Finnish comprehensive school classroom spaces are subject to heightened political and public attention. Populational, economic and pedagogic pressures have led to abandoning or renovating old schools, and building new ones. New spatial arrangements in schools are designed to support ‘new pedagogies’, flexible uses of physical spaces and digital technology, founded on the latest scientific knowledge on learning.
Most current research on classroom spaces in Finland is tightly tied to pilot -type design studies focusing on short term effects on school achievement and pupil satisfaction. It does not account for the political, epistemic, and institutional frameworks of classroom spaces. In contrast, TopRef project brings these frameworks to the fore and captures them by introducing and developing the concept of topological reflexivity. Using discourse analytic and observation methods we study the policy and scientific discourses of Finnish classroom spaces in the comprehensive school era and their effects on schools. TopRef will target three interlocking aims:
1) Political nature of classroom spaces: Spaces are tied to changing national and international policy trends in imagining relationships between education and society. These are mapped through analyzing policy literature on learning spaces.
2) Scientific knowledges delimiting design and implementation: We collect Finnish scientific articles and monographs on new learning environments and school architecture and study how they characterize the design of classroom spaces and learning therein.
3) Applications, diversions and resistance: drawing on interview data of local government administrators, principals, teachers and pupils, as well as observations of instruction in classroom spaces, we analyze how policy and scientific discourses are given meaning and put to use.
TopRef consists of scholars familiar with Finnish policymaking and everyday school cultures. To secure scientific impact, the team harbors state-of-the art methodological and theoretical expertise on discourse analytic and observation approaches, which is further supported by a carefully selected Advisory Board of scholars in the field of education policy studies, architecture, history of education, and science and technology studies. TopRef secures societal impact in the form of a policy brief of research results and recommendations for realistic incentives of classroom space development.
Publications:
Saari, A. & Decuypere, M. (2024). Governing by prototype and proto-practice: Topological configurations of Future Classroom Labs. Journal of Education Policy. https://doi.org/10.1080/02680939.2024.2304567
Saari, A. (2022). Topologies of desire: Fantasies and their symptoms in educational policy futures. European Educational Research Journal, 21(6), 883-899.https://doi.org/10.1177/1474904120988389
POISED 