In light of global challenges like climate change it is now argued in policy that there is a need for educational interventions to support students to understand and be able to act on sustainability issues. Open schooling is such a policy innovation that aligns with SDG 4 Target 7 to foster students’ relations with sustainability questions in the local environment to develop skills and competencies to create new visions of the future through action (UNESCO, 2017). Open schooling contains an explicit ambition to identify, investigate and act on sustainability problems in the local community. (Van Poeck, et al., 2021a) 

The research on open schooling is limited to studies that look at different teaching and learning approaches that could be included as part of ‘open schooling’ (Okada et al., 2020) Few studies look at the challenges that teachers and students face while implementing open schooling as it causes disturbance in their everyday habits of teaching and learning. Van Poeck et al. (2021b) identified disturbances in teaching habits for example, difficulties to design lessons starting from a sustainability challenge which relates to the disturbed habit of using the curriculum as a driver for lesson planning and, difficulties to plan lessons that take students along in an authentic quest for solutions which is related to the disturbed habit of teaching as lecturing. This paper follows up on previous work on the disturbances in teaching habits with the aim to identify challenges (disturbance in habits) as well as the affordances that students face in their everyday practice while doing school work.  Here we draw on an investigation from one Swedish school done within a four-year research project called ‘Open schooling for sustainable cities and communities. The investigation should be perceived as an explorative case-study.

The theoretical framework underpinning this study is a transactional learning theory (Östman et al. 2019a) based on the pragmatist work of John Dewey (1916). According to this theory we act without reflecting in our everyday lives, in and through our habits. We start to reflect when our habits are disturbed, and do not function in a specific situation creating a problematic situation (Dewey, 1929) which needs attention (cognitively and/or bodily) if we are to continue with the activity we were involved in. We then engage in an “inquiry” which involves experimentations making the problematic situation more intelligible. An inquiry process can be short but can also require considerable time and energy. It can involve acquisition of new knowledge, skills, values, identities, etc. and can result in an enrichment or transformation of a habit or even the start of a new habit.  Also highlighted in this theory is the bodily felt experiences (joy, excitement, etc.) that occur when the inquiry has succeeded. Dewey (1934) describe these experiences as aesthetical experiences of fulfillment and if they are strong the whole process from disturbance to fulfillment is remembered as “an experience”. Such experiences that stand out in the flow of experiences can be a crucial starting point for development of interests and attitudes (Dewey, 1934).

The empirical questions that guide our study are:

1. What problematic situations do students face while doing open schooling projects? 
2. Which habits of students, used in everyday school work, are disturbed in relation to the problematic situations identified?
3. Which, if any, positive experiences did the students have and which activities were they connected to?

We present the results from this explorative case study in one Swedish secondary school (students in their first year at the Social Science program, 16-17 years old). Teachers in a teacher team took part in five workshops, run by a team of facilitators with backgrounds as educational researchers, to plan for open schooling projects. Occasionally during the following semester, the students worked in groups on diverse issues, e.g. recycling of clothes, inter-generational dialogue on SDGs and gender issues, food waste, plastic, paper use, and waste/plastic collection and segregation. In this study we report on the students´ views of working with different open schooling projects. The data was collected in a survey with questions on for example what was new/different/hard in this way of working, what the students had learnt and if and in what way they had changed their way of thinking about sustainability issues. Nine groups, with a secretary in each group, answered the questionnaires digitally. Survey responses were entered as quotes into an excel sheet along with the questions. The analysis involved reading and tagging responses in which problematic situations became visible as a ‘gap’ (Wickman & Östman, 2002) expressed as a need, frustration, a challenge. Along with this we also tagged responses that students reflected as positive experiences primarily expressing insight, realization, motivation, etc. All problematic situations were noted down separately, grouped into categories representing similar gaps and then related to disturbances of specific habits that students use in everyday school work. These disturbances impeded the flow of these activities in some way.

The analysis shows that the students encountered problematic situations in relation to the open-endedness of the project especially with the fact that neither them or their teachers knew when the projects would end, given the limited time allotted to do such activities in the academic calendar and their limited exposure to working in open-ended activities with no definite endings. This is a departure from their habits of working on time-bound projects planned and executed during fixed times in the academic calendar. In relation to this uncertainty they also advised future students to be ‘structured’, ‘set goals’, ‘plan in advance’. This is a departure from habits of planning in structured projects versus outcomes in real world issues that cannot be ‘planned’ and requires one to be flexible. While students appreciated connecting with people and extending their learning to other sources of knowledge than the textbook and classroom, at the same time they seem to find it challenging to establish and maintain relations with people outside the school for project outcomes. This relates to a disturbance of their previous habits in projects where their actions were not dependent on other peoples’ actions, for example writing essays or doing group work within the classroom. By shining a spotlight on problematic situations that students’ face in open schooling practices, the study contributes with knowledge about the challenges students face and the disturbances to their everyday practices in school. In the paper we will discuss how this knowledge can help teachers to be conscious mentors to students’ in open schooling activities. We hope that this will paper will fuel a discussion about how to support teachers that implement open schooling.

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