Anne Harju

Children practising politics through spatial narratives

ABSTRACT The aim is to study children’s politics by exploring how children relate to and rework positions and identities offered to them and others in a residential narrative of ‘Swedes’ and ‘immigrants’. Children’s politics is defined as children practising politics when negotiating and challenging positions and defending identities. The results are based on a reanalysis of two studies. The results show that participating children use the narrative, and to it connected stories about neighbourhoods, to position themselves and to negotiate exclusion, inclusion, identity and belonging. In relation to this they deal with political issues connected to national and global discourses that blame the category of ‘immigrants’ for being the cause of local and national problems. They also reflect on the positions and identities offered in the narrative and use tactics to manage the positions and their consequences. From this point of view, the children practise politics in their everyday lives.

Colliding collaboration in student-centred learning in higher education

The paper deals with the assumption that student-centred learning enhances students’ sense of involvement and facilitates a recontextualization of their experiences into valid knowledge in an academic context. Bernstein’s concepts of classification and framing of knowledge and his distinctions between horizontal and vertical knowledge codes are used to explore these assumptions, focusing on the regulation of educational knowledge in one case of student-centred learning. Based on the results, we problematize the assumption that student-centred learning enhances students’ sense of involvement and gives them power and control over the knowledge production. We also problematize the assumption that student-centred learning in higher education facilitates a recontextualization of students’ former experiences, for example, connected to work practice. The horizontal and vertical knowledge codes ultimately did not meet in the project; instead, the two different discourses formed competing and colliding frameworks.