Pedagogical activities in schools are necessarily always directed at the individual pupil on the one hand and the school class as a group on the other. This creates a tension that teachers need to manage. The growing diversity of the pupils exacerbates this tension, as diversity increases, but the demand for community and shared commitment cannot be completely suspended. For all the tendencies towards individualisation as the preferred response to growing diversity, schools cannot avoid creating community. This is not only the task of the school, but also necessary if the activities of the pupils as a group are not to be in permanent conflict with each other.

Diversity, individuality and community are thus in conflict with each other in the classroom. In recent years, with the 'opening up of teaching' for a different way of dealing with diversity, practices have increasingly been implemented which can be described as contratualism (Brown et al., 1996). This refers to the tendency for pupils and teachers to enter into contracts.

Contracts have many functions. Contracts can be used to coordinate the actions of the signatories They can create a binding obligation to perform expected behaviours. They establish and secure a ‘norm-oriented’ basic order of the social. Finally, contracts legitimise the actions of their signatories by providing a reliable basis for actions (Nagel 1991).

In school classrooms, learning contracts with pupils are on the one hand orientated towards measuring pupils performance in specific fields (Greenwood & McCabe, 2008; Coy, 2014). On the other hand, regulatory approaches to behaviour, such as the ‘time-out room’ – where pupils are sent when they ‘disturb the class’, and where they must complete a contract to return to class participation – are based on contractual assumptions (Adamson et al., 2019). Such pedagogical practices follow the principle of negotiating rather than commanding. Contracts should govern social interaction, create community and respect the individuality of the pupils. But they also provide an opportunity to address these rules, norms and values pedagogically. A common basis for behaviour is to be practised and established through contracts (Budde et al. 2021).

On the one hand, contractual pedagogy is welcomed in the context of democratising reforms that seek to consider the agency and self-control of individual children (Sant 2019). It is also seen as contributing to an inclusive approach to diversity. On the other hand, the power effects inherent in this instrument need to be questioned. It is assumed that contractualism is intertwined with power effects that can be understood as both self-governmental and external regulation (Apple 2011). Contractualism is criticised for establishing a pedagogical order based on homogenising notions of the school as an institution. Against this background, the article asks what power effects are produced by contractualism as a strategy for dealing with diversity in school character education?

To this end, a practice-theoretical perspective is used, which essentially focuses on the activities of the actors involved. The practice-theoretical based approach assumes that human activities are based on practices which are expressions of social orders. Practices are closely linked to material arrangements such as humans, artifacts, organisms and things (Schatzki, 2005, 476 f.). The paper follows the idea of a "flat ontology", as proposed by Schatzki (2016), for example, which locates social phenomena on a single level of reality. With regard to practice theory, the focus of analysis is on practice-arrangement-bundles. These practice-arrangement-bundles – based on an interweaving of practices, discourses, artefacts and subjectivation- form larger constellations (Schatzki 2002).

The research question is addressed using the example of the formulation of class rules. The material comes from a larger ethnographic study that we have been conducting over the past few years on the topic of “Social Learning and Character Education in Schools” (Budde & Weuster 2017). The data (participant observation, interviews, artefacts) focus on pedagogical practices in schools in Germany (Budde & Eckermann 2022). The aim of the paper is to identify the actions that make up contractualism, which also means to identify the net of overlapping and interacting practice-arrangement bundles. The research design is based on the concept of an ‘ethnographic collage’ (Richter & Friebertshäuser 2012), which focuses on collecting and evaluating data with a multimethod approach on different activities in the context of contractualism in schools. The main interest of ethnography are the implicit, unconscious activities and routines. Participatory observation was used in order to analyse the practices of contractual pedagogy. Participatory observation is based on the assumption that the researcher can learn about the discursive and physical practices that constitute social orders by observing and participating in the natural enviroment of the people under study (Troman et al. 2005). Observations are recorded in the form of field notes and protocols and can then be transformed into analysable data (Emmerson et al. 1995). Document analysis complements the analysis of pupils’ and teachers’ practices and views in order to analyse the material basis of pedagogical contracts. The specific basis of the analysis is a participant observation of a workshop run with 8th grade pupils (around 14 years old) in a comprehensive school in northern Germany. The class takes part in an out-of-school workshop running over several days, which is facilitated by two pedagogues from an external organisation. The class teacher is also present. The analysis is based on grounded theory methodology (Strauss & Corbin 1996) to create core categories. This is done by coding of relevant passages and then systematising on the basis of maximum and minimum contrasts of the codes formed in the process.

In summary, this paper aims to show, that the effects of power are visible. Negotiations of rules are not ‘free’ or orientated towards the diversity of pupils, but they prefigure a behavioural contract that is structured above all in the school. Community in pedagogical practices on the basis of contracts appeals to – and at the same time creates – individually responsible learners under a homogeneous norm. It shows neither ‘external regulation nor self-regulation’ or ‘governmental power ideology versus progressive education’, but both as elements of a subjectivising constellation (Youdell 2006), a way of practising the relationality between external and self-regulation. In this sense, the empirical effects of contractualism reconstructed in the proposed paper are primarily aimed at restoring the institutional order. The data clearly demonstrate normalising, homogenising behavioural effects that maintain pre-existing power relations. Contractual pedagogy’s encouragement of participation is severely constrained by this implicitly normative orientation towards an order of established patterns of behaviour – which ultimately remains undisturbed. When we consider the diversity of pupils, contractualism cannot be said to represent a participatory democratic approach to educational that might be open for innovative and critical reflection. Rather than opening a field for learning, this process becomes an end in itself. From a practice theory perspective, contractualism can be seen as a cohesive constellation within a flat ontology that works through the relationality between subjective and communal modes of address.

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