Abstract

In this chapter, we explore the temporal construct of ‘Intermezzo Time’ (‘Mellemformer’) – an emerging governance effort responding to inclusion politics regarding children with special needs enrolled in Danish elementary schools.

This offers new creative ways of organizing time locally, but also takes tolls on staff, management and children.

This governance effort relates to policy ideals of including diverse children in elementary schools, inscribed in the Danish Inclusion Act (Law 379, 2012). Over the past 10 years this has meant a surge in enrolment of children with special needs in elementary schools, as well as a surge in the number of inclusion teachers and pedagogues in schools and in educational departments in local governments to manage this inclusion task. However, surveys and research show rising signs of lacking wellbeing amongst these children, and teachers and pedagogues point to the extra pressures this puts on daily class time and the educational organization and activities planned in the school schedules.

‘Intermezzo Time’, then, is emerging currently as a governance effort to respond to these issues, prompting local governments and school managements to convey decentralized ways of constructing inclusion that fit the specific children, classes, educators, school organization and local government budgets. Instead of governing ‘Intermezzo Time’ as an anticipatory planning tool fixed in specific time slots – as done with ‘normal time’ in class schedules, schools are organizing and re-organizing throughout the day, constantly negotiating forms, that include or exclude children of special needs, when the need arises adding and removing an intermezzo of a temporal space. Despite this ideal of following the children’s special needs, that nevertheless proves challenging in practice as availability of teachers, pedagogues and spaces are not necessarily coherent, creating struggles and tensions and emotional labour across multiple times, schedules, spaces, personnel availability, and inclusion needs, as the local schools in fact develop a preparedness for intermezzos in the daily emerging organizing.

Methodologically, we draw on a case study of time organization in elementary schools using post-representational methods of participant observations, interviews, and document gathering. This offers a rich data set of policy documents, management plans, school schedules, field notes and interviews from meetings, planning and enactments of ‘Intermezzo Time’ in a local school in Denmark.

In the chapter, we analyse ‘Intermezzo Time’ as an educational governance effort to manage ‘inclusion time’ alongside ‘normal time’ scheduled in Danish elementary schools. More specifically, we explore how multiple temporalities (e.g., time budgets, time schedules, preparation time, confrontation time, ‘normal class time’ and ‘Intermezzo Time’) co-emerge across educational policy documents, local government enactments, school management plans, team schedules and meetings, thereby analysing their temporal multimodality, rhythms and politics of time (Plotnikof & Mumby, 2023; Lefebvre, 2004, Sharma, 2015; Barad, 2013). The analysis unpacks I) how multiple rhythms and qualities of time co-emerge across policy, governance documents and daily enactments related to ‘Intermezzo time’ and compete in relation to other time qualities in school life, and II) how that involves struggles over de/valuing certain times as, for example, ‘non/plannable’, ‘in/excluding’, ‘ab/normal’, and ‘in/expensive’.Further, we discuss how that governs the local organizing of ‘Intermezzo Time’ alongside other times with performative effects on involved actors and practices.

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