It is part of the self-understanding of many (research) universities that their education is based on research. Clearly, there is a lot of discussion about specific approaches towards the integration of research into teaching, for instance research based, research tutored, research led or research oriented teaching (Griffiths, 2004; Healey, 2005). In these discussions, it is often taken for granted that teaching and researching are distinct activities (with different roles) that somehow should be linked (Simons & Elen, 2007). Furthermore, the assumption is that research is a tool or context to enhance the learning of students. Next, these approaches consider learning as an individual activity, and if there is any attention for some collective dimension, it is mostly framed in terms of group or team work as a context to increase individual learning opportunities. Finally, it is often assumed that the so-called ‘public service’ function of the university is to be kept outside education.  This contribution reports on a concrete case of university teaching/education/service that goes beyond these differential, functional and individually-oriented approaches, and actually includes a form of public service. The case will be described in detail and is taken as a point of departure to reflect on the unique role of the university.

For the case we draw on a bachelor course regarding ‘the position of education in relation to society and culture’, where the teaching team and the students following the course were engaged in a project ‘(re-)assembling the school’, that is, a collective mapping of the school as an institution embedded in a broader societal and cultural field. The starting point of the process was the contention that schools can be considered as assemblages of objects of different kinds. The analogy with an airport might be useful here: just as the school, the airport is an assemblage of different objects that were all fabricated and put into their specific place. For an airplane to fly, for example, not only a plane and its crew are needed, but also a command tower, radars, gateways, and so on. Being able to fly requires a whole hinterland of different actors and objects, yet we are hardly percipient of all actors involved and how they precisely relate to each other. In a similar way, we are perhaps barely percipient of the different components of a school, their origin and how they precisely relate to/which each other.

In the course, then, the attempt was to describe this particular ‘school assemblage’ by means of a concrete analysis of relations, networks and nodes and hence to describe the fabrication of these assemblages (Fenwick & Edwards, 2010). Or stated otherwise, the vantage point of the course was the contention that it might be possible to bring ‘school objects’ to life and, in this very process, to make ‘silent’ objects appear as appealing and ‘talking’ things (Waltz, 2006; Turkle, 2011). What we hoped for, was that this mapping would allow for looking differently at ‘the’ school.

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