Fleksible skoleskemaers fleksibiliseringer

Abstract

In this article, I examine the timetable as central technology for governing the ways schools are enacted. I argue that the reform of the Danish primary and lower secondary school in 2013/2014 marked a decisive ambition for a particular flexibilization of the timetable. I go on to analyze two school-leaders designs of flexible timetables, and school-leaders’ enact- ments of the affordance of the timetables, as they aim to flexibilize different elements in the school, as a way of changing schools. In the school-managers design of flexible timetables, flexibility is enacted in different ways, that entangles new ideas of organizing, and managing schools with related ideals for a flexible staff, flexible disciplines, flexible collaboration and flexible school lives for students. The employees of the school are enacted as a key component for the flexible timetable, and they are described as those whom are to actualize the potentiality of the timetable design. And thus, it seems, the timetables enact implicit critiques of, and ideals for, the employees of the schools, which makes assessments of willingness to comply and become flexible a possibility. The article concludes by asking: if critiques and ideals work implicitly on employees of the school, does this facilitate and render possible a collective dialogue on, and critique of, dif- ferent flexibility ideals?