Conference Agenda

This symposium investigates how future learning spaces are imagined in past and present Nordic learning‑environment policies and scientific expertise, with a focus on Norway, Sweden, and Finland. We examine how relations between school and a changing society are articulated in policy and scientific discourses, and how the sociomaterial aspects of schools and classrooms as learning environments are envisioned and experienced. Focusing on transformations in school architecture and interior design, we analyze the policies and expert knowledges behind the rise of Innovative Learning Environments (ILEs), such as movable walls and furniture, and zones for silent study, collaboration, and presentation (Mulcahy, 2016; Saari, 2021; Saari & Decuypere, 2024; Wood, 2020). We foreground both contemporary reforms and their historical trajectories, asking how future‑oriented rhetoric draws on, selectively forgets, or surreptitiously reproduces past spatial imaginations.

The overarching research question of the symposium is:
How do Nordic education policies construct and circulate spatial imaginations of the futures of learning, and through what forms of expertise, governance, and transnational policy mobility are school spaces made knowable and actionable?

The main objectives are:

• Map the historical trajectories of policy and scientific discourses that underpin current learning‑environment reforms in Nordic schools.

• Analyze how contemporary policies and expert discourses render school space as a problem to be solved and a lever for future‑readiness (e.g., labour markets, skills agendas, innovation).

• Situate Nordic spatial policies within broader European and global policy agendas.

• Develop a comparative perspective across Norway, Sweden, and Finland to understand convergences and divergences in policy narratives, design solutions, and everyday implementation.

As a conceptual and theoretical framework, we employ critical policy studies with a focus on the imbrication of power and knowledge (Ball, 2012). Methodologically, we use discourse‑analytic, rhetorical, and ethnographic approaches that help trace the power–knowledge relations embedded in both policy and scientific discourses, as well as in the quotidian experiences of learning environments.

As policies promoting future learning environments often highlight alignment with perceived future needs, such as labour‑market demands (Niemi, 2021), research suggests that such orientations may simultaneously make policy oblivious to its historical predecessors (Rosén‑Rasmussen, 2021; Saari, 2022). Yet discourses of novelty may also reiterate inherited spatial rationalities, such as functionally differentiated areas for distinct activities, which are now reframed as innovative breakthroughs. Moreover, historical identities, pedagogies, and teacher and student experiences continue to shape daily life in schools, influencing how new spatial arrangements are appropriated, adapted, or resisted (Saari & Decuypere, 2024; Vaaben & Bjerg, 2019).

We situate Nordic spatial reforms within a European and global policy ecology comprising learning‑environment research, and design standards circulating through networks of ministries, agencies, consultants, architects, and technology providers. The papers trace how national spatial planning references transnational frames (e.g., skills, inclusion, sustainability, digitalization) and how European initiatives and benchmarking discourses intersect with local traditions and governance. By reading Norwegian, Swedish, and Finnish policy and design practices comparatively, the symposium illuminates policy mobilities and translations across European, national, and municipal scales and examines how “best practices” are recontextualized in concrete architectural choices and everyday use.

By integrating policy analysis with spatial and material perspectives, the symposium advances understanding of how school spaces are problematized, designed, and governed as levers for educational futures. It offers theoretically informed and empirically grounded accounts of historical textures in present reforms and articulates the European and global circulations that shape Nordic trajectories. Collectively, the papers show how school spaces become sites where visions of learning, work, and citizenship are imagined, contested, and enacted.

European education policy discourses frequently frame schooling as preparation for an uncertain and accelerating future, where knowledge and skills risk rapid obsolescence and individuals are expected to adapt continuously (Forssell, 2015; Hansen et al, 2021; Säntti, Hansen & Saari, 2021). Within this framing, the future of learning is imagined not only through curricular reforms but also through spatial and material transformations. Flexible architectures, digital infrastructures and widely scaling cognitive and emotional competences are presented as solutions to unpredictability, embodying policy ideals of adaptability and innovation (Saari, 2022). This paper examines how metaphors of “openness” towards the society and “flexibility” operate as ways to respond to an unknown future in Finnish and Norwegian policy discourse. Partly in line with previous metaphor research (e.g. Lakoff & Johnson 1980), we argue that while metaphors are an effective way to communicate new intuitive ideas in policy reform context, their vagueness creates new kinds of implementation problems when reforming school spaces and teaching. Our analysis proceeds in three steps. First, we trace the historical lineage of these metaphors, showing that they do not mark a radical break but rather intensify trends present since the 1950s. While policies claim novelty, they often reproduce inherited spatial metaphors now reframed as innovative. Second, we analyze what’s distinctly new and context specific in contemporary Finnish and Norwegian spatial metaphors of governing in relation to an unknown future. Third, drawing on critical policy studies and rhetorical analysis, we show how imaginaries of openness and adaptability shape national curricula, architectural standards, and investment in educational technologies. By foregrounding the spatial imagination of learning, we argue that Finnish and Norwegian policy futures are not only narrated but materially enacted through school design. This has tangible consequences for education: it reconfigures the everyday environments of teaching and learning while embedding abstract visions of adaptability into concrete spatial arrangements. Our findings contribute to understanding how policy discourses of uncertainty and acceleration translate into spatial strategies, linking Finnish and Norwegian developments to broader European trends in imagining the futures of learning.

Forssell A (2015) School and the future: How teachers and teacher education are articulated in the political debate. Policy Futures in Education 13(6): 712–731. Lakoff, G., & Johnson, M. (1980). Metaphors we live by. University of Chicago press. Hansen P, Sivesind K and Thostrup R (2021) Managing expectations by projecting the future school: Observing the Nordic Future School Reports via Temporal Topologies. The European Educational Research Journal.DOI:10.1177/1474904121995695. Saari, A. (2022). Topologies of desire: Fantasies and their symptoms in educational policy futures. European Educational Research Journal, 21(6), 883-899. Säntti, J., Hansen, P., & Saari, A. (2021). Future jamming: Rhetoric of new knowledge in Finnish educational policy texts. Policy Futures in Education, 19(7), 859-876.

Contemporary educational policies are increasingly oriented towards imagined futures. School spaces are planned as anticipatory infrastructures, expected to accommodate learning yet to come, pedagogies not fully realised, and societal challenges framed as inevitable. In this future-oriented policy landscape, spatial planning is rarely presented as political; instead, it is articulated as a technical and forward-looking response to changing educational needs. In this presentation we start from the premise that the futures invoked in these policies are not neutral projections. They are shaped through selective engagements with the past—through remembering some histories while actively forgetting others (e.g., McLeod, 2017; Saari, 2022). We conceptualize these temporal, historically constituted connections as the politics of forgetting. Based on our ongoing research paper, we show how the politics of forgetting work in the history of spatial planning in Finnish comprehensive schools. By the politics of forgetting, we refer to discursive practices through which certain perspectives and voices in spatial design are emphasised and reiterated, while others are intentionally marginalised or omitted. To understand how particular forms of remembering and forgetting have been spatially and discursively constituted, we draw in particular on Michel Foucault’s (1972) theoretical notions on the entanglements of knowledge and power in expert discourses. The study’s data were selected from a broader collection of policy and scientific documents on Finnish comprehensive school spatial planning from the 1960s to the present. The selection focused on two major waves of school planning reforms. The first wave, 60’s and 70's, involved state-led, standardized school construction during the comprehensive school reform, whereas the second wave, post-2000, reflects decentralized decision-making, cost-efficiency concerns and global trends in innovative learning environments. Based on our analysis, we propose that the politics of forgetting shapes the design of school facilities in three ways: (1) complete silencing, (2) repetition of the past through forgetting, and (3) forgetfulness that deliberately frames certain design approaches as obsolete. Through these partly overlapping forms of forgetfulness, we argue that the design of school facilities operates as a site of contested politics, where struggles over the future of education crystallise and materialise in political archives, both spatially and temporally.

Foucault, M. (1972). The archaeology of knowledge (A. M. Sheridan Smith, käänt.). Pantheon Books. McLeod, J. (2017). Marking time, making methods: Temporality and untimely dilemmas in the sociology of youth and educational change. British Journal of Sociology of Education, 38(1), 13–25. https://doi.org/10.1080/01425692.2016.1254541 Saari, A. (2022). Topologies of desire: Fantasies and their symptoms in educational policy futures. European Educational Research Journal, 21(6), 883–899. https://doi.org/10.1177/1474904120988389

The idea that the physical environment shapes school activities is well established, with research demonstrating strong links between spatial design and pedagogical intentions (Alerby et al., 2006; Bjurström, 2003, Blackmore et al., 2011; Grannäs & Stavem, 2021; Krupinska, 2022). A major historical shift in school architecture has been the move away from the “egg‑crate” classroom model—where teachers work in isolated, self‑contained rooms—towards more integrated and interconnected learning environments (Fisher, 2007). A related transformation is the shift from teacher‑focused to student‑centred pedagogies, reflecting a broader reconfiguration of educational activity from separate units to interconnected processes (Bjurström, 2003).. Within this broader architectural and pedagogical turn, new spatial concepts such as “creative arenas” have gained traction as policy‑relevant instruments intended to foster collaboration and support more creative forms of teaching and learning. In this paper, I investigate how such “creative arenas” are imagined, designed, and materialised in practice in newly built Swedish schools. I first analyse the policy rationales underpinning them, focusing on spatial designs for design, technology, and craft subjects. I then draw on two empirical cases: one from a school design process in which creative arenas were introduced as “makerspaces,” and one based on interviews with craft teachers working in schools where these spaces have been built and enacted. Across the empirical material, two spatial tensions emerge. The first concerns the naming and classification of space. In one design process, nearly every cluster at the school—including a small teacher work area next to the copy machine—was designated a makerspace, despite the absence of a shared understanding of what the making or “creativity” should entail. This produced spaces that were both materially undefined and rhetorically charged, expected to support innovation while offering no concrete affordances. Such naming practices illustrate how spatial imaginations travel, becoming detached from material and pedagogical realities (cf. Wood, 2020). The second tension relates to the spatial imaginaries of the design, technology and craft subjects and their pedagogical requirements. In one school, a “creative arena” positioned outside four craft classrooms proved unusable due to organisational arrangements—particularly class sizes—and regulatory demands concerning evacuation and lockdown procedures. As several teachers noted, the build policy made teaching impossible, illustrating how built forms can constrain rather than enable pedagogical practice. In fact, the teachers expressed a desire to return to the “egg‑crate” classroom and more materially defined spaces.

Alerby, E., and M.-L. Hörnqvist (2005). Reflections from a School on a School. Reflective Practice 6, (2): 319–325. https://doi.org/10.1080/14623940500106609 Bjurström, P. (2003). Att avskaffa klassrummet – om skolans föränderliga arkitektur. In Kobran, Nallen och majjen. Tradition och förnyelse i svensk skola och skolforskning, edited by S. Selander. Forskning i fokus nr 12, 37–54. Stockholm: Myndigheten för skolutveckling Blackmore, J., D. Bateman, J. Loughlin, J. O’Mara, and G. Aranda. (2011). Research into the Connections Between Built Learning Spaces and Student Learning Outcomes: A Literature Review. Melbourne: State of Victoria (Department of Education and Early Childhood Development). Grannäs, J., & Stavem, S. M. (2021). Transitions through remodelling teaching and learning environments. Education Inquiry, 12(3), 266–281. doi:10.1080/20004508.2020.1856564 Krupinska, J. (2022). Skolarkitektur – formar den oss? Stockholm: Appell förlag. Wood, A. 2020. Built Policy: School-Building and Architecture as Policy Instrument. Journal of Education Policy 35,(4): 465–484. https://doi.org/10.1080/02680939.2019.1578901