Mante Vertelyte

Project title

Not Liking School: Lived Experience of School Emotions

What is your project about?

My project explores how generations of school students in Denmark have resisted, disliked, and struggled with school – and what that can tell us about today’s concerns over youth wellbeing. Children had complicated relationships with school for as long as schools have existed. Some skipped classes or pretended to be sick; others attended school but did not like being there. Some even organized school strikes to demand better conditions. Combining the history of emotions and the history of education, the project examines the phenomenon of not liking school as a way of understanding how pupils’ emotional relationships with schooling have been shaped, expressed, and managed over time. Combining historical research with ethnographic interviews, the project explores how students in the Danish Folkeskole experienced and expressed school dislike from the late 1950s onwards, and how schools responded.

How did you become interested in your particular field of research?

Throughout my research career, I have been drawn to the ordinary parts of school life that are often overlooked because they seem too familiar to be interesting at first. Yet these everyday experiences can tell us a great deal about how schools work and how children experience them. My earlier research explored humour, friendship, and the everyday practices through which children find their place – or struggle to fit in – in school. What interested me was how seemingly mundane experiences are connected to larger questions of belonging, diversity and inclusion-exclusion. Over time, this curiosity led me to another commonplace phenomenon: not liking school. Most people can remember moments when they were bored, frustrated, uncomfortable, or simply did not want to be there. As concerns about children’s and young people’s wellbeing have grown, I became interested in understanding how experiences of not liking school have been lived and understood over time, and what this history can tell us about schools, emotions, and youth wellbeing at present.

What are the scientific challenges and perspectives in your project?

One of the central challenges of the project is that emotions rarely leave straightforward traces in historical sources. Feelings such as boredom, frustration, discomfort, or not wanting to be in school are often fleeting experiences that are difficult to capture retrospectively. Feelings related to school dislike often appear only indirectly – in school reports, pedagogical texts, policy documents, or public debates. To get closer to these experiences, the research project combines archival research and ethnographic-historical interviews with former students and educators. Together with the participants, we revisit their former schools, attend alumni and reunion events, and bring photographs, school reports, diaries, and other material objects into the research process. By combining archival traces with memories, places, and material objects of school life, the project develops new methodological approaches to studying how school emotions were lived, remembered, and understood over time.

What is your estimate of the impact, which your project may have to society in the long term?

Concerns about children and young people’s wellbeing have become a major social and political issue, and schools are often at the centre of these discussions. The research project brings historical perspective to these debates by exploring how experiences of school dislike have been lived, understood, and addressed over time. By looking at what is new and what has longer historical roots, the project can help us better understand how we arrived at the current situation and what lessons might be learned from it. It is my hope that the research will contribute to ongoing conversations about wellbeing, education, and school attendance by offering historical insights into challenges that many students, families, educators, and policymakers have grappled with for decades and continue to grapple with today.

Which impact do you expect the Sapere Aude programme will have on your career as a researcher?

The project is an important step in developing my research agenda that connects affect theory and educational ethnography with new historical perspectives on schooling. Being part of the Sapere Aude program enables me to establish and lead my first research team and strengthen meaningful international collaborations. It allows me to further develop my leadership experience and build a research environment that supports early-career scholars and enables them collaborate as well as to develop their own research ideas. Doing a Sapere Aude project allows me to develop a research program that brings together historical and ethnographic approaches to the study of schooling and emotions.