After WW2 a comprehensive, secular, and democratic school of the welfare state replaced the exiting segregated and religious school system. While the political debate and legislative process are documented, next to nothing is known about the emergence of ‘promising spaces’, where edutopian ideas about the school of tomorrow not only served as guidelines, but were generated, negotiated, and transformed in the daily practices of moving schools beyond existing norms and conditions. Framed by neo-materialist thinking and affective methodologies, we want to study the school reforms introduced 1945-1975 from the perspective of the promising spaces of teacher training, school experiments, school architecture and independent small schools. We aim 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.
