Learning Environment between community and co-creation – an analysis of the new policy-term learning environment

Abstract

With the revised Daycare Law in Denmark from the summer of 2018, the term ‘learning environment’ has become a new and dominant concept that the personnel in all types of day care institutions should relate to. In this article, we examine how the policy concept of learning environment can be translated into pedagogical practice by considering it through two theoretical perspectives as formulated by Bronwyn Davies and Iram Khawaja. The theoretical perspectives are all selected based on a Foucault-inspired meta-theoretical view and ‘a critically suspicious and critically hopeful’ position. With this view, we can comprehend learning environment as stretched out between day-care traditional understandings of children and play on the one hand, and goal-oriented learning understandings on the other. The consequence of the critically suspicious and critically hopeful view is that we do not stand outside the political learning agenda and criticize. On the contrary, we set ourselves in the midst of the tension of the learning agenda and in solidarity with the day care personnel, offering analysis and questions that hopefully enable them to critically and reflectively relate to, and act in relation to, the new law and the defi ning term “learning environment”. Finally, in the article, we present a ‘questioning methodology’ that can act as deputy researcher when the day care personnel together with the children will create learning environments.