Conference Agenda

This paper examines the historical development and ongoing implications of school routes and transportation systems as critical yet often-overlooked infrastructures that impact educational access and equality. Drawing on Science and Technology Studies (STS), particularly Infrastructure Studies and Actor-Network Theory (ANT), this contribution traces how seemingly technical decisions about school zoning, school route planning, and transportation provision have functioned as powerful mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion in education systems.

School routes and transportation networks represent what Star and Ruhleder (1996) refer to as "infrastructures" – embedded, transparent, and learned as part of membership in communities of practice (p. 113; see also van Laak, 2020; van Laak, 2023). Yet these quotidian socio-technical arrangements have profound implications for educational access and the conditions under which access is made possible or denied (Lareau & Goyette, 2014). Through a historical lens, this paper seeks to show how school route planning policies emerged not as neutral solutions to geographical challenges, but as contested political projects entangled with questions of race, class, and social belonging (Rury & Mirel, 1997; Hunter, 2020).

The contribution explores three interconnected dimensions. First, it examines past perspectives by tracing the historical evolution of school route policies across different contexts, in particular West Germany and the USA, to reveal how decisions pertaining to designated school routes and transportation were implicated in processes of segregation, integration, and community formation (see, e.g., Delmont, 2016; Moran, 2004). Second, the paper addresses politically and culturally contested practices by following the networks of actors – such as city or communal administrations, policymakers, traffic associations, parental organizations, vehicles, roads – whose interactions produced particular configurations of educational access (Law & Mol, 2001; Latour, 2005; Belliger & Krieger, 2006). Third, it engages with past uncertainties by examining how educational authorities navigated ambiguities around optimal school size, transportation costs, safety concerns, and community demands, and how these negotiations shaped institutional responses that continue to influence contemporary debates (Kantor & Lowe, 2013).

Methodologically, the paper employs ANT to trace the associations between human and non-human actors – e.g., students, buses, roads, timetables, catchment areas – that collectively constitute school route systems (Fenwick & Edwards, 2010; Gulson & Symes, 2007). This approach reveals how infrastructure does not simply facilitate educational access but actively produces it through complex assemblages that distribute opportunities unevenly across space and time (Bowker & Star, 1999; Graham & Marvin, 2001). By making visible the work required to maintain these systems, the analysis challenges assumptions that educational access is primarily a question of policy intent rather than infrastructural capacity (Star, 1999).

The contribution speaks to contemporary challenges such as educational equity or school choice by demonstrating that present configurations of access are historically contingent rather than inevitable (McCulloch, 2016; Depaepe, 2017). Understanding how past decisions about school routes and transportation infrastructure became “locked in” can inform the critical evaluation of current proposals for reform (e.g., Bijker, 1995). Moreover, by examining how ambiguities and uncertainties were managed historically – often through technical solutions that depoliticized questions about educational provision – this paper offers insights into how contemporary uncertainties might be approached differently.

This historically informed STS perspective challenges both technological determinism and presentist thinking in education policy. It seeks to demonstrate that charting educational futures requires grappling with the material legacies and infrastructural inheritances that shape what appears possible in the present (Cowen, 2002). By revealing school routes as sites where educational ideals meet practical constraints, where policies encounter resistant materialities, and where futures are quite literally 'paved into place', this paper contributes to a more nuanced understanding of how educational access has been configured and how these configurations continue to shape (in-)equality.

This paper proceeds from a simple yet exacting proposition: silence is a material and spatial condition that organises how knowing and acting take place. To explore this proposition, we read a series of educational settings for hearing-impaired people – historical and contemporary – through three architectural lenses that have shaped, and continue to shape, educational research: topology, phenomenology, and sensory‑relational environments.

The first locus is Trondheim, where the Rødbygget (1855) and Gulbygget (1897) buildings of Norway’s first school for hearing-impaired children and young people articulate what we call a topology of continuity: across more than a century, these structures served shifting pedagogical regimes – from oralist instruction to total communication and later bilingual approaches in sign language – while retaining a legible spatial identity that helped stabilise the institutional memory of deaf education.

If Trondheim embodies a long durational topology, Sverre Fehn’s Skådalen School for the Hearing‑Impaired (Oslo, 1975) reframes the school as a phenomenological field, while recognising its institutional history (Thorbjørn, 1998). Fehn’s (1978) project redirects attention from the acoustic norm of schooling to the primacy of light, material and spatial sequence as mediators of perception and communication. The school becomes a careful instrument for visual attention – its clarity of section and delicacy of detail are not rhetorical flourishes but conditions of possibility for classroom exchange where face, hands and distance must remain legible at all times. Fehn’s stance resonates with Norberg‑Schulz’s (1963, 1980) later shift from analytic schemas to a phenomenology of place, as a “return to things” that takes seriously our being‑in‑the‑world – here, the pedagogical world of the deaf child and their community.

The contemporary development by Hansel Bauman (2004, 2010, 2025) of ‘DeafSpace’ at Gallaudet University in Washinton D.C. codifies what was often tacit in phenomenological practice: the school as a sensory‑relational environment. Principles such as proximity, sensory reach, light/colour calibration, vibro‑tactile awareness and spatial sequencing set out a design vocabulary in which transparency at corners, wide and gently graded stairs that sustain conversation in motion, and low‑glare daylighting become everyday infrastructural supports for signed communication. DeafSpace thus shifts the architect’s attention from sound control alone to the choreography of visual and tactile lines of communication across the school day – communication that should underline its own values, without having to emulate the ones from the world of sound (Humphries 1975, 1977).

Across these cases, the ECER 2026 theme – ‘Knowing and Acting: The changing conditions and potentials of education research’ – comes into strong relief. In Trondheim, we see how architectural stability sustains a community and curates a century‑long conversation about what deaf schooling is and should be: topology as institutional knowledge. In Skådalen, we witness phenomenology not as scholastic concept but as the daily grammar of classrooms attuned to silence – a unique architecture that compensated the absence of sound while enabling encounters, and which is currently under threat (Hagem , Heiberg, 2025). In Gallaudet University, we see sensory‑relational frameworks move from experiment to method, offering education research a supple apparatus to study environments in which the visibility of language and the tactility of social life are the matter at hand.
What this paper offers, then, is not a single model but a constellation: a narrative of how schools for the deaf have been – and remain – testing grounds where educational epistemologies are architecturally configured. In these silent places, learning is not less; it is otherwise: visual, proximate, vibrotactile, situated. That difference, carefully described, is the paper’s contribution to the changing conditions and potentials of education research.

What is meant by teacher love?

The study discusses the concept of teacher's love. The concept is approached in the history of Finnish education and upbringing in the way Uno Cygnaeus, known as the founder of the elementary school, described teacher's love. The data is Uno Cygnaeus' opening speech to the Jyväskylä Teachers' Seminar on August 14, 1863 (Mikkola, Leinonen, Rekola 1937). The task is to examine and answer the research question “What is meant by teacher's love” in the history of education as a concept presented by Cygnaeus to student teachers. Previous research on teacher love is presented by using Simo Skinnar's (2004) concept of pedagogical love. Research related to pedagogical love has been conducted e.g. from the perspective of critical pedagogy, good teaching, refugees, and the pandemic (Akkaraju 2023; Kaukko 2021; Määttä & Uusiautti 2013; Vanderheiden 2025). The study of teacher love helps European dialogue by referring to educational traditions. Finnish education is derived from German tradition in educational philosophy (e.g. Fröbel) and was tailored to serve civilized thinking and expertise. In 1863, future teachers at the time were equipped with teacher love, which would act as an undercurrent in examinations, in the teaching of knowledge and skills, and as part of the core of educational work. This presentation is based on the first article of my doctoral research and offers novel information with historical insights and past perspectives.