Interweaving Peripheries

Fanny Isensee, Lisa Rosén Rasmussen and Josefine Wähler

When we think about our school days, aside from the subjects, teachers and exams, other memories might come to mind that – at first glance – are only peripheral in terms of schooling: spending time in the school library, organising extracurricular activities and clubs, breaks with classmates, packed lunches for field trips, the lockers and sounds in the corridor or the dreaded detention. School memories beyond the presumed “core business of schools” are preserved in pupils’ yearbooks, which capture “meaning-making experiences unlikely to be recorded anywhere else” as “in combination with the student commentary, yearbook pictures capture mundane but important changes in the material culture of schooling and the way it was experienced”.1

This edited volume aims to explore aspects that are often considered peripheral to school and schooling: the lateral lines and liminal spaces, the unnoticed and perhaps overlooked aspects of school as a material, cultural, social and political phenomenon. We do so in ways that frame the peripheries as branches of schools’ quotidian operations, underlining their often intrinsic interconnectedness with more established pedagogical settings and procedures.2 Our argument is that the core tasks of schooling can be considered as situated in the dyadic teacher–pupil relation, but a substantial part of school life transcends this established educational setting. It takes place on the school’s “sidelines” but nonetheless exerts a significant impact on its daily routines. When we think of situations that occur outside of teacher–pupil settings but are still intertwined with schools, a plethora of settings come to mind ranging from traffic education, swimming lessons and the school nurse’s office to murals in the playground, to name a few examples. The peripheral also extends into settings beyond the physical school grounds, for example, field trips to beaches and forests, the architect’s desk, urban traffic or companies in the private industry, as the book’s chapters will show.

In terms of the interconnectedness of the periphery, we tentatively designate school and schooling in terms of a dynamic meshwork3 involving multiple interconnected actors, ideas and contents. Moreover, there may be several centres and various interwoven layers that are constantly moving and changing. In contrast to solid, fixed hierarchical structures, such peripheries are actively constructed through the dynamic and morphing intersection of connected lines and knots – sometimes of loose ends – forming a complex interweaving of participating actors, contents, institutions, ideas, knowledge and practices. The peripheries of school and schooling may in themselves be seen as constantly shifting, morphing and reconfiguring, based on changing conditions and interactions, needs and demands of varying intensity. This invites exploration of how these peripheries can stabilise or challenge existing school structures, representing dynamic processes that go beyond but are also tied to the classroom and subject knowledge.4 By placing the lateral lines and liminal spaces in a peripheral realm while attentive to the ways in which they entangle and even merge with what can be considered schooling’s “core tasks”, the book not only sets out to uncover empirical peripheries in time and space, but also encourages both authors and readers to experiment with, irritate and complicate, and unravel and rethink the understanding of how school is made in the past, present and future. Thus, the historical studies in this anthology, which are simultaneously situated in and stretched out across time and space, provide an opportunity to observe and analyse the specific changes that occur in schools beneath and beyond programme modifications and/or curriculum reforms. Each of these historical studies draws attention to an idea of school that constantly moves and morphs through transformative processes, often driven by external institutions, actors or materialities that are neither solely pedagogical nor immediately apparent.

The studies collected in this volume primarily focus on schooling and are united by their interpretation of school most often viewed as an educational institution,5 whether in the strict sense of a legally defined learning environment or more broadly as an entity characterised by its pedagogical function and resulting strategies. Meanwhile, through the chapters’ concerted efforts to further explore pedagogical peripheries as aspects of school and schooling that may not (yet) be perceived in educational or pedagogical terms, we aim to promote a definition of school as more than just an educational institution or a physical building for the pedagogical ambitions and actions of trained personnel. Through work exploring the peripheral, several chapters can be seen as grappling with something that may challenge the status quo, interrupt routine processes and disturb established – traditional – structures, with consequences for pedagogical approaches and thinking. This can prove to be a highly productive process, blurring or even dissolving the seemingly rigid separation between what are considered the centre and the periphery of school – either temporary or more enduring ascriptions that at times undergo a quite challenging and open-ended negotiation process.

Against this backdrop, the anthology is the result of a truly collective endeavour to explore the periphery of schooling. Emerging from the rich field of educational history, it has unfolded through an entangled and continuously unsettled dialogue involving both theoretical discussions and empirical studies. Attempting to pin down this process within a straightforward structure inevitably conceals the productive messiness of digressions, reiterations and detours. Nevertheless, the structure of this introduction is intended to unravel the knots, tangles and webs, revealing the elements and processes through which we developed a shared understanding and vocabulary of the peripheral – an understanding that emerged through this volume and that structures the sequencing and grouping of the chapters. In the following, we firstly present the significant research literature within the history of education, which provided the foundation for our work. Secondly, we address the concepts that frame but also disturb possible understandings of the peripheral across the chapters and that comprise our shared vocabulary for exploring morphing entanglements. We thirdly provide an overview of the chapters, which are organised into sections titled “Transient Objectives”, “Interweaving Processes” and “Morphing Spaces” and explain how we arrived at these headings. Finally, we introduce the vignette-based approach in the anthology’s closing chapter, “Glimpses of Peripheries: A Collection of Vignettes”, before briefly summarising our aims and the book’s contribution to history of education research.