Student writers in dialogue with the local community – an open school course

Abstract

Open school has been a mandatory part of school operation in Denmark since the reform in 2014. As an open school, the primary school is obliged to involve the outside world and cooperate with external actors who can thus contribute to supporting learning in the school subjects. As an attempt to represent and make writing visible as a social and potentially change-creating action, the article explores the importance of a collaboration with an external player – a pedagogue from a local Youth Center. This collaboration can be said to have the character of an open school course and is the focal point of the article.

The cooperation itself included, that the students in two 5^th grade classrooms were invited to produce project descriptions in order to contribute to the development of the Youth Center. The article draws on interview data, audio recordings and observational notes from the project. Data is approached from a positioning theoretical perspective.

Based on this, the article shows how the combination of teacher-initiated didactic writing activities (including the students’ work with a scaffolding writing map) and the pedagogue’s positioning of herself as a sincere text user and of the students as sincere contributors, contributes to actualizations of qualified and meaningful forms of partici­pation for the students.

The article thus contributes to shedding light on the possibilities of open school by pointing out how the didactic person (the Danish teacher) and an external actor, by virtue of their diverse roles, constitute different resource persons who can complement each other in a qualifying way in the academic teaching.