Making the Schoolyard: Recess, Recreation, Play, and Other Pedagogical Incentives to Regulate Outdoor School Spaces in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Sweden

Abstract

The present chapter examines early modern schooling in Sweden and more precisely how spatial conceptualizations of the outdoors (with regard to the use of it for recess, physical activity, recreational play, and other educational activities) were accumulated in formal curricula. The chapter draws attention to the introduction and origins of ideas connected to the use of the outdoors, the link between outdoor activities and specific school subjects, and the influence of dominating discourses. Theoretically, it expands on a Lefebvrian understanding of the production of social space and on his analytical distinction between different dimensions in this process. The chapter argues that this emergence of the schoolyard as a concept in formal planning was connected to a ‘pedagogization’ of the outdoor environment, which in turn enforced the design of new rules of conduct and an extended thinking about school governance. The making of the schoolyard meant a reconfiguration of the temporal and spatial preconditions of schooling and an expansion of ambitions to regulate pupils’ behaviour outside of the classroom walls.