Open-plan schooling and everyday utopias: Australia and Denmark in the 1970s

Abstract

This article explores the take-up and imaginaries of open-plan schooling during the 1970s, drawing on examples from Denmark and Victoria (Australia). As well as expressing new forms of classroom design and pedagogical praxis, open plan classrooms stood for reimagining schooling as a social institution and to possibilities for remaking student and teacher subjectivities. As a thoroughly transnational concept, the open-plan ethos was entwined with broader processes of social-cultural and political change and suffused with a critical optimism in its potential to inaugurate powerful transformations that extended beyond classrooms. We explore these aspects of open-plan schooling through Levitas´s..