Volume 1, No.2, June 2010

Education Inquiry is a new international online, peer-reviewed journal with free access in the field of Educational Sciences and Teacher Education. It is published by the Umeå School of Education, Umeå University, Sweden and is issued four times per year (March, June, September, December). Education Inquiry can be downloaded in full extent as well as selected articles.

Per-Olof Erixon

Editorial

This issue of Education Inquiry contains four articles. In “Spaces of social inclusion and exclusion. A spatial approach to education restructuring and identity in Sweden”, Joakim Lindgren takes as his point of departure the decentralised Swedish school system that has become ever more directed at the construction of self-governing and responsible pedagogical identities that are supposed to make integration and participation possible. Drawing on the work of the geographer Edward W. Soja, he acknowledges how material and symbolic spatialisation intersects with the local production of included and excluded identities in the context of restructuring education. The article is based on a study in two areas of a segregated Swedish city, one disadvantaged and the other advantaged. Lindgren uses a wide range of data such as policy documents, questionnaire data, longitudinal statistics, interviews with local politicians, school actors and former students. The findings show that former students from the disadvantaged area were more often excluded from further education and dependent on social welfare to a higher extent. Moreover, they faced low expectations and were simultaneously excluded from new educational processes that explicitly aim at social inclusion. Lindgren discusses how ethical ideals of decentralisation and participation, and the evaluation of such policies in terms of access to further education and work, conceal the local production of excluded identities. This production, he argues, is based on an amalgamation of material conditions and spatial representations.

In his article “Student Participation and School Success. The relationship between participation, grades and bullying among 9th grade students in Sweden”, Björn Ahlström finds his starting point in the Swedish school law and curriculum which states that students are to be participative in their work and that they should work in a participative manner. The pedagogical idea is that influence and participation have multiple benefits for students’ development. The article examines the relationship between student participation and school success. By using a theoretically based participation index, eight schools were chosen for closer examination. Success was measured by school grades and the level of perceived bullying among students. Student participation seems to have beneficial effects on students’ academic and social development. In schools with a higher level of student participation, the grades were higher and the level of perceived bullying among the students was lower than schools with a smaller level of participation.

In “Proposed Enhancement of Bronfenbrenner’s Development Ecology Model”, Jonas Christensen deals with how academic disciplines are constituted and claims that the related professional developments must be viewed within their wider social, political and economic frameworks. When studying the organisation, transformation and spheres of influence of professions, the Development Ecology model, he argues, provides a tool for understanding the encounter among societal, organisational and individual dimensions, a continual meeting point where phenomena and actors exist on different levels, including those of the organisation and society at large. However, the theory of development ecology may be questioned for how it looks at the individual’s role in relation to other actors in order to define and understand the forces underlying the professional development and constitution of academic disciplines. Factors relating to both the inside of the individual and social ties between individuals and in relation to global factors need to be discussed.

In Jonas Aspelin’s article, “What really matters is ‘between’. Understanding the focal point of education from an inter-human perspective”, the focal point of education is simultaneously defined as the place where the most important educational activity is taking place, and the place where the main interest of educational theory (and educational practice) should be located. Aspelin discusses the idea that the focal point is located somewhere between the teacher and the student. This idea is introduced by references to Gert Biesta’s inter-subjective theory. The article discusses Martin Buber’s contribution to understanding the focal point of education. Buber contributes by emphasising “the interhuman” as a primary dimension in relation to “the social”. From Buber’s perspective, what really matters in education exists in an ontological and relational event. In the last section of the article it is suggested that exploration of the focal point should not stick to just one form of relationship. The interhuman event is, taken by itself, supposed to be primary, yet the focal point cannot be fully understood without a penetrative picture of its social context.