In a European educational context where “life in schools” (e.g. MacLaren, 1989) is to a large extent dominated by a language of metrics and measurement, the everyday gestures and ordinary things that teachers do in order to create a safe and stimulating educational situation for their students often goes unnoticed and is given little attention and value. In order to respond to this negligence, research on schools culture seeks to offer teachers and educators a scientifically based language for “the pedagogical housekeeping” (e.g. Landahl, 2006) that needs to be in place for knowledge and formation to happen (e.g. Prosser, 1999; Deal & Peterson, 2016; Solvason, 2005). However, within this research, the notion of “school culture” seems either too broad or too vague for capturing the complexity of school life. For example, the notion of “school culture” is often used interchangeably to the notions of “school climate” and “school ethos” (Glover & Coleman, 2005), rendering invisible and unintelligible the many layers and dimension of the work that teachers do.

Against this background, the overall aim of this paper is to offer a conceptual analysis of the notion of school culture for educational, policy, research and practice. More precisely, the purpose is to unfold the notion of school culture in a three-folded gesture of a) mapping, b) unpacking and c) reconstructing. What it aims at showing is that school culture is a concept that comprises an abundance of metaphors not just relating to culture but also to climate and ethos.

In the first step, we are mapping the research field of school culture, looking particularly at where it is addressed and how it is being discussed within both educational research and educational policy and practice. It will be shown that school culture as a concept oscillates between metrics and mystery, rendering it often too measurable and technical or too mysterious and vague (Deal & Peterson, 2016). In the second step we are unpacking school culture (as the life of schools; How is life of schools liveable/habitual?), distinguishing it from school climate (as life in schools; How is life in schools organised and materialised?) and school ethos (as the meaning of school; What makes the school worth attending to?). In the third step we are reconstructing school culture by offering an educational and more precise language for addressing the above-mentioned “pedagogical housekeeping” of teachers. By way of conclusion we sum up our argument and return to the main contributions of the paper.

The significance of this theoretical work becomes evident in a time when the institution of the school in many parts of the West all the more seems to be regarded as a natural phenomenon, that is, as a place that can be taken for granted or as a space that has always existed and can be controlled and mastered (Biesta 2019; Masschelein & Simons, 2013). What seems to have been cast into oblivion, in others words, is that the school is a living, human invention prone to change which is why this paper begins in the idea that what we call ‘school’ is a cultural phenomenon. The core of our proposal is that if school culture is to have something to offer as an antidote to the naturalisation of the school, all three dimensions – school culture, school climate and school ethos – need to be acknowledged in analysing the complexity of school life. 

The method used in this paper is a philosophical argument that unfolds in three parts (see above).

The results show that there is a necessary and yet unexplored interplay to be considered in pedagogical practice and research between the culture (form), climate (life), and ethos (spirit) of schools. This becomes important not least in a Europe that either calls for more evidence-based research and focus on controlling and predicting desired results (the metrics of school culture), or assumes that the natural and organic life in school is best left in peace (the mystery of school culture). Against this, the paper resists an approach to research on school culture that is either too metrified or to mystified and if offers a more precise and yet nuanced way of talking about the micro-practices of the school where culture, ethos and climate signify different but interrelated dimensions.

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