The Dynamics of Domestication in Utopian Methodological Research in Finnish Upper Secondary Schools

• In Event: Communities Doing Futures: Research-Practice Continuum for Justice and Expansive Learning

Abstract

This paper examines research-practice partnerships (Coburn & Penuel, 2016) with Finnish upper secondary school teachers and students. The research participants implemented projects to reimagine and change the existing ways of living and organizing activity in the school and neighborhood. The methodological approach was guided by utopian methodology, which is a form of Design-Based Intervention Research that can guide the process of envisioning, implementing, sustaining, and critically evaluating alternative activity systems that prefigure the utopian goal of sustainable futures (authors, 2023).

Utopian designs often challenge the status quo by unsettling stabilized notions of possibility (Gutierrez et al., 2020; Sannino, 2020). A central concern of utopian methodologies is the creation of conditions for resisting the domestication of utopian designs and their assimilation within prevailing power relations over time (Adorno, 1984; authors, 2023). The aim of this paper is to advance understanding about utopian methodologies by focusing on the dynamics of domestication and sustaining the radical edge of utopian designs. The following research questions guided the inquiry:
What conditions were created for implementing and sustaining the utopian designs and for resisting their domestication?
What challenges to the viability, achievability, and sustainability of the utopian designs in their learning ecologies emerged for observation over the time scale of several years?

Data were collected during 2020-2022 in three Finnish upper secondary schools. The teachers organized environmental education projects to engage students in climate actions. The ethnographic data include multiple interviews of four teachers and observational fieldnotes. The study employs an inductive qualitative analysis approach (Strauss & Corbin, 1997) based on open coding of excerpts that formed thematically coherent units of analysis. The coding focuses on challenges to the viability, achievability, and sustainability of the projects, as well as deliberate attempts to create favorable conditions for implementing and sustaining the projects.

The findings illuminate patterns of successes and failures emerging from the long-term commitment of the teachers and students to create favorable conditions for their utopian pursuits. Over time, the teachers were able to create new supportive structures and tools for their work. The findings also illuminate diverse strategies of dealing with the tensions regarding the politicized nature of the climate action projects. Some of the projects opted for cooperative strategies that contributed to taming of the radical edge of the projects but helped them to grow. Other projects employed more confrontational strategies, which engendered sociocultural tensions. The political climate and dominant values of the local settings mediated opportunities to pursue radical climate actions. Furthermore, the findings show how over time, teachers and students could overcome institutional and sociocultural obstacles for their activity, as well as advocate for and achieve changes in the schools and the municipalities.

In all, this study advances understanding of designed utopian activity and its changing relationship to sociocultural ecology, which is a fundamental goal of design-based research (Cobb et al., 2003). The study develops useful analytic tools for examining tensions that arise when utopian designs confront power relations while transforming the institutions in which they are implemented (Gutiérrez et al., 2020; Stetsenko, 2016).

Author

• Antti J. Rajala, University of Eastern Finland