Children’s texts as emotional expression or political process? The educational space of experimental education projects and their data collection as historical sources in a policy history perspective

Children’s texts as emotional expression or political process? The educational space of experimental education projects and their data collection as historical sources in a policy history perspectiveAn impending challenge for historians active in education research these years seems to be how to methodologically approach qualitative data material, e.g. interviews, surveys and observations collected ‘back in time’, in the present moment. During the 20th century an increasing amount of data was collected in connection with engineering of the modern states (Latham 2000; Hansen & Jespersen 2008). In case of the state education system such data, especially from the 1960s onwards in the Nordic welfare states, has been produced in experimental educational projects, meaning that data was either accumulated as documentation of the pedagogical experiments that took place or as a knowledge base paving the way for designing pedagogical experiments, or both. Also, such projects sought to improve – whether by informing or challenging – the existing educational policy (Buchardt 2012). This paper will discuss the methodological challenges that working with such a material raises for the historian, based on the case of an empirically Swedish focused research project “The Child and Curriculum. Existential Questions and Educational Responses”. The project is interdisciplinary within the educational research field combining pedagogical ethnography, philosophy of education, curriculum studies and the history of education. The aim is “to generate new knowledge on children’s existential questions as educational concerns, both as expressions of their worldviews and as questions seeking knowledge that are calling for educational responses”. The data types are related in a complex way: 1) a newly generated data material is compared to 2) archival data material with a focus on children’s expressions of their “existential questions” on the one hand. On the other hand the educational responses to this are studied through 3) written curricula, didactical approaches that developed, and teacher interviews on their practices.The archival data material – the main concern of this paper – stems from the six studies in southern and central Sweden and the Stockholm region, conducted by the educational philosopher Sven Hartman et al. 1973 to 2003 and consists of e.g. children’s texts produced as part of qualitative data collection. On the one hand this type of material is to be compared with the newly produced data as an expression of children’s worldviews, meaning interpreted in a synchronic perspective as a challenge to present-day curriculum policies. On the other hand such a comparison is only possible if historical contextualization and analysis take place; meaning a diachronic perspective. In a curriculum- and policy historical perspective, such a diachronic perspective means that the historical data collections and the experimental projects they formed part of are however themselves to be understood as curriculum; as part of society’s selection of knowledge and experience for upbringing, including the processes that selectively institutionalize relevant experience into curriculum policy (Lundgren 1980; Hofstetter & Schneuwly 2002). The children’s texts should thus also be understood as curriculum political processes; not as pure emotional expressions of their inner core, but rather as a social demand for it (Bernstein 1990; Popkewitz 2016; Horlacher 2016). The paper explores and discusses how to theoretically conceptualize and understand this tension. Sub-theme: Educational places: memories, sensory and emotional experiences, interpretations.
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