How school classes are made. A praxeology for the production of school classes

• Applicant: Professorin Dr. Kerstin Rabenstein
• Subject Area: Educational Research on Socialization, Welfare and Professionalism
• Term: since 2025
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 566994904

The fact that lessons and schools are organised in school classes seems to be taken for granted at present. The social dynamics in lower secondary school classes have been the subject of intensive research for decades due to their implications for teaching. However, the school class has always been taken as a matter of course. The planned project goes beyond this assumption and examines the production of the school class in the sense of an iterative process in which school classes are created and are constantly in the process of becoming. To this end, the project is interested in the still little-noticed differentiation of the pedagogical organisation of the year group at the beginning of lower secondary level. Based on a practice-theoretical research approach, the project uses the materiality and corporeality of practices to analyse the affective and temporal dimension of class production. Empirically, the project is interested in the still little-noticed differentiation of the pedagogical organisation of the year group at the beginning of lower secondary level. Using a sample of three variants – the year group as a core group, team and place of democratic action – it examines how these classes are practically organised at the beginning of year 5, starting with the decisions on their social composition, through the familiarisation period in the first few weeks of school, to the educational activities for social interaction in the class, such as class teacher lessons, class trips, class council, but also the joint lunch, exercise activities, etc. In a nine-month ethnography of each school class, the project investigates the concrete procedures and formats in which the agency of the respective pedagogical concepts of the school class is reflected in everyday school life and explores the unfinished process in which the school class is addressed as one that is still to develop in a certain way. To this end, ethnographic observations are made at the sites inside and outside the school classroom that are relevant to the research question. Relevant documents of the pedagogical programmes of the school class will be collected, and perceptual walks and shadowing with class teachers and pupils will be used. The three cases can be contrasted in terms of their different functions in everyday school life, their varying degrees of demarcation or permeability to other classes and the additional educational programmes set up, which act as media for the production of the school class. The overall aim of the project is to point out in detail, through observation and description, the production achievements directed towards the school class as a pedagogical unit of action and in this way to develop a fundamental contribution to a theory of the school class based on data.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• Co-Investigator: Dr. Lars Wicke