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Teachers in three schools in a community in the northern part of Sweden tested prototype classrooms designed as innovative learning environments. This was an introductory step before merging the schools into one new school building, whose architecture was “new, innovative, modern, and flexible”. Our study spans six years of following this process with regard to how the aimed concept of student-centred learning develops during this time. The results presented here are based on data from the prephase, while the teachers explored the prototype classrooms to learn how these facilities created new preconditions, but also for preparing students for the move. The mixed data consist of both audio recordings of nine teachers during classes and retrospective interviews with the same teachers.

The analysis is based on our theory-driven framework, the Typology of Teacher Power and Control (TTPC) (Bergström & Wiklund-Engblom, 2022), derived from Bernstein’s (2000) theory of power and control. In TTPC, Bernstein’s concept of framing is interpreted as teacher’s use of control in communicative practice, while the concept of classification represents teacher’s power distribution regarding classroom organisation. Each of the two dimensions include several subcategories, which are our evaluative tool to identify variation of emerging teaching practices. 

In the first analysis, three clusters of teacher practice emerged, ranging from teacher-centred teaching to student-centred learning. These clusters were used in an integrated analysis with interview data, thematically analysed, to illuminate how teachers themselves reasoned. These results show differences in beliefs about power and control distribution in the classroom. The cluster of increased student-centredness had dialogical and relational approaches and beliefs, in contrast to the teacher-centred cluster, which discussed their choices in their practice in relation to controlling students and student behaviour in the environment.