Conference Agenda

This symposium presents findings from a four-year research project focusing the ideals and practices of ‘One school for all’ as a core of the Nordic welfare state (Blossing et al, 2014, Frønes et al, 2021). Nordic education systems have been internationally considered to promote educational equality and social inclusion by bringing together pupils from diverse backgrounds. The Nordic school model was developed as the solution to future challenges (Telhaug, Mediås & Aasen, 2006). In just over a decade, Sweden (1962), followed by Finland (1968), Norway (1969), and Denmark (1975) transitioned from parallel education systems to common basic education. Non-tracked neighborhood schools became well-known for ambitions in quality and equality aiming to provide children with not only learning, but also diversity of class, culture, gender and ability (Lundahl, 2016).

Since then, Nordic societies have faced ideological, economical and social changes, with continued evidence of exclusion (Thrupp et al. 2023). Since 2010, rapid digitalization has brought on-going changes: increased individualization, altered notions of time, space and place, and the enabling of mobile and ever-present 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 particular interest in the challenges that material and digital re-configurations of sociality bring to the future of One school for all. The project operates within a multidisciplinary framework – education, history and applied language studies – analyzing Nordic comprehensive schools as spaces and places constructed in the intersections of material qualities and social interaction (see Lefebvre 1991; Massey 2005). By focusing on four Nordic schools we explore their changing role for inclusion and exclusion over a time-span of 50 years, from the 1970s to date. The three sub-studies address:

• How have educational spaces, physical and digital, been locally enacted from 1970 to 2020?

• How did 1970s school spaces support social relations across diverse backgrounds, and what are the long-term implications?

• How do current school spaces and digital sociality shape peer interaction today?

The research material consists of policy documents and archive material from the selected schools, interviews with former students, material co-created with present students, video material, field notes, and interviews from the schools today.

The project offers a long-term, spatially grounded analysis of how the Nordic ‘One school for all’ model has evolved over 50 years. By examining both historical and contemporary school spaces, it provides insights into how physical and digital environments shape social inclusion and exclusion. The project contributes to the theorization of educational space as dynamic, socially produced, and politically contested. It shows how school environments are not neutral backdrops but active agents in shaping social relations.

The symposium consists of three presentations focusing on each of the sub-studies, followed by a fourth presentation that synthesizes the findings. This final presentation contrasts past and present developments and outlines how the results can inform new articulations of basic education in the Nordic countries and beyond.

This substudy conducts a historical analysis of how national school policies concerning basic education were enacted within local communities and school sites (Clark, 2010; Westberg, 2014). It also examines broader educational ideals related to school buildings. Drawing on policy documents and archival materials from four Nordic municipalities, the research focuses on local sources to explore how pedagogical ideas materialized in the physical spaces of schools. The analytical approach is reflective and interpretative (Alvesson & Sköldberg, 2009). The study rests on the theoretical premise that the establishment of basic schools cannot be attributed to a single explanatory factor. Instead, it reflects a complex interplay between historical processes and institutions operating at both local and national levels. Local traditions interacted with national and international perspectives positioning the school as a space central to democratic development (Thelen, 1999; Coninck-Smith, 2010; Westberg, 2015, 2018). To capture these dynamics, a lot of sources have been used, including architectural drawings, planning documents, municipal commissions, and correspondence between local authorities and national agencies. Empirical data from the four case municipalities illuminate the processes through which basic schools were established, with particular attention to planning procedures and decision-making structures. The comparative dimension of the study enables an analysis of similarities and differences in how localities—through municipal policies and community engagement—shaped the vision and realization of school buildings in the Nordic countries. Moreover, the study contributes to an understanding of how municipalities conceptualized the school as a specific place capable of fostering social inclusion. These insights also connect to the broader aims of the overarching research project. A key conclusion is that decisions about school location were guided primarily by municipal institutions, ideals, resources, and historical experience rather than external pedagogical theories. Municipalities had established institutional frameworks that shaped the school-building process, and local interpretations of democratic schooling played a decisive role. However, the physical design of the buildings themselves drew more directly on pedagogical ideals originating from outside the local context. By adopting a local perspective within a Nordic comparative framework, the study offers a more nuanced understanding of what constitutes the “Nordic model of education.” Whereas prior research has often focused on the national level, examining local processes reveals the significant influence of municipal traditions in the expansion and consolidation of compulsory schooling

Alvesson, M., and K. Sköldberg. 2009. Reflexive Methodology. London: Sage. Clark, Alison. "‘In‐between’ spaces in postwar primary schools: a micro‐study of a ‘welfare room’ (1977–1993).” History of Education, Vol. 39, No. 6, (2010): 767– 778, doi: 10.1080/0046760X.2010.514297 Coninck-Smith de, Ning. “Danish and British architects at work: a micro-study of architectural encounters after the Second World War.” History of Education Vol. 39, No. 6, (2010): 713–730. Thelen, Kathleen. “Historical institiutionalism in Comparative Politics.” Annual Review of Political Science, 2. (1999): 369– 404. Westberg, Johannes. “Beyond the Educational Visions of the State: The Construction of School Buildings in Rural Nineteenth-Century Sweden.” In Making Education: Material School Design and Educational Governance, edited by Ian Grosvenor and Lisa Rasmussen Rosén. Cham: Springer International Publishing AG, 2018. Westberg, Johannes. Att bygga ett skolväsende: Folkskolans förutsättningar och framväxt 1840–1900. Lund: Nordic Academic Press, 2015.

This paper presents a subproject examining democratization, inclusion, and differentiation in Nordic basic schools through a life history approach (Bertaux & Thompson, 1997). It focuses on former pupils of the 1970s and their retrospective narratives of school experiences. We explore how schools provided opportunities for social interaction among pupils from diverse social backgrounds and how these relations are perceived to have influenced their later lives. Inclusion has been a central principle in the ideology and policy of the Nordic comprehensive school model (Blossing, Imsen, & Moos, 2014). Established during the 1960s and 1970s, this model aimed to ensure equal access to education regardless of social class, gender, or ability (Telhaug, Mediås, & Aasen, 2006). However, research shows that comprehensive schools were not immune to earlier mechanisms of segregation based on academic performance or social background. From their inception, these schools implemented pedagogical practices to address pupil heterogeneity, including ability grouping and separate special education classes (Gustafsson & Blömeke 2018). Spatiality has increasingly been recognized as a key analytical dimension for understanding educational inequality (From 2020; Buchner, 2025). This presentation investigates how spatial dimensions of inclusion and differentiation are constructed in narratives of former pupils from four lower comprehensive schools in the 1970s. We ask: (1) how these practices contributed to social and spatial hierarchies and senses of belonging, and (2) how pupils negotiated their agency within these hierarchies. Methodologically, the study draws on interviews with participants who attended the project’s partner schools in the 1970s. They include elements of go-along interviews (Kusenbach, 2003), encouraging interaction with objects and places that elicit storytelling and illuminate the social, material, cultural, and historical contexts of life histories (Goodson, 2013). Interviews were conducted in and around school buildings and in participants’ homes or other preferred locations. Participants in Sweden (N=8), Finland (N=9), Norway (N=8), and Denmark (N=8) were interviewed twice between 2022 and 2024. The analysis demonstrates how memories of basic schooling reveal the long-term significance of social relations formed in local schools. While school architecture and spatial arrangements enabled encounters across social differences, they also reproduced distinctions, particularly through ability-based separation. These experiences often shaped pupils’ self-identification and subsequent life choices. The project offers a socio-historical perspective on the Nordic basic school as a political and educational endeavor, contributing to contemporary debates on inclusive education in European educational systems by linking historical insights with current discussions on learning environments.

Bertaux, D., & Thompson, P. (2007). Pathways to social class: A qualitative approach to social mobility (1st ed.). Routledge. Blossing, U., Imsen, G., & Moos, L. (Eds.). (2014). The Nordic education model: Policy implications of research in education. Springer. Buchner, T. (2025). On ‘integration rooms’, tough territories, and ‘places to be’: the ability-space-regimes of three educational settings at Austrian secondary schools. International Journal of Inclusive Education, 29(2), 192–209. From, T. (2020). “We are two languages here”: The operation of language policies through spatial ideologies and practices in a co-located and a bilingual school. Multilingua, 39(6), 663–684. Goodson, I. (2013). Developing narrative theory: Life histories and personal representation. Routledge. Gustafsson, J. E., & Blömeke, S. (2018). Development of School Achievement in the Nordic Countries During Half a Century. Scandinavian Journal of Educational Research, 62(3), 386–406. Kusenbach, M. (2003). Street phenomenology: The go-along as ethnographic research tool. Ethnography, 4(3), 455–485. Telhaug, A. O., Asbjørn Mediås, O., & Aasen, P. (2006). The Nordic Model in Education: Education as part of the political system in the last 50 years. Scandinavian Journal of Educational Research, 50(3), 245–283.

In the third substudy, we follow students currently attending four Nordic schools. Digital infrastructures increasingly reshape the conditions under which students encounter school content. Over the past decades, educational contexts in Europe and beyond have evolved into hybrid techno‑scholastic environments where students' learning activities span both online and offline spaces (Alirezabeigi, Masschelein, & Decuypere, 2020; Raes, 2022). Digital platforms and mobile applications have become integrated into students’ routines, during school hours but also during evenings, weekends, and other times traditionally outside the boundaries of formal schooling. This shift contributes to a more fluid temporal and spatial organization of schoolwork (Nilsberth, Høegh, & Slot, 2024; Sahlström et al., 2019). This presentation focuses on how students themselves engage with school content outside of school across different digital platforms. We ask: Where, when, and with whom do students encounter school content in different digital spaces? What characterizes the epistemic practices that take shape in students’ digital engagements with school content across physical spaces? The study is carried out in close collaboration with 14–15‑year‑old students, combining online and offline material within a patchwork ethnographic approach (Günel & Watanabe, 2024). Students contributed through self‑selected screen recordings, peer observations, and collaborative sessions analyzing student‑generated data, complemented by focus groups and interviews. These methods enabled us to capture the varied ways digital technologies participate in, shape, and are shaped by sociomaterial arrangements in contemporary hybrid school spaces. Our analysis draws on ethnomethodological perspectives using the concept of epistemic practices to examine how participants display and negotiate knowledge in interactions involving teachers, friends, and parents across institutional and social media platforms (Stivers, Mondada, & Steensig, 2011). Findings indicate both continuity and change in students’ engagement with schoolwork beyond the classroom. While peer collaboration on homework is not new, digital platforms reshape when and where it occurs. The constant availability of school information improves coordination but also generates tensions. Continuous notifications and expectations of rapid responses introduce new pressures that shape students’ everyday rhythms of learning. Digital spaces have transformed the temporal, spatial, and institutional organization of schoolwork, blurring boundaries between school and home, formal and informal communication, and student–teacher–parent domains. These insights highlight the need for further research on how todays’ hybrid school spaces affect equity, pedagogy, and well‑being, and show that digital schooling involves both extensions of traditional practices and the emergence of new forms of interaction.

Alirezabeigi, S., J. Masschelein, and M. Decuypere. 2020. “Investigating Digital Doings through Breakdowns: A Sociomaterial Ethnography of a Bring Your Own Device School.” Learning, Media and Technology 45 (2): 193–207. doi:10.1080/17439884.2020.1727501. Günel, Gökçe, and Chika Watanabe. 2024. “Patchwork ethnography.” American Ethnologist 51: 131–139. https://doi.org/10.1111/amet.13243 Nilsberth, M., Høegh, T. & Slot, M. (2024). Spatializing literacy-as-events. Literacy in new techno-scholastic environments of lower secondary classrooms. Language & Education, accepted for publication. Raes, A. Exploring Student and Teacher Experiences in Hybrid Learning Environments: Does Presence Matter?. Postdigit Sci Educ 4, 138–159 (2022). Stivers, T., Mondada, L., & Steensig, J. (Eds.). (2011). The morality of knowledge in conversation. Cambridge, UK:Cambridge University Press 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.

The aim of the final paper of this symposium is to present a preliminary synthesis of the analyses undertaken in the substudies of the project Nordic basic schools. Furthering national, Nordic and international understanding of the possibilities and constraints for basic education in providing the foundation for diverse and inclusive societies is a core aim of the project. The symposium primarily engages with its empirical material, aiming for transparent communication of perspectives, methods, and limitations.To maintain both diversity and coherence, the work of the French philosopher and social theorist Henri Lefebvre (1974/1991, see also Larsson & Rönnlund 2021) in La Production de l’espace (The Production of Space) has been used, particularly the so-called spatial triad. The framework provides a conceptual space for analyzing what unfolds in the social spaces of the project’s four schools. It allows us to understand school practices not as determined by physical structures, detached from context, or solely discursively prefigured, but as shaped through the interplay of the conceived, perceived, and lived. This paper brings together perspectives and results from the three substudies across the four Nordic research sites, using the spatial triad as an analytical lens and examines how Nordic basic schools have been spatially and temporally constructed as meeting places over the past 50 years. The analyzed data include policy and planning documents, interviews with former and present pupils, hybrid ethnographic data and data produced by participatory methods. The results from the analysis shows what was planned and realized, how the resulting environments have been narrated and remembered, and what everyday life looks like in these four schools today. The project’s analyses demonstrate that the Nordic basic school is fundamentally local and municipal in both its vision and implementation, rather than being generically Nordic. The schools differ significantly from one another as past and contemporary everyday life in the four schools varies, not only across cities and countries, but also among students within the participating classes. To some extent, the findings diverge from results reported in PISA or other studies, and from evaluations conducted by national authorities, and the project as a whole offers complementary insights in relation to findings from other and earlier research on Nordic education. The symposium papers as a whole present a new approach to the Nordic model in education. The studies are closely situated, and use innovative complementary methods for analysing the first fifty years of Nordic basic education.

Lefebvre, H. (1991). The Production of Space. (D. Nicholson-Smith, Trans.). Cambridge, MA: Blackwell. Anna Larsson & Maria Rönnlund (2020): The spatial practice of theschoolyard. A comparison between Swedish and French teachers’ and principals’ perceptionsof educational outdoor spaces, Journal of Adventure Education and Outdoor Learning, DOI:10.1080/14729679.2020.1755704