DPU

Research topic In the latest school reform from 2013 in Denmark little educational research or political attention has been paid to a very challenging element in the reform called the open school. The open school element in the reform makes it mandatory from August 2015 for municipalities to organize forms of educational collaborations between schools and the local community i.e. public supported arts institutions, NGOs, and local businesses. There is a long tradition in Denmark for these kinds of collaborations where so called external agents teach classes in a limited time frame, and evaluations have shown that it has been a great success. This success has surely motivated the politicians behind the school reform to establish open school, but this greater emphasis reveals both dilemmas and possibilities. One of the stated possibilities are, that the external agents can create a learning environment where students can experience bridges between theory and practice, learn by doing, and get to know their local community better etc.. But in the same pace teaching will be conducted by non-teachers in non-school places with a non-schooling agenda ideally in collaboration with teachers who are obliged by the same reform to guarantee all activities including open school are formulated on the basis of learning goals and teachers who must share the authority and autonomy with the external agents. Theoretical and methodology framework The analysis will be conducted with use of the topos and logos analysis model (Haastrup & Knudsen 2015) in a framework of Estelle R. Jorgensen’s (2005) differentiation of forms of theory and practice relations, Thomas Højrup’s (2006) theory of life modes, and the phenomenology of Gaston Bachelard (1994) and Edward Casey (2010). (Expected) conclusions/findings These possibilities and dilemmas call for a didactisation of the external agents which is already on its way. It also call for a poetization of the teachers, schools, and the policies of open school to underline that external agents are producers not teachers, and that this limit is the force of the open school to be kept and not reduced to yet another school program.