Mellan Rum. En studie i fysisk och mental utveckling av kommunikation med utgångspunkt i en mellanstadieklass

A Gap: A study in physical and mental development of communication based on a primary school class

The primary aim of the dissertation is to describe the role played by body, emotions, and movement in the everyday life of school. This includes both physical and verbal linguistic movements. In theoretical terms the analyses are mainly based on the French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s ideas about lived existence. With that aim I have conducted an intensive field study in a 5th grade in Sweden. The norms that apply to who one should be as a person are largely learned during ordinary working days. With this focus I simultaneously concentrated my attention on the pupils for whom today’s school generates difficulties. My other aim was to elucidate the question of how today’s situation could have arisen. I wanted to follow the changed role of pupil, partly by studying, via the history of school gymnastics, how pupils learned to open their bodies both to become expressive and to receive impressions, partly by studying how psychology has in its own way opened the senses, and how these two together have changed the prevailing epistemology. What I saw in the classroom was in large measure a matter of mutual communication between bodily movement and mental activity. My intention was to investigate ideas that create social and cultural effects. I found that not only gymnastics instruction but also psychology belonged here. Psychoanalysis seemed particularly interesting as a liberation project. During my work on the dissertation it became increasingly clear how psychological technique and theory have been incorporated in our everyday knowledge. This is not least interwoven in the pedagogics of school. A special motivation in my choice of topic came from the fact that I found the contemporary debate about school superficial and, as regards the lower and intermediate levels at least, unfair and misleading. I wanted to add some nuance to that debate by showing the historical growth of today’s situation in school as a conscious ideology with roots going back further than we often imagine. As an unexpected side effect I caught sight of an interaction between male and female, whereby a female attitude undermined a male one.