Framed School: Frame Factors, Frames and the Dynamics of Social Interaction in School

This paper aims to show how the Goffman frame perspective can be used in an analysis of school and education and how it can be combined, in such analysis, with the frame factor perspective. The latter emphasizes factors that are determined outside the teaching process, while the former stresses how actors organize their experiences and define shared situations. In this light, an analysis of framing of and in Swedish compulsory school, based on governing documents, is carried out. Since the frame factors are contradictory, different possibilities to frame school in the Goffmanian sense present themselves to the school actors. In spite of frame factors, school can be framed in different and inconstant ways, for example, as an institution, an organization, a movement, or a seminar. Such nuance shifts show different dynamics of social interaction in school and can be used to understand variations between and within schools.