Open-plan schooling and everyday utopias: Australia and Denmark in the 1970s

ABSTRACT

This article explores the take-up and imaginaries of open-plan schooling during the 1970s, drawing on examples from Denmark and Victoria (Australia). As well as expressing new forms of classroom design and pedagogical praxis, open plan classrooms stood for reimagining schooling as a social institution and to possibilities for remaking student and teacher subjectivities. As a thoroughly transnational concept, the open-plan ethos was entwined with broader processes of social-cultural and political change and suffused with a critical optimism in its potential to inaugurate powerful transformations that extended beyond classrooms. We explore these aspects of open-plan schooling through Levitas´s (2013) typology of modes of utopia and Cooper´s (2013) concept of ‘everyday utopias’, arguing for closer attention to the decisive role of mundane practices in navigating what is ‘doable and viable’ in how open-plan classrooms were planned and enacted while also being attuned to a vision of another future. To analyse the interweaving of national, local and transnational processes in the making of open-plan ideas and practices, we draw upon Ingold´s (2011) notion of ‘meshwork’, proposing that local enactments of open-plan schools fold back into and contribute to building up different (transnational) conceptions of the open plan.

KEYWORDS:

• Open-plan schooling
• everyday utopias
• school space
• progressive education
• community
• transnational educational concepts

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed here

Notes

1. Figure 1 was reproduced with permission from the State of Victoria Department of Education and Training (2 Treasury Place, East Melbourne, Victoria, 3002, Australia) under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International licence. The image is a floor plan of Collingwood Educational Centre, as presented in The Educational Magazine: Volume 29: (4) 1972.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Australian Research Council under Grants [FT110100646], 'Youth identity and educational change in Australia since 1950: Digital archiving, re-using qualitative data and histories of the present’; and [DP110100505], 'Designing Australian Schools: A spatial history of innovation, pedagogy and social change'.

Notes on contributors

Julie McLeod

Julie McLeod is Professor of Curriculum, Equity and Social Change at Melbourne Graduate School of Education, University of Melbourne. She researches in the history and sociology of education, with a focus on youth, gender and genealogies of educational ideas and reform.

Lisa Rosén Rasmussen is an Associate Professor of contemporary history of schooling at the Danish School of Education (DPU), Aarhus University, Denmark. In her work on educational architecture, school space and materialities of schooling, she deals with the intercrossings of policy, pedagogy and everyday life.