Reform pedagogy as a national innovation system: Early twentieth-century educational entrepreneurs in Norway

Paedagogica Historica

Volumn 45, Issue 4-5, 2009, Pages 469-484

  Jarning, Harald ^a  

^a OSLO METROPOLITAN UNIVERSITY   (Norway)

Author keywords

New Educational Fellowship; Progressivism; Reformp dagogik

Indexed keywords

EID: 75649115791     PISSN: 00309230     EISSN: 1477674X     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/00309230903100874     Document Type: Article

References (54)

1. Systematic as well as historical terminology in relation to education as academic and professional fields of knowledge varies across languages. In this article a few keywords from national terminology are used occasionally to mark significant points of reference, and throughout the article the somewhat unfamiliar English term reform pedagogy is used to point to the correspondence with reformpedagogikk. In Norwegian reformpedagogikk has several common usages, as a historic epoch-covering the first half of the twentieth century, and as a broad intellectual and professional strain within modern pedagogy that differs from approaches that focus predominantly on instruction and on performance.
2. Fritz Ringer, Fields of Knowledge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). Ringer points to a need for attentiveness to the cultural and institutional context in combination with investigation of commonalities in approaches and patterns of development.
3. Robin Alexander, Culture and Pedagogy (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000). The work of Alexander points at pedagogy as a field of knowledge including acts and discourse differing from approaches that emphasise divergence of educational practice and theory (p. 540 ff.).The focus in the article on historical changes in balance between professional and academic knowledge orientations is a way to investigate such key dimensions of pedagogy.
4. Harald Thuen and Sveinung Vaage, Pedagogiske profiler. Norsk utdanningstenkning fra Holberg til Hernes (Oslo: Abstrakt forlag, 2004). This new anthology is a basic source for new research on the modern intellectual history of schooling and pedagogy in Norway.
5. Detlev Müller, Fritz Ringer and Brian Simon, eds, The Rise of the Modern Educational System (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987).
6. Val D. Rust, The Democratic Tradition and the Evolution of Schooling in Norway (New York: Greenwood Press, 1989). In English this book gives a broad introduction to the history of modern schooling in Norway.
7. Harald Jarning, "The Many Meanings of Social Pedagogy: pedagogy and social theory in Scandinavia," Scandinavian Journal of Educational Research, 41 (1996), 413-31
8. Harald Jarning, "The Folk High School and General Education," Skolen 2002-2003 (Notodden, 2003).
9. Jon Lauglo, "Populism and education in Norway," in Arild. Tjeldvoll, Education and the Scandinavian Welfare State in the year 2000 (New York: Garland, 1998)
10. Rune Slagstad, De nasjonale strateger (Oslo: Pax, 1997) are related recent studies of the intellectual history of Norwegian rural education and pedagogy.
11. Jarning, "The Folk High School" (2003).
12. Jarning, "The Many Meanings of Social Pedagogy" (1996). This article focuses on the Norwegian positivism debate, the populist versions of new sociology of education and curriculum theorising in Norway from the 1960s onwards.
13. Robin Alexander, "Culture and Pedagogy" (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000).
14. Harald Jarning, "Mellom skiftende kunnskapsregimer. Det pedagogiske feltet mellom forskning og politikk," in Bør pedagogikken styre samfunnet?, Report from the 8th Norwegian conference in Educational Research (Bergen: NLA-forlaget 2000), 51-77.
15. William Boyd, ed., Towards a New Education (London and New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1930), 54-55.
16. Eng, op. cit., 234.
17. Op.cit., 54-57.
18. In this respect it might be useful to distinguish between small-scale reform pedagogy, characterised by utopian and avant-garde critique of schooling as a pedagogic institution, and large-scale reform pedagogy, connected to inner pedagogic reform of established systems of mass schooling and with little room for avant-garde alternativism.
19. Johs. Sandven: Educational Research in Norway in the Twentieth Century (US Department of Health, Education, and Welfare 1963), 7.
20. Harald Jarning, "Virkelig sikre fremskritt," in Brokker av en faghistorie, ed. Berit. Bratholm, Torstein Harbo and Harald Jarning (Oslo: PFI, 1994), 88
21. The need for analysis of historical shifts in political and educational settlements has been the focus of research of Roger Dale (The State and Education Policy, Buckingham 1989), chapter 7
22. This approach to a historical sociology of educational knowledge can also be related to the distinction between official and pedagogic recontextualisation fields found in the later works of Basil Bernstein (Pedagogy, Symbolic Control and Identity, Oxford 2000, chapter 3 and 4).
23. Harald Jarning, "Mellom disiplinforskning og profesjonsfellesskap. Reformpedagogikk og skolebasert kunnskapsutvikling," in Nytt arbeidsliv-nye former for kunnskap, ed. Knut Fossestøl and Olav Eikeland (Oslo: AFI, 2004)
24. Reports of school-based experiments and development work in the interwar period from a number of teacher-researchers are collected in three books: Martin Strømnes, Forsøk i skolen. Festskrift til Herman Ruge (Oslo, 1953)
25. Martin Strømnes, Klasseromsforskning (Oslo: Aschehong, 1966)
26. Martin Strømnes, Kristvik-skolen (Oslo: Aschehong, 1982).
27. Harald Thuen and Sveinung Vaage, Pedagogiske profiler (Oslo, 2004). From the first part of twentieth century the anthology includes articles on Erling Kristvik, by Sveinung Vaage; on Helga Eng, by Elisabeth Lønnå; and on Bernhof Ribsskog, by Gro Hanne Aas.
28. Gro Hanne Aas, "Elevenes læring i sentrum," in Pedagogiske profiler, Harald Thuen and Sveinung Vaage (Oslo, 2004)
29. Arne O. Dahl, Skoleinspektør Bernhof Ribsskog-en byggmester i norsk skole (Master's thesis in Education. Institute of Education, University of Oslo, 1978).
30. Anathon Aall, quoted by Kim Helsvig, Pedagogikkens grenser. Kampen om pedagogikkfaget ved Universitetet i Oslo 1938-1980 (Oslo: Abstrakt forlag, 2005), 40.
31. Rune Slagstad, De nationale strateger (Oslo, 1997).
32. Erling Kristvik, "Heimesentrert skuleprogram," Norsk pedagogisk årbok 1954-55 (1955), translation by the author.
33. Sveinung Vaage, "Pedagogikk som kulturell modernisering og folkedanning," in Thuen and Vaage, Pedagogiske profiler (2004), 141.
34. Martin Strømnes, Kristvik-skolen (Oslo: Aschehong, 1982).
35. Alfred Oftedal, Telhaug Utdanningspolitikken og enhetsskolen (Oslo: Didaktika, 1994), 10-12. Telhaug here points to the co-establishment of a social democratic welfare state settlement and progressivism as dominant pedagogic orientation. For other relevant references, see note 14.
36. Arne O. Dahl, Skoleinspektør Bernhof Ribsskog (Oslo, 1978). The transcript of an interview with RFN is included in the attachment in this work by Dahl.
37. The Nordland county network was developed by Karl Jan Solstad, former professor in education at the university of Tromsø and state director for schooling in Nordland county from the 1980s.
38. Jürgen Oelkers, "Origin and Development in Central Europe," in Progressive Education Across the Continents, ed. Hermann Röhrs and Volker Lenhart (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1995). Another aspect of Scandinavian reform pedagogy that differed from the Continental and American focus in the analysis of Oelkers is that, with the inclusion of the folk high school and the folk school, Scandinavian reform pedagogy had a broad basis also outside the large cities.
39. Harald Jarning, "The Populist Argument: Cultural Populism and the Development of Educational Theory in Norway," in Paedagogica historica, History of Educational Sciences, Peter Drewek and Christopher Lüth (Ghent: CSHP, 1998). The somewhat untranslatable term "folkelighet" is a keyword in Scandinavian cultural populism. In the Nordic counties the rural social movements of the nineteenth century and the social and cultural transformations they brought about are the roots of the term "folkelighet", a term with similar uses and meanings in the Scandinavian languages. In cultural and political discourses in Denmark, Norway and Sweden, one meets these positively valued terms constructed around the root word "folk" all the time. Jon Lauglo has pointed to the term "populism" as the best expression in the international vocabulary of the social sciences to describe these dimensions of Scandinavian societies and culture. In Norway the folk high schools and the new Norwegian language movement were the homeland of this populist pedagogy.
40. The educational ideas and pedagogy by Bruun is presented shortly by this author in Harald Jarning. The Populist Argument: Cultural Populism and the Development of Educational Theory in Norway, in Peter Drewek and Christopher Lüth, eds. Paedagogica Historica. Supplementary series Vol. III (Gent: CSHP, 1998).
41. Towards a New Education (1930), 10-11.
42. Dietrich Benner and Herwart Kemper, Theorie und Geschichte der Reformpädagogik (Weinheim and Basel: Beltz, 2003).
43. The term "intellectual programme" is chosen to develop a terminology to cover all intellectual activities and does not give preference to academic over non-academic forms of institutionalisation.
44. Peter Wagner and Björn Wittrock, "States, institutions, and discourses: a comparative perspective on the structuration of the social sciences," in Discourses on Society. The Shaping of the Social Science Disciplines, ed. Peter Wagner, Björn Wittrock and Richard Whitley (Amsterdam: Kluwer, 1990)
45. The lack of relative historical stability that often is pointed to as a characteristic feature of pedagogy and education as research fields is also taken up in Harald Jarning, "The Many Meanings of Social Pedagogy" (1996). In historical and comparative studies it is thus a challenge to get a broader understanding of comprehensive, disciplinebuilding and professional programmes in pedagogy and educational research and their conditions and patterns of development.
46. Michael Gibbons, Camille Limoges, Helga Nowotny, Simon Schwartzman, Peter Scott and Martin Trow, The New Production of Knowledge (London: Sage, 1994)
47. For an interpretation of the cognitive sociology on social movements by Ron Eyerman and Andrew Jamison, see Jarning, "The Populist Argument" (1998).
48. Johan P. Olsen, "Innovasjon, politikk og institusjonell dynamikk," ARENA Working Papers WP 04/04 (available at: http://www.aksjonsprogrammet.no/Innovasjon.htm). The paper analyses the key roles of institutions in development of innovative profiles and points to democratic aspects as necessary complementary goal areas to economic efficiency in relation to innovation. In line with this approach it is interesting to analyse historical examples of innovation systems in schooling and pedagogy as well as other public sector organisations and institutions.
49. Erling Lars Dale, De pedagogiske strateger (Oslo: Gyldendal, 1999)
50. Dale emphasises the unbroken progressive line of development from the interwar years to the postwar period. Rune Slagstad, De nationale strateger (Oslo, 1997)
51. and Elisabeth Lønnå, Helga Eng. Psykolog og pedagog i barnets århundre (Bergen: Fagbokforlaget, 2002), point to areas where lack of continuity is predominant and give support to further investigation of why the progressive educational system of innovation was not sustained after the war.
52. Jürgen Oelkers, "Origin and Development in Central Europe," in Progressive Education Across the Continents, ed. Hermann Röhrs and Volker Lenhart (Frankfurt am Main, 1995), 42, points to the marginalisation of reform pedagogy in the postwar decades as a cross-national feature.
53. Lise Vislie, "Spesialpedagogikkens vilkår under moderniteten," Utbildning and Demokrati 13, no. 2:13-44
54. and Sven-Eric Liedman, I skuggan av framtiden (Stockholm: Bonnier, 1997), 517-28.