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19 SES 01 A: Everyday School Spaces, Temporalities and Children's Experiences
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19. Ethnography
Paper The Time Has Come - Teenage High School Students Negotiating and Experiencing Time in Everyday School Life 1: Högskolan i Gävle, Sweden; 2: Swedish School of Sport and Health Sciences GIH; 3: Malmö University Presenting Author:Time plays a crucial role in everyday school life in multiple ways and for several reasons. Most prominently, time frames and structures school content. In this sense, time becomes a resource that is distributed among teachers and pupils according to specific principles and priorities. These principles are neither neutral nor fixed; rather, they are often contested and debated, particularly when new educational content or reforms are proposed. Time not only regulates the overall duration of compulsory schooling but also organises semesters, weeks, days, and individual lessons. Creating space for teaching and learning, therefore, involves constructing annual, weekly, and daily schedules for pupils. School life is, in other words, divided and managed through temporal arrangements that operate horizontally, vertically, and diagonally, shaped by the work of teachers and school leaders. Although pupils may formally have a voice in school matters, their influence over time management is often limited. Teachers, too, may have limited autonomy, as they are frequently required to design plans and adhere to externally determined schedules. Consequently, pupils, teachers, and administrative staff all participate in negotiating how the temporal and related spatial order is constructed. Here, the organisation and regulation of movement become key aspects of the physical school environment (Holland et al., 2007). In this ongoing research project, we approach everyday school life not as a sequence of discrete lessons, but as a mobile, changing, and fragmented space in which young people navigate and make sense of their schooling. This perspective enables an exploration of the educational consequences of pupils’ movements and transitions through liminal spaces in daily school life. Pupils experience these transitions socially, materially, and affectively, as they move in and through the rhythms of school time. By conceptualising school life as an in‑transit activity, the project foregrounds the changes required to move through space and time between scheduled activities. In this presentation, we focus on how time is made visible and symbolically guides pupils in two Swedish upper secondary schools, and on how pupils experience, manage, and negotiate time and transitions between activities (and spaces) in everyday school life. Time and temporality have increasingly been recognised as central analytical dimensions in educational research. Gell’s (2001) Anthropology of Time challenges the conventional division between “psychological” and “physical” time, arguing instead that temporal subjectivity emerges through contrasts with socially organised, regularly patterned temporal processes. This perspective underscores time as relational, produced through interaction between lived experience and institutional structures. Building on this relational view, Franch and Pequeno de Souza (2015) conceptualise school as a site where multiple temporalities are produced, learned, and negotiated. Their distinction between structural time, the formal organisation of pedagogical activities and lived time, the practices and experiences of teachers and students, highlights how time functions simultaneously as a regulatory mechanism and as the context for social and cultural interaction. At a macro level, Landahl (2020) demonstrates how large-scale assessment regimes, exemplified by the “PISA calendar,” introduce highly synchronised, regular temporal structures that shape educational governance and enable global comparison. Such regimes illustrate how time operates as a subtle yet powerful form of governance. At the micro level, efficiency-oriented temporal practices, such as time management and self-regulation, increasingly structure everyday school life, often in tension with pedagogical values. Critical perspectives further question linear and productivity-oriented notions of time. Drawing on alternative temporalities, scholars such as Sayers (2023) and Kakkori (2013) challenge assumptions of linear progress and highlight age, experience, and embodied engagement as crucial to understanding educational time. Together, these perspectives frame education as shaped by multiple, overlapping temporalities rather than a single, linear timeline.
Methodology, Methods, Research Instruments or Sources Used Our ethnographic research project has generated data from two schools situated in major cities in Sweden, one in the southern part and one in the central part of the country. To distinguish them, we call one the South school and the other the North school. Both schools are suburban schools, and both were selected as ‘normal’ schools in terms of performance in relation to the average Swedish school. The two schools were also comparable in terms of size and architecture. The North school catered to 740 students, and the South school, 750 students across all compulsory school years (from preschool/F to year 9). Both schools were originally built in the 1960s and shared similar architectural features. Ethnographically inspired methodologies have proven useful for generating data on what people do while simultaneously paying attention to movement (Atkinson, 2014; Pink, 2007, 2015). Consequently, ethnographic research methods have the potential to systematically capture people’s practices and are well-suited to studies of children and young people (Heath et al., 2009). For the project, ethnography has provided a framework for data generation and analysis, specifically addressing theory and methodology as intricately linked. We have used a variety of ethnographic data-generation techniques, including participant observations, classroom video recordings and walk-and-talk interviews. These techniques were used complementarily in different phases of fieldwork. Having finalised data generation, we now have various forms of data that provide rich, multidimensional empirical material. For this presentation, we rely on visual and written field notes from participant observations, transcripts from walk-and-talk interviews, and classroom video recordings. The data offers insights into the temporality and spatiality of everyday school life as experienced, used and negotiated by individuals and groups of pupils. Our analysis is theoretically driven and draws on previous research on temporality (e.g., Gell, 2001; Franch et al, 2015; Kakkori, 2013, Leaton Gray, 2017). Conclusions, Expected Outcomes or Findings The results demonstrate how pupils’ everyday lives are profoundly shaped by institutionalised temporal governance in school, while simultaneously revealing how these structures are negotiated, stretched, or resisted in practice. Time emerges as a pervasive organising principle, structuring educational content, social interactions, and expectations of behaviour across both schools. At the structural level, temporality is made highly visible and omnipresent. Clocks placed throughout school buildings, along with detailed schedules, lesson plans, and semester overviews, signal the importance of chronological order and punctuality. Educational content is distributed across long-term timelines, such as weekly and semester plans, which aim to ensure progression, coordination, and efficiency. In classrooms, particularly in theoretical subjects, lesson plans explicitly link time to purpose, content, and completion, reinforcing a linear and goal-oriented logic of schooling. Digital clocks and real-time countdowns further intensify this focus by measuring and managing time down to the minute or second. These displays suggest that time is not merely a backdrop but an active governing mechanism that structures pedagogical practices and pupils’ conduct. At the level of everyday practices, however, pupils relate to these temporal structures in divergent ways. Some pupils attempt to minimise temporal margins by arriving early, standing outside classrooms, and preferring short breaks that facilitate focus and predictability. Others maximise these margins by taking longer breaks, socialising in corridors, or arriving late to lessons. Recess thus functions as a key site of contrast: for some, it represents a valued space of freedom and self-determined activity; for others, it is a stressful and uncertain transition that should be kept brief. Observations and interviews indicate that lesson start and end times are often perceived as negotiable rather than fixed. Late arrivals, early departures, and interruptions contribute to micro-disruptions and reduced instructional efficiency, while many pupils express a preference for clear temporal leadership by teachers. References Atkinson, P. (2014). For ethnography. London: SAGE Publications Ltd. Franch, M. & Pequeno de Souza, J. (2015). Clocks, calendars and cell phones. An ethnography on time in a high school. Vibrant, V.12 N.2, 417-450. Gell, A. (2001). The Anthropology of Time. Cultural Constructions of Temporal Maps and Images. Routledge, London. Goffman, E. (1959; 1971). The presentation of self in everyday life. Doubleday/ Penguin Books. Goffman, E. (2005). Interaction Ritual: Essays in Face-To-Face Behavior. Aldine Transaction. Heath, C., Hindmarsh, J., & Luff, P. (2010). Video in qualitative research. Los Angeles: Sage. Holland, J., Gordon, T., & Lahelma, E. (2007). Temporal, spatial and embodied relations in the teacher’s day at school. Ethnography and Education, 2(2), 221–237. https://doi.org/10.1080/17457820701350673 Kakkori, L. (2013). Education and the Concept of Time. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 45(5), 571–583. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1469-5812.2011.00838.x Landahl, J. (2020). The PISA calendar: Temporal governance and international large-scale assessments. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 52:6, 625-639, DOI:10.1080/00131857.2020.1731686 Leaton Gray, S. (2017). The social construction of time in contemporary education: implications for technology, equality and Bernstein’s ‘conditions for democracy.’ British Journal of Sociology of Education, 38(1), 60-71. https://doi.org/10.1080/01425692.2016.1234366 Lieberg, M. (1992). Att ta staden i besittning: om ungas rum och rörelser i offentlig miljö. Diss. Lund : Univ.. Lund. Lieberg, M. (1998). Ungas rörelser i staden periferi. I: Holmberg, I & Wetterberg, O (red), Nordisk arkitekturforskning. Vol. 11, No. 3. Sid. 21-35. Pink, S. (2007). Doing visual ethnography: images, media and representation in research. (2., [rev. and updated] ed.) London: SAGE. Pink, S. (2015). Doing sensory ethnography. (2. ed.) London: Sage. Sayers, E. (2023) Skateboarding, Time and Ethics: An Auto Ethnographic Adventure of Motherhood and Risk. Sport, Ethics and Philosophy, 17(3), 306–326. doi.org/10.1080/17511321.2023.2180533 19. Ethnography
Paper The Troublesome Relationship between Children’s Experiences and School Department of Science Education, University of Copenhagen, Denmark Presenting Author:An important aspect of understanding how we learn, is that we build on what we already know. Classic learning theorists like Dewey (1916) and Kolb (1984) emphasise that learning entails an engagement and reflection in relation to the experiences of the learner. Likewise, when science education researchers and practitioners look for ways to maintain or create an interest for learning science, linking the content of the science teaching to children’s everyday experiences is one of the suggestions. A recent example is the so-called ‘Science-Capital Teaching Approach’ (Godec et al., 2017), developed as part of the ASPIRES project (Archer et al., 2023) to allow for more and more diverse groups of students to access science. A key element is to include more of the students’ own experiences into the classroom and conversely relating the science teaching to examples and experiences in the children's lives. However, creating such links, is far from a trivial endeavour. Previous research has found a persistent gap between children’s everyday experiences and the science they encounter at school (Goulart et al., 2022). Likewise, our own ethnographic research (blinded, 2025), show that even what children experience in breaks during school-days often does not find its way into the formal teaching. In this paper, we further explore the difficulties in bridging the children’s everyday experiences and school science. To do so, we draw on two theoretical approaches. Science Capital (Archer et al., 2015) is a concept developed to capture what makes some students more inclined to choose and aspire towards science than others. It builds on Bourdieu’s (1984, 1986) work where he shows that the amount and composition of economic, cultural and social capital of an individual that they can invest and use in a given practice are crucial for the position they can obtain in the field, e.g., the educational field. Science capital identifies aspects of cultural and social capital that are relevant for science education, e.g., knowing about science, finding science interesting, watching science-related content online and knowing people in science-related roles (Archer et al., 2015). Children with a higher level of science capital will in general be more inclined and better prepared for choosing and engaging with science in school. However, the challenges in bridging everyday experiences and school science suggest that science capital acquired outside school does not necessarily count in school. Following Bourdieu, it appears that not all out-of-school science capital is valued in the field at school. Our second theoretical approach offers a perspective on this. Bernstein (2000) argues that when knowledge and practices become a part of curriculum, it is recontextualized through the pedagogical practice. Through this recontextualization, out-of-school knowledge changes into school knowledge. Some elements are included and related to each other, while others are separated and left out, and the process distributes the control over what is considered relevant. It turns nature into school science. If children’s experiences are to become legitimate parts of school teaching, they will be recontextualized. Consequentially, the children’s experiences are not recognized as relevant for school unless recontextualised to become school content; and the children may not necessarily recognize the school-science as something related to what they could experience in nature. The aim of this paper is to further unpack the difficulties in linking children’s everyday experiences and school science. We do so by presents empirical examples and discussing the implications, in particular in relation to the ambition of raising children’s interests in science by drawing on their experiences. Methodology, Methods, Research Instruments or Sources Used The paper draws on empirical material from a longitudinal, qualitative study, that follows children and young people as they move through the Danish educational system. In the compulsory part of the Danish system, children attend the same school from grade 0 (age 5-6) to grade 9 (age 14-15). Afterwards, most young people move on to post-compulsory education. In this project, we follow participants from five different schools, selected based on variation in the socio-economic composition, urbanity and distance to higher-education institutions. From each school, we follow three cohorts of students who by the beginning of the project attended grade 0 (age 5-6), grade 5 (age 10-11) and grade 8 (age 13-14), respectively. At present, we have followed the participants for six years. Hence, the youngest cohort now attends grade 5, while the oldest have entered various vocational or upper-secondary programmes. We engage with the participants through various qualitative methods, including ethnographic fieldwork, interviews and workshops. We first visited the fifteen involved school classes and carried out a workshop with each of them. In order to involve the children and young people in different ways the workshops used creative methods (Hoppe & Holmegaard, 2022), including an exercise where participants were asked to write and draw what they associated with nature, technology, health and science. In the present analysis, we particularly focus on their associations with nature and science. Following the workshops, 77 children and young people across the five schools were interviewed and have later been invited to two rounds of additional interviews. The interviews were semi-structured and focussed on the participants’ experiences with school, science, out-of-school interests and aspirations. Further, we carried out ethnographic fieldwork with six of the school classes, two for each cohort. The two youngest cohorts were visited twice, while the oldest cohort was visited only once, because they completed compulsory schooling the same year. The fieldwork included participant observation (Musante, 2015) during entire school days, including both formal teaching and activities during breaks. This allowed us to gain insights into the way the children and young people engaged during class activities, but also what occupied them in between these formal teaching situations. The fieldwork also formed the basis for informal conversations with participants about how they experienced the different subjects and teaching, just as it informed the more formal interviews. The empirical material were analysed using a thematic analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2006). Conclusions, Expected Outcomes or Findings The fieldwork showed examples where following the curriculum meant that the children’s experiences with nature were not addressed, and where children could not recognise their interests in nature in the science discipline. Tim, e.g., had a strong interest in animals, spending every elective reading session reading about animals, but did not like science because it was not about animals. During interviews, the children had difficulties giving examples of how their everyday experiences related to what they learned in school and vice versa. The association exercise in the workshops with the oldest cohort also suggested that they connected nature and science with different things. While nature was mostly associated with concrete things found in nature (like plants and animals) or with experiences (e.g., fresh air or going for a walk), science was associated with scientific concepts like biodiversity, experiments and research and the names of the disciplines. While a few words appeared in both areas (e.g., nature, climate and CO2), the concrete experiences from nature seemed to be transformed into concepts and disciplines in school. Following (Bernstein, 2000), the required recontextualization of the children’s out-of-school experiences meant that they could not recognise their concrete experiences as potential school content. For becoming that, they would have to be transformed into general, abstract knowledge and language. Consequently, Tim did not recognise the substantial science capital he possessed as something belonging in the school field. While his teacher might disagree, Tim believed his interest and knowledge concerning animals were not relevant. We posit that the recontextualization of experiences into school science presents a challenge for the intentions of making school science more inclusive and relevant by building on children’s experiences. The transformation of concrete experiences to abstract concepts of school science may eventually alienate the children from their own experiences when in school. References Archer, L., Dawson, E., DeWitt, J., Seakins, A., & Wong, B. (2015). Science capital: A conceptual, methodological, and empirical argument for extending bourdieusian notions of capital beyond the arts. Journal of Research in Science Teaching, 52(7), 922–948. https://doi.org/10.1002/tea.21227 Archer, L., DeWitt, J., Godec, S., Henderson, M., Holmegaard, H., Liu, Q., MacLeod, E., Mendick, H., Moote, J., & Watson, E. (2023). ASPIRES 3 Main Report. UCL. Bernstein, B. B. (2000). Pedagogy, symbolic control, and identity: Theory, research, critique. Rowman & Littlefield. Blinded. (2025). Bourdieu, P. (1984). Distinction: A social critique of the judgement of taste (R. Nice, Tran.). Harvard University Press. Bourdieu, P. (1986). The forms of capital. In J. G. Richardson (Ed.), Handbook of Theory and Research for the Sociology of Education (pp. 241–258). Greenwood Press. Braun, V., & Clarke, V. (2006). Using thematic analysis in psychology. Qualitative Research in Psychology, 3(2), 77–101. https://doi.org/10.1191/1478088706qp063oa Dewey, J. (1916). Democracy and Education: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Education. Macmillan. Godec, S., King, H., & Archer, L. (2017). The Science Capital Teaching Approach: Engaging students with science, promoting social justice. In UCL Institute of Education: London, UK. [Report]. UCL Institute of Education. https://www.ucl.ac.uk/ioe/departments-and-centres/departments/education-practice-and-society/science-capital-research/science-capital-teaching-approach Goulart, M. I. M., Germanos, E., & Roth, W.-M. (2022). Expanding young children’s lifeworld. Cultural Studies of Science Education, 17(2), 251–276. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11422-021-10040-0 Hoppe, E. E., & Holmegaard, H. T. (2022). Art-based methods in science education research: A systematic review of their prevalence and an analysis of their potentials in addressing complex questions. Nordic Studies in Science Education, 18(3), Article 3. Kolb, D. A. (1984). Experiential Learning: Experience as the Source of Learning and Development. Prentice-Hall. Musante, K. (2015). Participant Observation. In H. R. Bernard & C. C. Gravlee (Eds.), Handbook of Methods in Cultural Anthropology (Second edition). Rowman & Littlefield. | ||