Organisers and project participants: Professor Ning de Coninck-Smith, Associate professor Lisa Rosén Rasmussen, PhD student Kamilla Ane Petersen & Post.Doc. Pernille Svare Nygaard – Danish School of Education (DPU), Aarhus University

Invited speakers: Professor Joakim Landahl, Stockholm University, and Professor Johan Samuelsson and Associate professor Fredrik Krohn Andersson, Karlstad University.

Date: 27^rd of October 2026 

Time: 8.30-11.00 am (CET/CEST)

Zoom-link:

https://aarhusuniversity.zoom.us/j/65619679910?pwd=9jJlp5n4efs8ydxmKBVPUfJJnea5Za.1

With a focus on the role of utopian (and dystopian) imaginaries and articulations (Cooper 2013), this dialogue seeks to explore understandings of school reform as complex and lengthy everyday processes rather than merely a matter of political decision-making. By asking what constitutes a reform and what significance reforms have for school development, and by drawing on notions of networks, entanglements, and assemblages to understand how reforms help shape the world (Nespor 2002; Staunæs et al. 2019), the dialogue aims to grasp, and theorize, the complexity and multifaceted character of school reform and transformation.

The dialogue will begin with two short presentations. Joakim Landahl from Stockholm University, Sweden, will, under the heading “Parents Between Voice and Exit: Utopian and Dystopian Accounts of Schooling and the Quest for Parental Involvement in Schools,” talk about how a utopia always involves its own dystopia. Landahl will focus on Swedish school reforms of the 1990s, showing how the reconceptualization of parental involvement in schools entailed competing visions of democratizing schooling, rooted in different diagnoses of the shortcomings of existing arrangements. Following this, Johan Samuelsson and Fredrik Krohn Andersson from Karlstad University, Sweden, will present how the construction of new, modern school buildings in post-war Sweden came to be regarded as one of the central means of realizing the school, and thereby the democratic citizen, of the future. The presentation will focus on the utopian dimensions of the production of knowledge for future school buildings through the collaborations between the state, private companies, architects, teachers, and pupils. In the second part of the dialogue, researchers from the project Edutopias: Reforms of Everyday School Practices: Denmark, 1945–1975, based at Aarhus University, will present and discuss a number of examples of everyday utopian imaginaries and articulations entangled with the Danish school reform of 1975.

We invite scholars and other interested participants to join this online seminar, with the aim of sharing and discuss knowledge on school experiments and progressive education. If you have any questions about the digital dialogue, or if you encounter any technical difficulties with the Zoom link on the day of the event, please get in touch with Lisa Rosén Rasmussen (lisa@edu.au.dk).

This is the last digital dialogue in a series of four. The dialogues are organised as part of the research project EDUTOPIAS based at Aarhus University, Denmark. In this research project Ning de Coninck-Smith, Lisa Rosén Rasmussen, Pernille Svare Nygaard, and Kamilla Ane Petersen study the Danish school reforms introduced 1945-1975 from the perspective of the promising spaces of teacher training, school experiments, school architecture and independent small schools. The aim is to develop a new understanding of reforms as complex and conflicting everyday processes, which not only address the curriculum or school structure, but also change the affective, spatial, and embodied relations between teachers, parents, and students.

GUEST SPEAKERS FULL ABSTRACTS AND BIOS

Joakim Landahl

Abstract: Parents between voice and exit: utopian and dystopian accounts of schooling and the quest for parental involvement in schools. Every utopia involves its own dystopia, either in the form of its corruption or in the problems it seeks to address (Gordin et al. 2010; Jameson 2005). The reforms examined here illustrate how competing visions of democratizing schooling were rooted in different diagnoses of the shortcomings of existing arrangements and generated unintended consequences of their own. This presentation explores the history of parental involvement in Swedish schools, and zooms in on a period when parental influence was reconceptualized in new ways. I examine the problems that were identified and the solutions that were proposed. The presentation focuses on two distinct ways in which parental influence over schools was reconfigured: one characterized by “exit” and the other by “voice” (Hirschman 1970). On the one hand, the free school reform of the early 1990s led to a proliferation of new schools and expanded opportunities for school choice. This reform exemplifies how parental influence increasingly came to be exercised through exit strategies, allowing parents to shape their children's education by choosing between schools. On the other hand, the proposal to establish local school boards, introduced as a pilot project in 1996, represented a voice strategy by creating new opportunities for parents to participate in school governance. Both reforms were rooted in long-standing dissatisfaction with parents' opportunities to influence schools. Yet while both sought to strengthen parental influence, only the exit strategy gained lasting traction: the number of independent schools grew rapidly, whereas participation in local school boards remained limited. Paradoxically, the two reforms coincided and may together have contributed to the decline of the traditional forms through which parents had previously exercised influence over schools.

References

Gordin, Michael D., Helen Tilley, and Gyan Prakash, eds. (2010). Utopia/Dystopia: Conditions of Historical Possibility. Princeton University Press.

Hirschman, Albert O. (1970). Exit, Voice, and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations, and States. Harvard University Press.

Jameson, Fredric (2005). Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions. Verso.

Bio: Joakim Landahl is a professor of education at the Department of Education, Stockholm University. His current research includes the early history of international assessments, and the relationships between parents and schools. His most recent book is Global Knowledge in the Making: The Rise of International Testing in Education (Palgrave 2026, forthcoming). 

Johan Samuelsson & Fredrik Krohn Andersson

Abstract: Designing Futures: Transnational Knowledge Production, Experimentation, and the Making of Postwar School Buildings in Sweden. In the postwar period, the construction of new, modern school buildings came to be regarded as one of the central means of realizing the school of the future. Within these buildings, the democratic school was to be materialized through classrooms adapted to progressive pedagogy; yet, in practice, the very act of construction itself was perceived as a “utopian task.” Access to building materials, expertise, and knowledge concerning how school buildings should be designed and constructed posed significant challenges (SOU 1948:27).

A key component in the effort to concretize this utopian undertaking was the development of knowledge at the national level. This work included, for example, experimental studies involving pupils, the collection of teachers’ views on classroom design, and the production of plans and illustrations of modern school buildings capable of accommodating modern pedagogical approaches (cf. Samuelsson & Krohn). Extensive transnational exchanges of knowledge also took place. Areas of investigation included how to manage excessive noise, what constituted the optimal classroom temperature for learning, and which materials were most suitable for construction.

This presentation focuses on how the state, in collaboration with private companies, architects, teachers, and pupils, generated knowledge that could enable the realization of future school buildings. We analyse the processes involved in this work, while also highlighting illustrations and architectural drawings of school buildings and classrooms of a near-utopian character, in which the future democratic citizen was to be formed.

Theoretically, the presentation draws on the conception of schools as sites of hope (cf. Ward, 2015; McLeod & Rosén Rasmussen, 2021; Harvey, 2000; Halpin, 2003). It also engages with scholarship concerned with how knowledge is produced, mobilized, and circulates across different contexts (cf. Burke, 2023).

References

Burke, Peter (2023). “Knowledge, the Return of the Actor.” In Knowledge Actors: Revisiting Agency in the History of Knowledge, edited by Johan Östling, David Larsson Heidenblad and Anna Nilsson Hammar, pp.269-278. Nordic Academic Press.

Halpin, David. (2003). Hope and education: the role of the utopian imagination. RoutledgeFalmer

Harvey, David (2000). Spaces of Hope [Elektronisk resurs]. Edinburgh University Press

McLeod, Julie, and Lisa Rosén Rasmussen (2021). “Open-Plan Schooling and Everyday Utopias: Australia and Denmark in the 1970s Oxford Review of Education 47, no. 5, pp. 659–680.

Samuelsson, J., and Fredrik Krohn Andersson (forthcoming). "Building Knowledge about Building Schools. Research, Experiments, Dissemination and Practice in Sweden 1950–1970." In The History of Education as History of Knowledge: Exploring Methods and Sources, edited by Joel Barnes, Jona Garz, Fanny Isensee, Joakim Landahl, Björn Lundberg and Daniel Töpper. Routledge.

SOU 1948:27

Ward, Hugo (2015). Architecture of Academic Innovation: Progressive Pedagogy, Modernist Design & Perkins & Will’s Heathcote Elementary in Post-War America. Columbia University.

Bios: Johan Samuelsson is a Professor of History at Karlstad University. His research focuses on experimental schools and their role in generating knowledge that could support and advance the educational reforms of the twentieth century. He also studies the postwar establishment of comprehensive schooling in the Nordic countries, with a particular focus on school buildings and educational planning. Fredrik Krohn Andersson is Associate Professor of Art History and Cultural Studies at Karlstad University, Sweden. His research is focused on heritagization and commemoration of nuclear power and the Cold war, and modern architecture as social and cultural technology.