New publication on Christian schoolscape

My most recent paper on schoolscapes has just been published in the Hungarian journal Regio. In this paper, I deal with connections between the material environment of education and school literacy. As a case study, I analyze the schoolscape of a Christian school in Finland. Across the history of Finnish education the role of religious literacy has changed fundamentally. While reading and interpreting the Bible constituted essential and accessible literacy for a wide population for centuries, religious and other layers of literacy are kept separate in the contemporary secular education system. I argue that (re)integrating religious and non-religious layers of literacy forms the essence of the schoolscape in the Christian school I studied.

As a fieldwork method, I used my own procedure called tourist guide technique. In the analysis, I use photographs and voice recordings when investigating schoolscape-related interpretations that we co-constructed with teachers of the school community. Visual intertextual references in the school are Bible-centered which indicates the dominance of Protestant traditions in the schoolscape. Further, I devote a special attention to the materialization of socializing students to personal prayers. Finally, I propose ethnographic and diachronic approaches to develop the field of schoolscape studies further.

Szabó, Tamás Péter 2017. Keresztény iskolai nyelvi tájkép [On Christian schoolscape]. Regio 25(3), 82–112. Open Access publication available online.