This paper presents a comparative analysis of the temporal and spatial boundaries on teachers’ and pupils’ activities found in a number of classrooms in Germany and Sweden. The study focuses on two central research questions: how pupils and teachers and their actions are organized and controlled (1) inside and outside the classroom (2) with respect to the time-table, lesson activities, the use of time, and examinations.

Teaching and learning in schools are defined by the space and time in which they occur. According to Niklas Luhmann, successful educational communication depends more strongly on when and where it happens than other types of communication. Consequently, surveying and structuring time and space are essential aspects of teaching and learning. However, the use of space and time in teaching varies between countries, epochs or pedagogies. The spatial boundaries in a school context are closely related to the classroom, while the temporal boundaries are defined by the lessons timetable and structure of activities. Spatial and temporal structuring and control of people and their activities are assumed to be integrated principles in modern institutions such as schools and classrooms. This assumption is founded in the theoretical descriptions of disciplinary order presented in Michel Foucault’s (1977) book Discipline and Punish. Taking Foucault’s disciplinary order as a theoretical starting point allows spatial and temporal organization to be considered in relation to one-another.

Discipline and Punish is a multifaceted piece of intellectual work. One facet is the abstract, typified, description of the fundamental mechanisms that define a disciplinary organization, derived from the historical development of modern institutions such as hospitals, armies, schools and ultimately prisons. It encompasses techniques for organizing and controlling individuals and their actions using aspects of space and time. Both the spatial and the temporal dimensions are divided into various subcategories, that subsume different ways of how space and time can work as organizing principles. For example, the spatial and temporal organization in hospitals differs from how life in barracks is organized, even thought the same abstract principles can be applied to describe them. This dimension in Foucault’s descriptions of the different disciplinary techniques allows them to be used as comparative dimensions that can be utilized for data analysis.

The two central aspects for organizing individuals and their actions in relation to time and space found in Discipline and Punish and used for data analysis purposes in this study are (1) “The art of distributions” (Foucault, 1977, p. 141), (2) “The control of activity” (Foucault, 1977, p. 149) and (3) “The examination” (Foucault, 1977, p. 184). Translated into an everyday language this covers spatial aspects of (1) The classroom, temporal aspects of (2) The lesson and (3) Exams and tests.

References to “Germany” in educational contexts often produce confused reactions because each state of the German federal republic has its own school system, many of which differ in important ways. However, on an institutional and policy level, the states’ school systems are more similar to one-another than they are to the Swedish school system. Moreover, the institutional differences between the states seem to have relatively little impact on classroom life. The German research literature consulted during this study does not problematize differences between the states’ school systems. Therefore, this work compares Sweden and Germany rather than Sweden and Bavaria (the German state in which the empirical studies were conducted).

Classroom observations were conducted by monitoring the classrooms of six teachers from the German federal state of Bavaria and Sweden for a week each during 2011 and 2012, resulting in about 67 hours of classroom observations, which were separated into 1264 short ‘courses of action’, or ‘scenes’, for analysis. Two of the German teachers worked at a college-prep high school; and two female teachers worked with fifth and sixth graders at a middle school. The teachers observed in Sweden were a male teacher of social studies, history and religious education and a female teacher of mathematics and natural sciences for grades 6-9. The aim was to create a representation of the observed reality in which the members of the fields would recognize themselves. In that sense, the method built on ethnographic methods. The field studies focused broadly on lessons and life in the classrooms. The Foucault-derived analytical categories of space and time were only applied during the analysis; they were not brought up in the field. The introduction of these elaborate descriptions of the interrelations between time and space for the purposes of analysis and comparison was the second strategy for addressing possible bias in the empirical data, strengthening the validity of the reported results. The data were analysed using the model for constructing empirically-based ideal types described by Kelle and Kluge (2010) which is built on the concept of the ideal type, as suggested by Max Weber and elaborated by Alfred Schütz (1960). This model allows to compress a broad empirical material – in this case more than 1200 units of analysis – into a concise, yet comprehensive result.

In summary, two types of use of space and time in the classroom have derived from this study. On the one hand the classrooms from Germany appeared to be enclosed both in a spatial and temporal sense, with clear cut boundaries between the outside and the inside of the classroom. Additionally, the German lessons involved a narrow repertoire of activities that recurred in a similar order. Meanwhile, the observed Swedish classrooms were more open to the outside and flexible on the inside. Moreover, there was more variation between lessons in Sweden, which consisted of an array of possible activities occurring at different occasions during individual lessons. Consequently, the Swedish teachers had to spend a lot of lesson time on presenting and planning the day’s topics with the pupils.

Foucault, M. (1977). Discipline and Punish - The Birth of the Prison. New York: Vintage Books. Kelle, U., & Kluge, S. (2010). Vom Einzelfall zum Typus : Fallvergleich und Fallkontrastierung in der qualitativen Sozialforschung. Wiesbaden: VS, Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften. Schütz, A. (1960). Der sinnhafte Aufbau der sozialen Welt - eine Einleitung in die verstehende Soziologie. Wien: Springer.