Order and disorder have both been essential concepts of schooling throughout history (e.g. Biesta, 2021; Lanas & Brunila, 2019, Price, 2011). Order remains an underlying objective in both formal and informal schooling practices: students are arranged and expected to behave orderly, schooldays and facilities of school create particular order, the aim of schooling is to create some order in the society. Order is visible through acts, national and transnational documents, rooted practices (such as waiting for a turn, queuing and following a class schedule) and architectural solutions of physical school building.

In this paper, I focus on my PhD study’s first research question, how order and disorder are understood in school institutions. I approach order and disorder as counterparts that together exist in the everyday practices of schooling and education. I understand practices to be built on institutional, political, physical but also cultural and social conventions rooted in schooling (e.g. Biesta, 2021; Petersen & Millei, 2016). Everyday life of a school composes of informal and formal school culture where different power relations and ways of knowing are constructed. In formal school, knowledge is percieved to be teacher-led, based on guidelines (national curriculum, law, international guidelines) and often more restrained than the intense and fast-paced nature of informal schools (Lanas & Brunila, 2019; McLaren, 1993). The formal side of school culture and pedagogical thinking have been studied extensively in the educational sciences, yet there is a gap in the international and Finnish research literature on the informal side of school and its social orders in educational context (e.g. Kiilakoski & Lanas, 2022; Juva, 2019; Paju, 2011). To address this gap, I will focus on both the formal and informal side of primary school in analysing the existing ethnographic data.  

In educational practices and implementations, there is a significant interest on developing models, interventions and programs (e.g. Blueprints for Healthy Youth Development register) on how to dismantle the so-called problem behaviour of students. To continue, these interventions are used to create and maintain a particular type of order in classrooms as well as in individual students (see for example Mertanen, Vainio, Brunila, 2021; Petersen & Millei, 2016). Yet, analyses on disorder have remained ambiguous. Hence, since the dominant discourse and gaze on disorder are mainly focused on how to diminish disorder instead of conceptualising what it comprehends, it is relevant to view the counterarguments and ask for a wider perspective on order and disorder (see for example Lanas & Brunila, 2019; MacLure, Jones, Holmes & McRae, 2011). As students, teachers and other everyday actors of school do not exist in a vacuum but are surrounded by school institutions and society that also create the idea of order and disorder (Dewey, 1957). 

By looking at disorder in school institutions and society, we can see hierarchical power relations that stem from the idea of ideal order of schooling and education (Foucault, 1984). This is important because only after acknowledging schooling practices to be entangled in and stemming from surrounding society, it becomes possible to challenge the individual-oriented idea of order and rethink it as something wider (see for example Mertanen et al. 2021; Wright & McLeod, 2015).  

This study is the first part of my PhD study and is based on my master’s thesis. In this paper, I combine theoretical, philosophical and empirical work to provide a wider understanding on disorder and order in school institutions. The existing research data consists of 188 pages of ethnographic field notes and open conversations produced in 8/2020-10/2020 in a primary school in the Helsinki area, Finland. The informants were primary school students aged 7-10 years, classroom teachers and school assistants. Additionally, I will produce another setting of ethnographic data during the spring 2023. Theoretically this paper stems from Foucauldian (1984) theories on power, Biesta’s (2021) understanding of the self-value of education and school and Lanas’ et al (2020; 2019) theorising of the discursive structures of so-called problem behaviour and the critical gaze towards the problem-centered view on childhood and adolescence. The methodological background of the study lies in discursive approach and Smith’s (2005; 1990) institutional ethnography. Smith’s institutional ethnography (IE) expands from everyday and local to wider temporal and spatial phenomena. I will utilize Smith’s ideas on knowledge and knowing as a political event.

Based on my preliminary findings and previous research on order, I expect to demonstrate that order and disorder are a power relation related to differences, such as power to act as a primary subject, to demonstrate and designate order, and classify into different hierarchical categories (gender, body orders, social class, origin). In the analysis of my data, I expect to overcome the practices and implementations that target and focus mainly on the individual. Furthermore, I will examine the questions of what the value of order is, what is the purpose of maintaining order, and what is beyond order. Additionally, I propose that dominant power relations in primary school renew the position of order that maintains the hierarchical idea of formal school’s order as primary and informal school’s order as secondary. These expected results have a notable novelty value to international scientific discussion in the field of education by increasing the theoretical understanding between power relations and disorder in primary school. Also, the aim is to raise interest and critical discussion on how the self-evident position of order could be viewed in education.

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