Conference Agenda

This symposium presents an ongoing project focusing the ideals and practices of ‘One school for all’ as a core of the Nordic welfare state (cf. Blossing et al, 2014, Frønes et al, 2021; Lundahl, 2016). Internationally, Nordic education systems have been considered to promote educational equality and social inclusion by bringing together pupils from diverse backgrounds. From 1945 to about 1970, the Nordic school model was developed as the solution to the future challenges of its time (Telhaug, Mediås & Aasen, 2006). In a little more than ten years, beginning in Sweden in 1962, followed by Finland in 1968, Norway in 1969, and Denmark in 1975, all of the Nordic countries took the final step from parallel education systems to one, common basic education. Non-tracked common neighborhood Nordic schools became well-known for their ambitions in relation to quality and equality (Lundahl, 2016). In the One school for all model, the aim was to provide Nordic children with not only learning, but also diversity of class, culture, gender, ability, and language.

Since then, Nordic societies have faced ideological, economical and social changes and also the Nordic education model has lost some of its spark, with widening differences between schools and continued evidence of exclusion (Beach 2018; Thrupp et al. 2023; Lundahl, 2016). The 13-year olds of the 2020’s also come from a different social world than their predecessors. From 2010 onwards, the rapid and massive digitalization has caused on-going changes: increased individualization, altered notions of time, space and place, and the enabling of mobile, ever-present and place-independent social networks (van Dijk, 2012; Livingstone & Sefton-Green, 2016).

Against this background, this project examines how the Nordic basic school as a physical and social space shapes social interaction and learning with a particular interest in the challenges that material and digital re-configurations of sociality bring to the future of One common school for all. The project operates within a multidisciplinary framework – education, history and applied language studies – of analyzing Nordic comprehensive schools as spaces and places constructed in the intersections of their material qualities and social interaction (see Lefebvre 1991; Massey 2005). Through multidisciplinary studies of four Nordic schools we explore their changing role for inclusion and exclusion over a time-span of approximately 50 years, from the 70’s to date, organized in three sub-studies. The substudies address the following research questions:

1. How have educational spaces, physical and digital, been locally enacted in the studied communities and schools during the period 1970 to 2020?

2. How, in retrospect, did the basic school spaces during the 70’s provide opportunities for pupils to engage in social relations with peers with diverse social backgrounds, and what are their perceived long-term implications of the relations established in school?

3. How do school spaces at present provide opportunities for pupils to engage in social interaction with peers with diverse social backgrounds, and what are the roles of digital sociality for the relations that develop?

The research material consists of policy documents and archive material from the selected schools, interviews with former students about their life histories, small projects carried out collaboratively with students, video material, field notes, and interviews from the schools today. The symposium consists of three presentations focusing on each of the sub-studies, followed by a fourth presentation about how they altogether make it possible to contrast past education and current developments, and as a next step can contribute to articulate basic education in new ways in the Nordic countries and beyond.

This study is a historical analysis of how national school policies concerning basic education have been enacted in the local community and at the school sites (Clark 2010; Gamson, 2019; Westberg, 2014). Through studies of policy texts and archive material from the four local communities, the focus is on local and regional documents, and how pedagogical ideas have been enacted in the physical spaces of the school buildings. This is done through a reflecting interpretative approach (Alvesson & Sköldberg 2009). Theoretically, the starting point is that there is no single factor that can explain the establishment of basic schools in the cities studied; rather it is a complex interaction between a series of processes at local and national level. In this process, local traditions interact with national and international perspectives at school as a space for the development of a democratic society (Westberg, 2014). To capture local processes and how they interact with regional and national institutions, we have used a wide range of sources. Examples of material we use are drawings, planning materials, municipal commissions of school buildings, correspondence between the municipality and the national authorities and teacher interviews. In this presentation, empirical data from the four cases comprising the study will be presented. We have studied the overall process that led to the establishment of secondary schools in four municipalities. The material used is mainly based on local and regional source material where the process and planning of the school building was dealt with. The studies enable comparative analyses that explore the differences and similarities of how localities, including municipality policies and local communities, shaped the processes of envisioning and establishing schools in the Nordic countries. The study also contributes to an understanding of how the municipalities viewed the school itself as a specific place (or space) that could contribute to an inclusive society. These perspectives can then be related to the other sub-studies in the project. Overall, one conclusion of this study is that the school's location was governed by municipal ideals, resources and experiences, not primarily pedagogical ideas from outside the school. Here, the municipality's ideas about a democratic school came to be decisive. But when it comes to the physical design of the school itself, a clear inspiration came from outside pedagogical ideals.

Alvesson, M., and Sköldberg; K. (2009). Reflexive Methodology. London: Sage. Clark, A. (2010). ‘In-between’ spaces in postwar primary schools: a micro-study of a ‘welfare room’ (1977–1993) History of Education Vol. 39, No. 6, 767–778. Gamson, D. The Importance of Being Urban. Chicago: The Chicago University Press, 2019. Westberg, Johannes. Att bygga ett skolväsende: Folkskolans förutsättningar och framväxt 1840–1900. Lund: Nordic Academic Press, 2014.

This paper presents a subproject that aims to examine inclusion and democratization in Nordic basic schools by adopting a life history approach (Bertaux & Thompson, 1997). The focus is on the students of the 70’s and their narratives about school experiences described in hindsight (Freeman, 2010). We ask how the school spaces provided opportunities for pupils to engage in social relations with peers with diverse social backgrounds, and what the perceived long-term implications are of the relations established in school. The theoretical framework of this study is grounded on the concepts of space, place and time, seeking analytical connections between physical objects, narrated experiences, bodies and places. Informed by Massey’s (2005) notion of throwntogetherness, we aim to describe the plurality of individual trajectories that come together in the construction of the school as a social and physical space. This enables us to explore how the different social backgrounds of pupils have merged in the construction of schools as meeting places and how these encounters have further influenced the lives of the previous pupils. Methodologically, this study sets out from interviews of informants who attended the partner schools of this project in the 70’s. The interviews include elements of walk-along interviews (Kusenbach, 2003) where informants are encouraged to interact with objects that can set into play storytelling that informs the analysis of social relations, interactions, and material, cultural and historical constructions in which the life story is embedded (Goodson, 2013). The interviews have been conducted in and near the school buildings and in the informants’ present homes or other places of their preference. Participants in Sweden (N=8), Finland (N=9) and Norway (N=8) have been interviewed twice in 2022–23 and the participants in Denmark will be recruited and interviewed in the spring 2024. The interviews are analyzed in a framework of narrative analysis with a life history approach (Goodson, 2013). The life history approach will give access to the narrated memories and experiences of the school as a meeting place, the opportunities it provided to the informants and the difficulties they encountered. It also contributes with knowledge of what these lived experiences of the social relations established in the local school as a meeting place with its specific architectural divisions and spatial arrangements have meant for the students across the lifespan, providing socio-historical insight into the development of the Nordic basic school as a political and a educational project.

Bertaux, D., & Thompson, P. R. (1997). Pathways to social class: A qualitative approach to social mobility. Transaction Publishers. Freeman, M. (2010). Hindsight. The Promise and Peril of Looking Backward. Oxford University Press. Goodson, I. (2013). Developing narrative theory: Life histories and personal representation. Routledge. Kusenbach, M. (2003). Street phenomenology: The go-along as ethnographic research tool. Ethnography, 4(3), 455-485. Massey, D. (2005). For Space. Sage.

In the third substudy, we follow the students that presently attend the four Nordic schools. Massive investments in digital technology have found its way into schools of today, and most secondary students have access to a computer of their own for school work and, more or less openly, are constantly connected through their own smartphones (Sahlström et al., 2019). This possibility of always being connected to the internet has also been described as being “always-on” in “hybrid spaces” (Trentin, 2016). In this presentation we focus on the students’ experiences of participation with others in these new hybrid school spaces. The aim is to further understandings of what ongoing digitalisation means in relation to the role of classrooms and schools as shared spaces for knowledge and inclusion, from the perspective of the students. Theoretically we understand the concept of space as produced and emerging in relations between social and material dimensions of people’s lives, always entailing different connections to places and time (Massey, 2005; Lefebvre, 1991). We investigate the school's spaces as conceived, perceived and lived spaces and their importance and possibility for learning and knowledge communication (Leijon, 2016). The study is conducted in close collaboration with students (aged 14-15) at the project schools where we have employed citizen science for investigating the role of digital technologies in students' everyday sociality (Haklay, 2018). The students document their digital communication at school and beyond in the form of screenshots, video- and screen recordings as well as digital and analogue surveys and logs. Students and researchers then analyze these materials together in recorded data sessions. Still in the initial phases of analysis, we will present some preliminary findings from this innovative and collaborative field-work. Although findings point to a continued importance of schools as sites for meeting peers with different backgrounds, the boundaries between schools and families have become blurred due to the constant availability in both ways. Students can always be reached from the outside, and schools are always present in the homes through digital apps and platforms. Almost all screen-mediated social interactions are based on physical relations and we see few examples of relations based exclusively online. Based on preliminary findings we discuss how our study can contribute to knowledge about the role of contemporary schools as meeting places for students with diverse backgrounds, who attend the same schools.

Haklay, M. (2018). Participatory citizen science. In S. Hecker, M. Haklay, A. Bowser, Z. Makuch, J. Vogel & A. Bonn. Citizen Science: Innovation in Open Science, Society and Policy, (pp. 52-62). UCL Press, London. Lefebvre, H. (1991). The production of space. Blackwell. Massey, D. (2005). For Space. Sage. Leijon, M. (2016). Space as designs for and in learning: investigating the interplay between space, interaction and learning sequences in higher education. Visual Communication, 15(1), 93-124. Sahlström, F., Tanner, M. & Valasmo, V. 2019. Connected youth, connected classrooms. Smartphone use and student and teacher participation during plenary teaching. Learning, Culture and Social Interaction 21: 311-331. Trentin, G. (2016). Always-on Education and Hybrid Learning Spaces. Educational Technology, 56(2), 31-37.

The final paper of this symposium presents a preliminary synthesis of the analyses undertaken in the substudies of the project. A core aim of the project Nordic Basic Schools is the integration of the substudies, related disciplines and the four Nordic research sites for furthering both national, Nordic and international understanding of the possibilities and constraints for basic education in providing the foundation for diverse and inclusive societies of the future.To better understand the ongoing changes in the Nordic education systems, phenomena such as digitalisation need to be related not only to a contemporary context but also to the school's spatial physical history, the changes in the space-times of schooling and the effects of digital media on classroom pedagogies (Dussel, 2018). In this presentation, we merge data from the three substudies to analyze the spatial and temporal construction of the Nordic basic schools as meeting places in a timespan of 50 years. The analyzed data include policy and planning documents, interviews with former and present pupils, ethnographic data and data produced by participatory methods. Informed by Henry Lefebvre’s theorization (1991, see also Larsson & Rönnlund 2021), we analyze space as socially constructed and three-dimensional, consisting of ideological and institutional space (conceptual space), everyday spatial practices (perceptual space) and the space experienced and negotiated by its users (lived space). Aligned with Doreen Massey (2005), we conceptualize places as spatio-temporal events, where a multitude of human and non-human trajectories come together. Utilizing this analytical framework, we aim to reach a preliminary analysis on how the different dimensions of space have been and continue to be co-constructed in the everyday lives of the schools. For instance, we expect to learn more about the role of spatial conceptualisations, i.e. ideas, policies and plans of school space of the 1970’s influencing the organized use of space and pupils’ agency today and gain a deeper understanding of the role of digitality in altering these dimensions of space. Moreover, we are interested in the meanings given to particular places in the school buildings and how they have contributed to students’ understanding of inclusion or exclusion in the past and today. The analysis will gain relevance not only in the context of Nordic basic schools but also in understanding the spatial and temporal change in European spaces of education from the perspective of social inclusion.

Dussel, I. (2018) The Digital Classroom: A Historical Consideration on the Redesigning of the Contexts of Learning. In: Grosvenor, I. & Rosén Rasmussen. L. (Eds.). Making education: Material school design and educational governance. ProQuest Ebook Central. Larsson, A. & Rönnlund, M. (2021) The spatial practice of the schoolyard. A comparison between Swedish and French teachers’ and principals’ perceptions of educational outdoor spaces, Journal of Adventure Education and Outdoor Learning, 21:2, 139-150, DOI: 10.1080/14729679.2020.1755704 Lefebvre, H. (1991). The production of space. Blackwell. Massey, D. (2005). For Space. Sage.