Session Information
17 SES 03, Disability and Health
Paper Session
Contribution
The paper focuses on the universal welfare state and its professionals’ construct of pupil normality and deviation at an experimental school in mid-20th-century Denmark. The Emdrupborg Experimental School was a highly profiled school established by the emerging Danish universal welfare state soon after World War II (Jensen 1998; Ydesen 2011).
Its activities were supported by the municipality of Copenhagen. Numerous notable educational psychologists and other professionals were connected with it, primarily functioning as a group of engaged and progressive teachers.
The paper aims to provide a historical understanding of the emergence of professional interventions by the burgeoning psychological community in relation to school children and their parents.
Theoretically, the paper subscribes to the sociological notion of the state as a bureaucratic field (Bourdieu, 1996; Wacquant, 2008, 2009). In particular, the paper will draw on the concept of “state crafting,” focusing on the way in which the state crafts itself when addressing deviance, whereby it continuously remakes and rethinks itself through material forces and symbolic powers (Moldenhawer & Øland, 2013).
Professional interventions have changed over time, yet such activities can be identified and analyzed concerning the roles they may have played in constructing the “normal” child via pedagogical interventions.
Research questions
- How are children, their parents, and their homes described in professional records within a highly profiled welfare state experimental school?
- Which and whose perceptions of normality are evident in these descriptions?
- To which extent and to what ends were these descriptions used to justify and legitimize interventions vis-à-vis pupils at the Emdrupborg Experimental School?
- Who would benefit from the interventions?
Method
Expected Outcomes
References
Bourdieu, P. (1996): I Statens ånd. Det byråkratiske feltets opprinnelse. In: P. Bourdieu, Symbolsk makt. Oslo: Pax Forlag A/S, pp. 48–77. Gottlieb, B., Henriksen, A., Jeppesen, L., Kallenbach, F., Rønne, J., & Valbro, P. (Eds.). (1974). Emdrupborg skole 25 år. Emdrup: Emdrupborg School. Jensen, N. R. (1998). Kampen for enhedsskolen—forsøget på Emdrupborg. Arbejderhistorie (2):45–59. Knudsen, H. (2010): Har vi en aftale? – magt og ansvar i mødet mellem folkeskole og familie. Frederiksberg: Nyt fra samfundsvidenskaberne. Moldenhawer, B., & Øland, T. 2013. Disturbed by “the stranger”: State crafting remade through educational interventions and moralisations. Globalisation, Societies, and Education (submitted). Nørvig, A. M. (1955). Beretning om Emdrupborg skoles første 6 år 1948–1954. Copenhagen: Det danske forlag. Wacquant, L. (2008). Urban Outcasts: A Comparative Sociology of Advanced Marginality. Cambridge: Polity Press. Wacquant, L. (2009). Punishing the Poor: The Neoliberal Government of Social Insecurity. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Ydesen, C. (2011). The Rise of High-stakes Educational Testing in Denmark, 1920–1970. Frank-furt a.M.: Peter Lang Verlag. Øland. T. (2012). “Human potential” and progressive pedagogy: A long cultural history of the ambiguity of “race” and “intelligence.” Race, Ethnicity, and Education, 15:4, 561–585.
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