This symposium presents an ongoing project focusing the ideals and practices of ‘One school for all’ as a core of the Nordic welfare state (cf. Blossing et al, 2014, Frønes et al, 2021; Lundahl, 2016). Internationally, Nordic education systems have been considered to promote educational equality and social inclusion by bringing together pupils from diverse backgrounds. From 1945 to about 1970, the Nordic school model was developed as the solution to the future challenges of its time (Telhaug, Mediås & Aasen, 2006). In a little more than ten years, beginning in Sweden in 1962, followed by Finland in 1968, Norway in 1969, and Denmark in 1975, all of the Nordic countries took the final step from parallel education systems to one, common basic education. Non-tracked common neighborhood Nordic schools became well-known for their ambitions in relation to quality and equality (Lundahl, 2016). In the One school for all model, the aim was to provide Nordic children with not only learning, but also diversity of class, culture, gender, ability, and language. 

Since then, Nordic societies have faced ideological, economical and social changes and also the Nordic education model has lost some of its spark, with widening differences between schools and continued evidence of exclusion (Beach 2018; Thrupp et al. 2023; Lundahl, 2016). The 13-year olds of the 2020’s also come from a different social world than their predecessors. From 2010 onwards, the rapid and massive digitalization has caused on-going changes: increased individualization, altered notions of time, space and place, and the enabling of mobile, ever-present and place-independent social networks (van Dijk, 2012; Livingstone & Sefton-Green, 2016).

Against this background, this project examines how the Nordic basic school as a physical and social space shapes social interaction and learning with a particular interest in the challenges that material and digital re-configurations of sociality bring to the future of One common school for all. The project operates within a multidisciplinary framework – education, history and applied language studies – of analyzing Nordic comprehensive schools as spaces and places constructed in the intersections of their material qualities and social interaction (see Lefebvre 1991; Massey 2005). Through multidisciplinary studies of four Nordic schools we explore their changing role for inclusion and exclusion over a time-span of approximately 50 years, from the 70’s to date, organized in three sub-studies. The substudies address the following research questions:

1. How have educational spaces, physical and digital, been locally enacted in the studied communities and schools during the period 1970 to 2020?

2. How, in retrospect, did the basic school spaces during the 70’s provide opportunities for pupils to engage in social relations with peers with diverse social backgrounds, and what are their perceived long-term implications of the relations established in school?

3. How do school spaces at present provide opportunities for pupils to engage in social interaction with peers with diverse social backgrounds, and what are the roles of digital sociality for the relations that develop?

The research material consists of policy documents and archive material from the selected schools, interviews with former students about their life histories, small projects carried out collaboratively with students, video material, field notes, and interviews from the schools today. The symposium consists of three presentations focusing on each of the sub-studies, followed by a fourth presentation about how they altogether make it possible to contrast past education and current developments, and as a next step can contribute to articulate basic education in new ways in the Nordic countries and beyond. 

Beach, D. (2018). The Myth of Swedish Education Equity. In: Structural Injustices in Swedish Education. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-95405-9_1 Blossing, U., Imsen, G. & Moos, L. (2014). The Nordic education model: ”A school for all” encounters neo-liberal policy. Springer. Frønes, T.S., Pettersen, A., Radišić, J., Buchholtz, N. (2020, eds.) Equity, Equality and Diversity in the Nordic Model of Education. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-61648-9_1 Lefebvre, H. (1991). The production of space. Blackwell. Livingstone, S. & Sefton-Green, J. (2016). The Class. Living and Learning in the Digital Age. New York University Press. Lundahl, L. (2016). Equality, inclusion and marketization of Nordic education: Introductory notes. Research in Comparative and International Education, 11(1), 3-12. https://doi.org/10.1177/1745499916631059 Thrupp, M., Seppänen, P., Kauko, J., Kosunen, S. (2023, eds.). Finland’s Famous Education System. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-8241-5_1 van Dijk (2012). The evolution of the digital divide: The digital divide turns to inequality of skills and usage.