Contraforming as epistemic practice – the becoming of professional knowledge through syncretic practices in schools

Abstract

A national school reform (2014) and following reorganizations of the management of schools has merged leisure time centers and schools in Denmark. The pedagogues who were previously primarily employed at leisure time centers now also work in schools. Through fieldwork in four different primary and lower-secondary schools the article explores how the pedagogues’ expertise emerges through syncretic practices where elements that originally have been considered non-coherent are made cohesive. The analysis shows that the pedagogues’ practices are defined by dynamics as; “imitation” and “parallel work”, which are analyzed as different expressions of an emergent “expertise of the counterform”. The expertise of the counterform is unfolded as a metaphor for the type of expertise the pedagogues deploy as an unheeded effect of the merge. “Counterforming” occurs as the pedagogues grab onto issues ungrabbed by the schools, or as they sustain and support activities not sustained nor supported by the schools. The expertise of the counterform illustrates both potentials as the pedagogues work with the well-being of children, but problems arise as the conditions for work are individualized and fragmented. As such the pedagogues must guess and sense how to be relevant and competent in school, and so they end up miming school practices. Practices that the school leaders and teachers declaredly are eager to unsettle. To this point the article suggests that syncretic practices put pedagogues in individualized positions making them vulnerable and open to critique.