Session Information
23 SES 04 A, The Politics of Education and Care
Paper Session
Contribution
Approximately a hundred years ago, after school activities were introduced in Sweden as means to control begging and criminality among lower class children when leaving school in the afternoon, a quickly escalating problem in the growing cities (Rohlin, 1996, 2001). These so called “work cottages” were the first of a series of institutions, with the objective to keep children off the streets and to contribute to their moral education and readiness to work. Today, the modern leisure center is, although subject to parents’ choice, attended by most children age 6-9 years, and considered a part of the Swedish school system.
The topic of this paper is the values and interests over time from the 1880ies, which formed and governed these after school activities supported by the government but not subject to legislation or curricular directives (Vallberg Roth, 2001). This is also what constitutes the general interest in the paper, it explores a vital area – children’s time off school when this is subject to attempted control.
The objective of this study is to investigate and analyze the formal and informal intentions and goals of and their practical outcome in the community organized after school activities, developing in Sweden through the 20th century and resulting in the contemporary leisure centers, provided by the community.
Research questions are:
· What intentions by whom formed the activities during different periods of the after school activities:
o What values were the leisure centers and their forerunners supposed to accomplish in the community?
o In what practical pedagogical context were these values carried out?
o What ideal child was aspired?
Lev S. Vygotsky (1930/1978) reflects in one of his chapters in Mind in Society on the different problems that the researcher is confronted with, when it comes to studying human activities and actions. He states that it is hard to find explanations through experiments and observations if you are to examine higher, human forms of actions and behavior, since these are very complex. A dialectic approach connotes an assumption that man is influenced by the surrounding context and nature but that man also influences and changes the surrounding context and thereby creates new natural predispositions for his existence. According to Vygotsky (1930/1978), this means that research ought to analyze processes rather than objects, ought to explain rather than describe, and ought to enlighten every part of a practice in the light of history. This should specifically be applied to practices that has been “fossilized” by a period of long historical development, and that have frozen into a mechanized state, making its inner nature hard to study only by taking the outer shape into account. Inspired by Lev Vygotsky’s theoretical frame, this study will enlighten the practice of the leisure centers by their historical forerunners, a search of the practices’ formal and informal intentions and goals and its practical outcome. It is a study of historical written sources merged with analyzes of pedagogical incitement in the curricula of the era and the prevailing view of children.
Method
Expected Outcomes
References
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