Introduction

The purpose of this article is to demonstrate and discuss the scientific and societal relevance of interdisciplinary research collaborations in educational contexts in which researchers engage in collaborative local transformations of practice while developing knowledge and theory. This methodological approach to theory development seems particularly promising for upholding the scientific ideal of democratising knowledge production. Because when researchers engage in local transformations of practice, while simultaneously developing theory about these very same processes of change, knowledge production holds promise to become democratic through its flexibility of being able to continuously integrate various forms of critique, contributions, and contestations among those with whom we collaborate, children as well as adults. By means of such a collaborative and transformative approach to research, it furthermore becomes possible to experiment with new ways of addressing and manoeuvring within the historical and socio-political contradictions, dilemmas, and struggles in the educational practices with which our co-researchers are affiliated.

The empirical foundations for this argumentation were developed during my PhD project exploring cultures of care within communities of children. During 15 months of fieldwork at a Danish municipal primary school, I collaborated with a schoolteacher and the 21 2nd gradeFootnote 1 children in her class (age 8–9). Here, the aim was to jointly develop an intervention framework to support the development of a culture of care within the community of children, while simultaneously developing knowledge and theory about the conditions that enable the development of such cultures within the contradictory historical and socio-political context of the Danish Folkeskole (the Danish term denoting municipal primary and lower secondary schools). Throughout the article, this research collaboration will serve as an empirical example of how the introduced transformative methodological approach to theory development in and for educational practice could take shape.

Methodologically, the primary inspiration for this approach is drawn from three research traditions, all of which are rooted in the Marxist, Leont’evian, and Vygotskian heritage of cultural-historical psychology and activity theory. These traditions are German-Scandinavian critical psychological practice research (e.g., Chimirri & Pedersen, 2019; Højholt & Kousholt, 2014; Holzkamp, 2013b; Nissen, 2000a), Transformative Activist Stance (TAS) (Stetsenko, 2011, 2015, 2022; Vianna & Stetsenko, 2014; Vianna et al., 2014), and the Change Laboratory Framework (Virkkunen & Newnham, 2013) based on Engeström’s (2015) theory of expansive learning.

Before presenting these three traditions, I will outline a theoretical idea for the field of care I developed prior to the initiation of the research collaboration presented above. This theoretical idea, which is formulated as a collective notion of care within communities of children, thus serves as a sort of starting point for the transformative research collaboration around which this article revolves.

Theoretical foundations

A collective notion of care

By emphasising a collective notion of care, my aim is to contribute to the body of work by a range of scholars who are preoccupied with superseding dyadic notions of care (for instance, as seen in the work of Noddings (1984)) that are characterised by an analytical focus solely on the relationship between the caregiver and the care receiver (Chatzidakis et al., 2020; Tronto, 2013). One way in which I seek to contribute to this endeavour in the field of educational psychology is by suggesting a slightly altered analytical scope when defining the object of care within a community of children. Instead of attempting to identify the needs of particular children (referred to as the care receivers), I suggest the object of care being the so-called ‘productive needs’ for agency, which, according to the concept’s progenitor Ute Holzkamp-Osterkamp, are shared by every member of a community (Holzkamp-Osterkamp, 1991; Nissen, 2023). This critical psychological notion points to the universal productive need among adults and children alike toward increasing influence on the societal conditions of their lives in collaboration with others. By altering the analytical scope in this way, I conceptualise care as a collective practice and ideal that aims to serve the interests of every child in a community, and not just the interests of the few children who, for various reasons, have been designated as the care receiver. Following Tronto’s (2013) concept of care practices’ interrelationships, a collective practice of care within a community children is nested within a range of other care practices, for instance those of educational professionals aiming to care for the productive needs of schoolchildren. When such professional care practices develop pedagogical interventions based on the presented collective notion of care, it is the mutual conditions of life that children share, ascribe meaning to, (re)produce, and struggle with together that becomes the object of analysis and transformation.

This altered scope renders it possible to deem the collective practices with which the community of children struggle as the object of pedagogical intervention, as shown later. Now, however, I will present the three research traditions mentioned above, all of which have served as methodological inspiration for the transformative research approach presented throughout this article.

Practice research

Practice research is based on a philosophical understanding of the relation between theory and practice that transcends its hierarchical dichotomisation (Holzkamp, 2013a; Jensen, 1999). As such, theory development is not regarded as an activity reserved for scientists (Axel & Højholt, 2019). Whether a teacher, a researcher, a parent, or even a child, we all participate across structures of social practices in which knowledge and theories are continuously developed, adjusted, and refuted in order to understand and change the social practices that we are constantly in the process of (re)producing (Axel & Højholt, 2019).

Inherent to every social practice is a historically accumulated body of knowledge and theory, that seeks to address and overcome the common problems, struggles, and historical contradictions of the social practice. This implies that research can be understood as a process of collaboration between (at least) two social practices, each with a history of collective struggles and strivings (Højholt & Kousholt, 2019a). This so-called ‘joint venture’ (Mørck, 2000; Nissen, 2000a) between a research practice and a local practice is guided by the ethos that neither of their respective bodies of knowledge should be deemed superior to the other. Instead, the form of knowledge to strive for is the one that is developed in collaboration between the two practices and holds transformative relevance for the future development of both (Nissen, 2000b, 2012).

TAS

When it comes to conceptualising research collaboration as a transformative endeavour, the TAS framework developed by Anna Stetsenko (2011, 2015, 2020, 2022) and Eduardo Vianna (Vianna & Stetsenko, 2014; Vianna et al., 2014) has been another theoretical source of inspiration. Like the practice research tradition, TAS is based on a Marxist understanding of the dialectical relation between the processes of exploring and transforming a specific social practice. By implication, Stetsenko argues, collaborative educational research must be organised methodologically as activist, future directed endeavours towards local transformations of practice. TAS rests upon the ontological-epistemological axiom that the world and the psychological phenomena we investigate are never static and fixed elements of a structure that exists independently of us. When it comes to the content of scientific theories, Stetsenko (2015) posits, the aim should therefore not be to uncover some value-neutral notion of ‘how things are’. Instead, theory development and knowledge production must be thought of as an ethical and political endeavour to envision a better future and conceptualise ways of getting there within the present historical and socio-political context (Stetsenko, 2022). This epistemological axiom has become a cornerstone of the transformative collaboration between the schoolteacher and myself, underpinning our shared aim of supporting the future development of ‘cultures of care within communities of children’ while also developing theory concerning how to realise this envisioned development within the current socio-political conditions of Danish educational practices.

As mentioned, the schoolteacher and I intended to support the realisation of this envisioned future of cultures of care by developing an intervention framework with this very aim. To this end, I sought inspiration in Engeström’s (2015) theory of expansive learning and the associated Change Laboratory Framework (Virkkunen & Newnham, 2013).

Expansive learning and formative interventions

Expansive learning is, in short, the collective process through which a local community develops agency and historically new forms of practice by means of analysing and transcending the double binds and contradictions inherent to the social structure of the status quo (Engeström, 2015). According to Engeström and Sannino (2010), such processes follow the dialectical method of ascending from the abstract to the concrete. In practice, this means that the object of the collective activity, for instance in the form of a problem articulated among the community members, initially takes the form of an abstraction, a so-called ‘germ cell’ carrying the contradictions of the object (Engeström, 2020). Gradually, however, this object becomes more concrete and complex through explorations of its historical origin, formation, and logic of development, as well as its empirical manifestations, inner systemic contradictions, and possible solutions (Engeström & Sannino, 2010). This gradual enrichment of the concreteness of the object can be supported by researchers by arranging ‘Change Laboratories’ (Virkkunen & Newnham, 2013) — so-called formative interventions mediating a non-linear cycle of expansion, ideally consisting of the following seven epistemic actions of the community (Engeström & Sannino, 2010): (1) Questioning the status quo, for instance by criticising aspects of it. (2) Analysing explanations behind the problem at hand, either by tracing its historical origin or by unravelling its actual-empirical inner systemic relations. (3) Modelling a representation of a possible solution to the problem on the basis of its analysed explanations. (4) Examining the model through experimentation to gain a comprehensive understanding of its possibilities and limitations. (5) Implementing the model in practice to let it further develop in the face of its real-life application. (6) Reflecting on and evaluating the preceding processes. (7) Consolidating the new practice that has both emerged from and been refined on the basis of the entire cycle of expansion.

In order to support such processes in practice, researchers ought to follow a range of intervention principles (Engeström & Sannino, 2010; Virkkunen & Newnham, 2013): For instance, the content, form, and goals of a formative intervention must continuously remain open to negotiation among the participants, and thus cannot and should not be defined in advance. Furthermore, if the participants express critique or resistance toward the form, content, or goal of the intervention, this must be addressed and incorporated in a (re)negotiation of the structure of the intervention. I will later present an adaptation of these, and more, intervention principles tailored to an educational context with children as the intervention participants.

To exemplify what a transformative research collaboration that is based on the above research traditions could entail, I will now present my collaboration with a schoolteacher and the intervention framework we were in the process of developing.

Excerpts from a transformative research collaboration

A methodological journey

In January 2022, a schoolteacher and I embarked upon a methodological journey that lasted until December 2022. At this point, she and I had already been working together for two years, during which we developed pedagogical interventions aimed at supporting well-being (Gylling-Andersen, 2021a) and democratic participation (Gylling-Andersen, 2021b), respectively, among children in educational contexts. Against the backdrop of our mutual struggles and strivings from our years of collaborating, as well as the three research traditions outlined above, we set out to develop a formative intervention framework whose aim is to support cultures of care within communities of children. Apart from being developed for and with the 2nd grade children of the schoolteacher’s class, this framework also sought to address a range of broader pedagogical and scientific issues. Regarding the pedagogical issues, the framework was intended to represent a novel way of approaching a number of general issues that educational professionals in Denmark have historically struggled with across educational contexts. I will present some of these issues later. Regarding the scientific issues, the framework is a methodological means of approaching a general theoretical challenge — qualifying and putting into practice a collective notion of care.

The Class Laboratory: an intervention framework

The schoolteacher and I have chosen to name our intervention framework ‘The Class Laboratory’. The pedagogical aim is to support a community of children in developing cultural tools that can help them transform or navigate within collective forms of practice with which the community of children struggle. As such, the framework is rooted in a normative theoretical and ethical–political endeavour to support children in gaining increased control over the societal conditions of their lives — aligned with the emancipatory purpose of German-Scandinavian critical psychology (Chimirri & Pedersen, 2019; Tolman, 1994). In practice, the intervention was divided into 12 sessions that took place in and around the 2nd grade children’s classroom, spanning from February until December 2022. The sessions were facilitated by the schoolteacher and observed by me, with each session lasting approximately 50–70 min. As the name indicates, it is inspired by the Change Laboratory Framework (Virkkunen & Newnham, 2013). Equally, we have found inspiration in this framework’s intervention principles in the development of our own. Hence, every Class Laboratory session was guided by the following principles:

  1. (1)(1)(1)

    The content, form, and goals of the intervention cannot and should not be strictly defined in advance but remain open to negotiation among participating children throughout the intervention. (2) A democratic ideal is pursued by continuously providing the children the possibility to express their perspectives. (3) Every object of collective analysis should be based on the children’s perspectives and sense of relevance. (4) Any conflict, resistance, or critique among the participating children that emerges during, and/or is directed towards, the intervention framework should not be seen as a disturbance that must be confined. These should rather be interpreted as expressions of agency (Haapasaari et al., 2016; Sannino, 2010) and therefore a rich source of information that should be addressed and integrated within negotiations of the intervention’s form and content. (5) The logic of ascending from the abstract to the concrete, meaning that the concreteness and complexities of the contradictory object of every session, i.e. a particular collective practice with which the children struggle, must continuously by expanded and enriched through collaborative explorations of its social dynamics, inner contradictions, and historical emergence. (6) The Vygotskian principle of double stimulation, reinterpreted by Sannino (2015) and Engeström et al. (2022) as a path for developing collective transformative agency. In practice, this means that cultural tools should be developed as a means of overcoming the double-binds and contradictions of the collective practices with which the community of children struggle. (7) The participating children must be afforded mediating conceptual tools for them to use both when they analyse the contradictory dynamics and historical emergence of the status quo and when they develop novel ways of overcoming or navigating within these tensions (Engeström, 2011; Virkkunen & Newnham, 2013). These can both take shape as material representations, such as drawings, words on a black board, a theatrical display, and as ideal representations, such as a thought or an idea.

In our attempt to tailor the Change Laboratory Framework to an educational context with children as participants, the schoolteacher and I developed an eighth intervention principle: (8) Every object of collective analysis and transformation of the community should concern collective practices with which the children, especially those in marginalised positions, struggle.

In the following sections, I will analyse the methodological development of our eighth intervention principle, as well as arguing that our continuous transformative commitment toward actualising it in practice expanded our theoretical understanding of how to support the development of cultures of care within communities of children.

I will now invite the reader on a journey back to January 2022 and to a meeting room at the municipal governed school in Copenhagen where the schoolteacher works. Here, we planned the preliminary structure of ‘The Class Laboratory’ sessions over the course of two two-hour meetings.

The initial meetings in a joint venture

The schoolteacher and I had agreed that our first meetings should be focused on discussing the overall structure of the different sessions comprising our formative intervention with the children. We discussed both content and form by envisaging which problems the children might address and analyse during the intervention, as well as how we could support this process through different pedagogical activities based on various intervention principles. Against the epistemological ethos of ‘joint ventures’, we strived to democratise our discussions and knowledge productions by acknowledging that all of our perspectives should be both respected as equal carriers of knowledge, recognised as grounded in the history of a social practice, and susceptible to critique.

During our first meeting, I suggested that the children should be encouraged to define, analyse, and address ‘types of situations from their everyday life with which they struggle’. This suggestion was rooted in a cultural-historical ethos of supporting and maintaining an analytical focus on collective practices of the people for whom a particular intervention is developed (Engeström, 2015; Virkkunen & Newnham, 2013). Denoting it ‘types of situations’ was my attempt to establish a common ground with the schoolteacher in an everyday discourse. With this suggestion, I also sought to maintain a collective notion of care, where the object of analysis and transformation was the shared conditions of life of the community of children (in the form of collective practices/‘types of situations’). During my presentation of this idea, I asked the schoolteacher whether she thought it would make sense and whether it could be realised in practice. She told me that it did indeed make sense to her, although she had a few reservations, with a range of seemingly urgent matters in her professional life as a teacher pointing to some limitations inherent to, and thus a critique of, my suggestion. This calls for some backstory.

Children in marginalised positions

Since the children of the schoolteacher’s class started in the 1st grade, the teacher and her colleagues have had heightened concerns for the well-being of two boys in particular. These two children both seemed to struggle across the various educational contexts in which they participated in the course of their everyday lives. One of these boys, pseudonymised as Philip, primarily struggled within the social domain among his peers, while the other boy, pseudonymised as Amir, struggled both socially and academically.

Without digging deeper into the stories of the boys, the schoolteacher brought up these heightened concerns during our initial meetings. More specifically, she proposed, on the ground of her professional concern for the well-being of Philip and Amir, that the intervention framework we were developing could have a specific aim of attending the needs of these particular children in marginalised positions.

The synthesis of ideas

Due to our mutual respect for and recognition of each other’s perspectives, we agreed to try and synthesise our seemingly contradictory perspectives, searching for a way to maintain a collective level of analysis throughout the intervention’s various phases while simultaneously addressing the needs of specific children in marginalised positions. To achieve this, we came up with an addition to the part of the intervention process in which the schoolteacher and I selected which ‘types of situations from the children’s everyday life with which the children struggle’ should constitute the unit of analysis for a given Class Laboratory session. More specifically, we agreed that the ‘types of situations from their everyday life with which the children, especially those in marginalised positions, struggle’ should function as our selection criteria prior to each Class Laboratory session. The productive needs of children in marginalised positions hereby became an inherent and inevitable part of the intervention framework, without this happening at the expense of maintaining a collective level of analysis during the intervention.

As I will show in the following sections, the eighth intervention principle that emerged from this collaborative process came to represent the first step towards an expanded theoretical understanding of how to support the development of cultures of care within communities of children.

Analyses of methodological processes of theory development

A historical and socio-political contextualisation of an intervention principle

Before demonstrating how the schoolteacher and I realised our eighth intervention principle in practice, I will present a historical and socio-political contextualisation of this principle against the historical backdrop of the institutional practice in, with, and for which the framework was developed: The Danish Folkeskole. Firstly, I highlight some general contradictions and common struggles that have characterised this societal institution throughout its history — and continue to do so today. Secondly, I will illustrate, by means of a visual representation, how our eighth intervention principle can point towards a novel scope of possibilities, helping educational professionals who struggle with manoeuvring within these historical-institutional contradictions and common problems.

The contradiction of (in)flexibility

The contradiction of (in)flexibility has its historical roots in the emergence of Denmark as a ‘competition state’ around the mid-1990s (Pedersen, 2011), and in the subsequent emergence of neoliberal governance tools within Danish education policy (Imsen et al., 2017). This contradiction emerged between, on the one hand, the flexibility that has historically characterised the pedagogical practices of Danish school professionals who have adapted these practices to the needs of every unique child and community based on their situational professional judgement, and, on the other hand, the inflexibility of the neoliberal educational policies and tools of governance that have increasingly permeated these very same pedagogical practices over the past thirty years (Imsen et al., 2017; Moos, 2005; Rasmussen & Moos, 2014).

The paradox of inclusion

Since the Danish Parliament (2012, 2013) passed the so-called Inclusion Act in 2012 and implemented a reform of the Danish Folkeskole in 2014, it has been a political objective to include children with so-called ‘special needs’ within mainstream education (Danish Ministry of Eduation, 2023). However, by complying with this political demand, these particular children are at risk of being seen as deviating from the norm due to individual deficiencies, such as a psychiatric diagnosis, a physical disability, or a disadvantageous socio-cultural background (Jacobsen, 2016; Røn Larsen, 2012; Vehmas, 2010). In cases where this so-called deficit-based understanding (Hjörne, 2004) translates into individualised pedagogical practices where the child is defined as the problem, as unit of analysis, and as site of transformation, practices of inclusion bear the risk of promoting what they are supposed to be preventing — namely processes of marginalisation by which children who struggle are identified as problems to be solved. Herein lies a paradox of inclusion. This is closely connected to the final institutional issue I will highlight.

Problem displacement

A general problem present within, albeit not confined to, the institutional practices of the Danish Folkeskole has been labelled ‘problem displacement’ (Højholt, 2022). This concept refers to a common process across various practices of school life in which complex social problems are explained with reference to individual deficits, shortcomings, or a lack of competence (Højholt & Kousholt, 2019b; Kousholt & Højholt, 2022; Mardahl-Hansen, 2018).

A visual contextualisation of an intervention principle

By means of a visual representation, I have created a continuum that shows how our eighth intervention principle both addresses and is situated within the aforementioned historical institutional struggles and contradictions. As shown below, this continuum represents a range of pedagogical approaches revolving around the same so-called common cause (Axel & Højholt, 2019) of wanting to support transformative development within communities of children by means of case-based interventions (Fig. 1).

Fig. 1
figure 1

Considerations when developing case-based interventions aiming to support transformative development within communities of children

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The left pole

When developing case-based interventions with children, the content of the case can be abstracted from the everyday life of the children to a greater or lesser extent (see horizontal axis). On the left pole of the continuum, I have placed the descriptive case based on the children’s accounts of concrete situations. A common example is when children return to their classroom from break and tell their teacher about a conflict they have just experienced. This often becomes a practice of name-calling, for instance if a child says, ‘he did [something], and then she did [something]’. When educational professionals engage themselves in this dialog, for instance with the aim of resolving the conflict and prevent conflicts like this in the future, the case-based intervention is situated on the left side of the continuum. As such situations call for situational professional judgement, this interventional structure represents the side of flexibility within the aforementioned contradiction inherent in educational practices of the Danish Folkeskole.

The right pole

On the right pole of the continuum, I have placed the standardised case based on the abstractions of others (typically adults). This can be found within many standardised manual-based well-being interventions in schools, where children are encouraged to analyse a case consisting of content that has been deemed problematic by the interventionist: for instance, a case of bullying. The underlying assumption in such interventions is that the children’s analytical reflections will accompany them outside the classroom and thus improve the children’s behaviour in situations that resemble the specific case. Due to the standardised, fixed, and inflexible nature of the content of the case, intervention approaches at this end of the continuum represent the neoliberal approach within the aforementioned contradiction inherent in educational practices of the Danish Folkeskole. The intervention framework Perspekt 2.0, which is a Danish adaptation of the American Social Emotional Learning paradigm, is a prototypical example of such an approach (Durlak et al., 2011; Larsen & Simonsen, 2020, 2021).

The risks of unintended consequences

Both poles of the continuum of case-based intervention practices carry each their own risks of unintended consequences. When structuring an intervention around a standardised case, there is a risk that it will lack a sense of relevance for the children. This is due to the highly abstract and inflexible nature of the case in question, which is neither based on the children’s perspectives nor open to re-negotiation that could address the children’s critique of its lack of relevance. As a sense of relevance and meaningfulness among those participating in a given intervention is a prerequisite for any future voluntary processes of change (Valsiner, 1997), interventions based on standardised cases are unlikely to result in the intended change.

At the other end of the continuum, interventions based on the children’s accounts of concrete situations risk contributing to unethical positionings of individual children as problems, thus supporting existing or creating new processes of individualisation, exclusion, or marginalisation. This approach thus seems to risk (re)producing problem displacement.

A proposal for a theoretical-ethical ideal

Based on the schoolteacher’s and my collaboration to define our intervention’s unit of analysis, I drew up a proposal for a theoretical-ethical ideal with the aim of pointing toward a novel way of approaching the historical-institutional contradictions, problems, and risks depicted in the model. As formulated in the model, this ideal is a case based on the children’s abstractions of their collective practices of everyday life with which the children, especially those in marginalised positions, struggle. Inherent to this type of case-based intervention is a range of intertwined ethical and methodological endeavours. Firstly, the aim is to prevent the reproduction of an unethical practice of problem displacement and individualisation that positions the individual child as both the unit of analysis and site of change. This aim is pursued by insisting on ‘collective practices’ as the content of the case. This analytical focus is simultaneously rooted in a methodological ambition of conducting analysis at a collective level whereby the children’s social conditions of life are brought to the fore as the unit of analysis and transformation. Secondly, this ideal represents the schoolteacher’s and my proposal for addressing the general pedagogical issue of inclusion and the associated need to target interventions at the needs of children in marginalised positions while maintaining a collective level of analysis and transformation.

In regard to the contradiction of (in)flexibility, this ideal sits somewhere between the inflexibility of standardised pedagogical practices and approaches that rely entirely on flexible and situational professional judgements. While the content of the intervention (i.e. the case) is highly flexible — defined, adjusted, perhaps even refuted based on the children’s perspectives — the form it takes in practice is shaped by a number of inflexible intervention principles. These include the principle of maintaining a collective level of analysis and the principle of utilising the perspectives of children in marginalised positions as a criterion for selecting a particular collective practice as the object of analysis and transformation.

Theory development through collaborative transformative endeavours

I will now provide an empirical example of how the schoolteacher, named Camilla,Footnote 2 and I attempted to put our eighth intervention principle into practice in collaboration with the children. In addition, I will demonstrate how a particular situation expanded our theoretical understanding of transformative endeavours whose aim is support the future development of cultures of care within communities of children.

The first Class Laboratory session

In the weeks following our preliminary meetings, Camilla and I organised our first Class Laboratory session under the heading ‘When we play together in 2B’. This theme was chosen based on our shared and recurring observation that many of the children, including Amir and Philip (two children in marginalised positions), often seemed to struggle within the social practice of play. Conflicts regularly arose among the children when playing during breaks, often bringing the play to an end. Furthermore, emotional expressions of various negative valence among the children often occur during these situations. Camilla and I therefore wanted to support the children in analysing these situations and in developing cultural tools to overcome the dilemmas and contradictions embedded in the conflictual dynamics with which they seemed to struggle. I will now present an excerpt from my observations of the initial part of this session.

Excerpt from observations, 01.02.2022

It is Tuesday, 10 am and all the children in 2B are returning to class from break. While they find their seats, Camilla sits at her desk facing the class. After a quick discussion of events during the break, she introduces the children to a new activity: ‘The Class Laboratory’. She tells them that this laboratory is a place where, over the coming months, they will experiment with situations from the children’s school lives. A place where they can practise being in difficult situations and, together, come up with ideas for dealing with such situations. A place where no one, neither adults nor children, has the answers in advance; instead, they will have to figure things out together. After this introduction, Camilla asks the children to come to the front of the class and sit on the floor in front of a blackboard. Here, she introduces the heading for today’s session: ‘When we play together in 2B’. Camilla tells the children that, in a moment, she will ask them to describe situations at school where conflicts arise during play. However, she stresses, they cannot use any names when describing these situations. So, instead of describing who did what to whom and when, they must describe what was happening in the situation. Camilla gives an example: “I think it is difficult when we have to agree what to play”. She then asks the children whether they can come up with examples. Half of the children put their hands in the air. “When somebody leaves while we’re playing”, Carl says. Camilla writes it on the board. “When one person says ‘you’re dead’, and the other one says ‘no I’m not’”, Oscar continues. Camilla writes it down – and so it continues, with the children describing various cases. At one point, Camilla asks Lucas, who says: “It’s because Amir kicked…”. Camilla stops him and reminds him that they are not supposed to mention any names. After a few seconds, with a thoughtful look on his face, Lucas says: “A person kicked…”. Loudly, from the seat behind Lucas, Amir exclaims “accident!”, with a seemingly frustrated expression on his face. Camilla writes ‘accident’ on the board, saying that this is a situation where there exists a misunderstanding about what happened. She then writes ‘misunderstanding’ and draws an arrow from ‘accident’ to ‘misunderstanding’.

Theoretical implications of a single case

Later that week, Camilla and I held our first evaluation meeting (of many) to discuss the previous Class Laboratory session and in particular the situation described above. During our discussion of this incident, we inferred that our intervention framework had made it possible to position Amir as a misbehaving and violent child — a practice of individualisation he had often been subject to before. The framework therefore risked reinforcing Amir’s already marginalised position. This had theoretical implications for our understanding of what we had deemed a theoretical-ethical ideal. On the basis of the situation with Lucas and Amir, a general theoretical notion could be derived: When engaged in the process of supporting cultures of care within communities of children, there is a risk of unintentionally supporting what this process is meant to overcome: namely, processes of individualisation, exclusion, and marginalisation.

This notion had implications for both the future of our intervention practice and the theoretical framework we were developing. Regarding the former, the theoretical notion produced a heightened awareness between the schoolteacher and me toward structuring future Class Laboratory sessions in ways that would prevent the emergence of such marginalising processes. Regarding the latter, my visual representation of our theoretical-ethical ideal had to be adapted. Our ideal could no longer be justified without at least incorporating a disclaimer regarding the risks of unintended negative social consequences. A part of the normative theoretical model was therefore revised as follows (Fig. 2):

Fig. 2
figure 2

Revised theoretical-ethical ideal when developing case-based interventions aiming to support transformative development within communities of children

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As shown, the theoretical-ethical ideal was hereby accompanied by a disclaimer with the phrase ‘implies the risks at both ends of the continuum’. I chose to write ‘both ends’ rather than just ‘the left end’ as formative interventions based on our intervention principles surely also imply the risk associated with the right pole.

Discussion

Among scholars of critical and cultural-historical branches of psychology, a common challenge inherent to the methodological endeavour of theory development is to appraise, as well as render probable, the societal relevance of a theory while in the midst of its development. Various methodological strategies have been developed in order to address this challenge. Stetsenko (2015), for one, has argued that the societal relevance of a theory can be appraised against analyses of contemporary and historical socio-political struggles that the theory is meant to help overcome. Throughout this article, I have attempted to outline such an approach by providing the historical and institutional contextualisation of the schoolteacher’s and my eighth intervention principle. I have highlighted a range of historical and socio-political struggles and contradictions inherent to the Danish Folkeskole and illustrated how parts of our theoretical intervention framework represent an attempt to address and overcome some of these issues. Another methodological strategy developed to overcome the common challenge mentioned above is to democratise the process of theory development (Højholt & Kousholt, 2019a). This is often pursued against the backdrop of a methodological ideal where the process of theory development is rendered receptive to critique and contestation from representatives of the group of people addressed by and who are expected to benefit from the theory in question (Axel & Højholt, 2019). I contend that the methodological approach to theory development presented in this article holds great promise for upholding the ideal of continuously incorporating various forms of critique and contestation from the people a given theory concerns. I will now attempt to support this claim.

Throughout this article, I have tried to show how our collaborative theory development was continuously qualified by critique from both the schoolteacher and the children it was intended to benefit. In the case of the schoolteacher, her critique was embedded in her reservations concerning my initial suggestion to what should constitute the unit of analysis during our Class Laboratory sessions. She pointed to its crucial drawback, that it was unable to address the urgent need to target pedagogical initiatives at children in marginalised positions. As detailed above, we then synthesised our ideas to formulate a joint theoretical-ethical ideal. This synthesis, catalysed by critique and contradictory perspectives, seemed crucial for the scientific quality of our joint knowledge production. Not only by virtue of democratising our collaborative theory development, but also for enhancing the likelihood of relevance for educational practices other than our own. Allow me to clarify.

Imagine if I had rejected the schoolteacher’s idea of targeting the intervention at specific children in marginalised positions. Not only would our intervention framework lack to be meaningful and relevant for the schoolteacher as it would be unable to address some of the important urgent issues in her pedagogical practice. It would probably also not be meaningful or relevant for other educational professionals engaged with a common cause similar to that of the schoolteacher and I as the dilemma of targeting interventions at specific children in marginalised positions while maintaining a collective level of analysis is a common and unresolved issue across educational contexts in Denmark (Borring, 2021; Borring & Kousholt, 2023; Böwadt et al., 2019; Ydesen & Andersen, 2020). If an intervention framework such as ours, with its aim of promoting care within a community of children, fails to take this issue into account, it is therefore likely to have little relevance to other educational contexts, rendering its scientific and societal value questionable at best.

Apart from being receptive to critique from the educational professionals with whom transformative educational research projects are developed, the presented methodological approach supports the continuous incorporation of both direct and indirect critique from the children who are intended to benefit from the knowledge produced. This, I argue, is due to the methodological design where the process of exploring and transforming an educational practice become two sides of the same methodological endeavour. By exploring the problems, dilemmas, and historical and socio-political contradictions of a particular educational practice while experimenting with practice-realisations of theories concerning how to address and navigate within them, it becomes possible to continuously adjust these theories on the basis of critique from the children who are intended to benefit. This was the case, or at least the intention, in the research project presented in this article. The methodological design enabled the schoolteacher and me to not only collaborate on the development of theories for approaching historical-institutional issues in novel ways, but also to continuously test out their relevance in collaboration with the children. It thus became possible for us to both continuously appraise whether our theories had the intended transformative relevance and flexibly adjust these theories to account for any unforeseen dilemmas and struggles. The situation with Lucas and Amir served as an example of such a dilemma. Amir’s emotionally loaded exclamation (“accident!”) is interpreted as an indirect critique of the arrangement of the intervention that rendered it possible for Lucas to identify Amir as a problem. As shown, this situation led to a refinement of the schoolteacher’s and my formulation of a theoretical-ethical ideal for supporting transformative development within communities of children. With Amir’s critique as the catalyst, we refined our theory to encompass a general recommendation for educational professionals who engage in transformative processes similar to those of the schoolteacher and me. Namely that, even when trying to initiate pedagogical initiatives with an explicit normative-ethical focus on preventing individualisation among participating children, educational professionals should be aware of the risk of such processes occurring regardless.

In closing, I want to stress that I do not regard the transformative methodological approach to theory development presented in this article as some kind of ‘best practice’. Instead, it should be seen as a suggestion for how educational researchers with different objects of analysis can complement each other in the shared pursuit of producing societally relevant research. More specifically, collaboration between scholars preoccupied with historical analyses of a given educational institution and scholars preoccupied with situated transformative educational research can be mutually beneficial. Without historical context, situated transformative educational research risks a lack of scientific rigour when justifying its broader societal relevance. Conversely, the societal relevance of historical-institutional analyses is dependent on people who make use of the analytical insights to develop new forms of educational practice. This leads me to ask a final rhetorical question: Could researchers who employ a transformative methodological approach, such as the one presented in this article, offer a gateway to documenting the societal relevance of historical analyses concerning a given educational institution by demonstrating how these historical insights help to (in)form the transformation of contemporary educational practices?