The first substudy, co-ordinated by Johan Samuelsson, with Nikolaj Elf and Héctor Pérez Prieto as co-researchers is a historical analysis of how national school reforms and policies concerning basic education have been enacted in the local community and at the school sites. Through studies of policy texts and archive material from the four local communities, the focus is on local documents, and how pedagogical ideas and ideals have been represented in the physical spaces of the school buildings. Through a reflecting interpretative approach, this substudy will contribute to the analysis of how digital, physical and material spaces in schools are related. We will also use the interview data in substudy 2 to gather information of previous students' experiences of their schools as a physical meeting place, in line with how previous history of education studies have combined micro studies of schools, including visits and interviews, with document analysis.
Contact: johan.samuelsson@kau.se
The second substudy, co-ordinated by Tuuli From, and with Stig-Börje Asplund and Héctor Pérez Prieto as co-researchers will focus on inclusion and democratization with a life history approach. Here, the focus is on the students of the 1970’s and their narratives about local school experiences as they look back on their lives and talk about their memories and experiences in a creative process of narrative reflection, described as hindsight. Informants who previously attended the schools will be recruited for the interviews and asked to guide us in finding additional informants based on their social networks and their local knowledge. The interviews will include elements of walk-along interviews where informants are encouraged to interact with objects and photos 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.
Contact: tuuli.from@helsinki.fi
The third substudy, co-ordinated by Marie Nilsberth, and with Petteri Laihonen, Fredrik Rusk, Fritjof Sahlström and Jens Jørgen Hansen as substudy researchers focuses on the students and teachers that presently attend the schools with a focus on how physical and digital school spaces provide opportunities for developing relations constituted in social interaction. In this substudy, we try out methods for creating engagement from the perspective of citizen science through cooperation with one school-class and their teachers at each site, involving the students in investigations about the role of digital technologies in their everyday social lives. We make video-ethnographic recordings in the classroom, including self-controlled screen-recordings of screen-mediated social interaction on laptops and phones. In the analysis, we apply ethnomethodological approaches of conversation analysis, adding the concept of socio-material bricolage to investigate how students in interaction make use of available social, material and technological resources in personal relations and networks, situated on a continuum of physical and digital spaces.
Contact: marie.nilsberth@kau.se