This paper examines how pedagogical ideas become present and recognisable in educational practice through materially grounded forms of representation in sloyd education. In several earlier studies, the relationship between the material and the crafter has often been centered on the practical encounter and the embodied interaction that occurs during the making of craft in pedagogical sloyd (Broman m.fl., 2013; Frohagen, 2016; Jagell & Homlong, 2024; Westerlund m.fl., 2021). This study instead focuses on students’ articulations of expression in relation to the sloyd objects they create and discuss. The specific focus lies on students’ sloyd objects as materializations of sedimented pedagogical discourses on expression, through which such ideas take form and become open to interpretation.

The study is guided by the following research question:
How do students articulate representations of pedagogical ideas through their sloyd objects?

The objective is to understand how knowledge in sloyd education is shaped through interpretive frameworks that precede students’ expressive acts and filter what appears as possible or meaningful ways of expressing though craft. The study examines how representation is articulated through students’ objects, through their talk about these objects.

The theoretical framework combines pedagogical theory Mollenhauer (2014) and discourse theory (Laclau & Mouffe, 1985). From a pedagogical perspective inspired by Mollenhauer (2014), representation is understood as the educational selection and mediation of the world, through which certain aspects of culture are made accessible to learners. Representation is thus seen as a pedagogical construction that organises what can be encountered, practised, and understood within education.

Drawing on discourse theory as developed by Laclau and Mouffe (1985) , representation is understood as an articulatory process through which meaning is provisionally stabilised. Through articulation, relations between elements are established in ways that foreground certain interpretations, while rendering others absent. Read together with Mollenhauer’s (2014) pedagogical concept of representation as the mediated selection of the world for educational purposes, this perspective makes it possible to analyse not only what is pedagogically selected, but how such selections become fixed as meaningful. This perspective allows pedagogical representation, in Mollenhauer’s sense, to be analysed as becoming provisionally fixed both in the sloyd object itself and in students’ ways of articulating and relating to it.

An important point of departure is a previous study (Author, forthcoming)  which has established that in sloyd education, aesthetic expressions are commonly framed pedagogically in relation to individual freedom, imagination, and future orientation, while cultural expressions are framed in relation to shared values, historical continuity, and the common good. This distinction is approached as an established and sedimented pedagogical understanding. The study examines how it is represented and articulated through students’ sloyd objects.

By highlighting representation through articulation in materially grounded practices, the study contributes knowledge about how pedagogical meanings are formed and made recognisable over time within sloyd educational practice, linking established pedagogical ideas with future-oriented forms of expression.

The empirical material consists of focus group interviews with students aged 7–12. During the interviews, students’ own sloyd objects are used as stimuli for discussion. The focus group format enabled collective meaning-making and allowed the students to relate to each other’s ways of speaking about their sloyd objects. The analysis draws on articulation (Howath &Torfing, 2005), derived from discourse theory, to examine how students’ sloyd objects and their accounts of making take form within particular pedagogical understandings of expression. The analysis attends to what becomes possible for students to express, recognise, and value when a certain pedagogical orientation is at work. In this study, representation is examined as a pedagogical relation in the sense of Mollenhauer(2014), while articulation provides a way of analysing how such representation takes shape in students’ engagement with their sloyd objects, a contingent practice of meaning-making in line with Laclau and Mouffe. The analysis is conducted through close reading of the focus group transcripts, attending to how students position their objects, themselves, and their expressions in relation to pedagogical ideas about expression. The analysis remains open and exploratory, tracing recurring patterns of articulation as they emerge in the material.

The study is expected to clarify how pedagogical representation shapes the conditions under which meaning is continuously formed in students’ sloyd practices. The results will mediate how aesthetic and cultural expression are articulated in relation to one another, and on what comes to count as expression within a certain pedagogical framework. In addition, how pedagogical ideas shape the forms of expression that become recognisable in practice, will be presented. In relation to the conference theme Knowing and Acting, the study highlights how knowledge takes form through action, material engagement, and articulation, as students engage with established practices while orienting themselves towards future possibilities for expression.

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