafter, a more in-depth exploration of these crucial aspects of quality of school life are explored by focusing on students’ peer relations as well as tensions and negotiations that occur between student agency and school control. This study also illuminates how student agency is controlled or manifested in students’ interactions with teachers and how students reflect their experiences with control and agency in daily school life.

The theoretical approach of this study departs from the concept of quality of school life. I utilise Foucault’s ([1975] 2003; 1984) and Butler’s thoughts (1988; [1990] 2008) as well as Bernstein’s theory of classification and framing (1996) to discuss control and agency. In addition, I employ cross-cultural and comparative studies as methodological approaches and discuss the notions, benefits, and dilemmas associated with as well as the objectives fulfilled by cross-cultural and comparative studies.

Further, this thesis was conducted using a mixed-methods design. The quantitative data was collected from student survey items taken from PISA 2012 studies, targeting 15-year-old Finnish and Korean students (study 1). The qualitative data was produced from fieldwork inspired by an ethnographic approach, in two comprehensive schools in southern Finland and two primary and two lower-secondary schools in Seoul, Korea. The qualitative data consists of field notes generated through observations and interviews with students (grades 6, 8, and 9) and their class teachers (studies 2 and 3).

The findings of the quantitative study revealed that, in all the dimensions of quality of school life (general satisfaction, peer relations, and teacher-student relations), both Finnish and Korean adolescents’ perceptions were less affirmative compared with those of students in other OECD countries on average. Further, the perceptions of Finnish and Korean students, compared to the OECD average, were the least positive for teacher-student relations. In the first two dimensions, Finnish adolescents’ views appeared to be more positive than that of Korean students. Subsequently, qualitative findings elaborated that young people strived for two demanding tasks of school life: studying and friends. Many students—regardless of their school grade, gender, and socioeconomic status—perceived the importance of high achievement or at least of accomplishing school work, with regard to their future path and career. Simultaneously, students found meaning in attending school from the relationships with their friends. Their peer relations connoted emotional support as well as hierarchy and conflict for both genders. The students constructed gendered identities through the patterns of their peer relations, and gender roles were constructed in school scenes organised by adults. Students displayed diverse patterns of peer interactions, moving between independence and interdependence, and these patterns appeared somewhat differently in the Finnish and Korean schools. However, an academically competitive spirit among peers did not distinctly appear among either the Finnish or Korean students.

Further, in all the Finnish and Korean schools studied, student agency was tightly controlled by the regulations of time, space, and movement and was extensively limited in teaching-learning practices. Some teachers, who appeared to exercise weak control on student conduct and their use of time and space, exercised strong control over the sequence and contents of lessons, teaching-learning methods, and evaluation criteria. Many students appeared to be accustomed to strong control in teaching-learning practices, and some students did not welcome teachers’ weak control in instruction methods that attempted to encourage students’ agency and active participation. Moreover, variations of control and agency were observed in student-teacher interactions in daily routines. A less vertical relationship and rather weak teacher control over students’ self-expression (e.g., appearance and the use of smartphones in school) were observed in the Finnish schools, whereas a hierarchical relationship and class teachers’ intensive control and care work were more noticeable in the Korean schools.

This study interprets that historical, sociocultural, and institutional contexts are linked with the roles of schoolteachers and students and also with students’ views and experiences of their quality of school life. I argue that more aspects of a disciplinary school were visible in the Korean schools, whereas the Finnish schools seemed to be shifting slightly ahead towards being schools of self-regulating learners. However, the symptom of self-responsible learner identity was visible in both the Finnish and Korean schools, including students who were considered as intractable and low-achieving. Their attitudes were somewhat different from the studying-diminishing manners that adolescents from disadvantaged social backgrounds revealed in the ethnographic studies conducted in previous years. Lastly, this thesis conveys a message of democratic school culture in terms of the quality of school life.