Reflection on Interview with Dr. Karen Bjerg Peterson: Bildung, Dannelse & Education with a Capital E

This post was written by Christopher Ozuna, PhD Candidate at UC Santa Barbara, and accompanies the CTERIN Focus Interview with Karen Bjerg Petersen. Watch the interview on CTERIN's YouTube channel here.

A Common Starting Point

In January of this year, I walked off the plane at the Copenhagen airport and boarded a train to my new home at Aarhus University in central Denmark. While I was excited to be living in Europe, my arrival was not the way I had pictured it. Arriving in January meant I was arriving during the winter surge of COVID-19 that was occurring across Europe and many other parts of the world. The Danish capital was almost entirely locked down, and the winter streets were even emptier than they, I imagine, usually would be in January.

Marmokirken, the Marble Church, in Copenhagen during a winter flurry.

    Armed with my mask and a few words in Danish, I began my role as a visiting PhD student at the Danish School of Education (or Danmarks Institut for Pædagogik og Uddannelse as it’s known there, nicknamed DPU). I was there through a Fulbright grant to study Denmark’s teacher education system, specifically as it relates to preparing Danish teachers to work with the diversifying student population in the country, a relatively recent trend occurring there when compared to the US.

For the next 6 months, I was able to interview a variety of people involved in Denmark’s teacher education system. Throughout this entire time, I worked closely with Dr. Karen Bjerg Petersen, my supervisor at DPU. Karen helped me connect with teacher educators and candidates throughout Denmark. Karen and I also had many conversations about the broader education systems in our respective countries, and often she helped me process and make sense of what I was seeing, hearing and learning. During this time, I was also continuing to work part-time as a GSR for CTERIN, and when the idea came up to interview a teacher education scholar from abroad as part of our CTERIN Focus interview series, I pitched the idea to Karen and she agreed.

Throughout the interview, one of the main themes that stood out to me is how both our countries are trying to understand the role of standardized assessment in schools. I mainly work with quantitative research, and throughout grad school I have developed an interest in data science and data management more broadly, so I was keen to learn more about how other education systems are handling this. In the US, our current system of standardized testing is largely the result of decades of policies that aimed to both raise achievement and create a common understanding of those levels of achievement so we can compare within and across states. In short, our testing strategy is largely motivated by domestic policy. In Denmark, as a relatively small country both geographically (at ~16,000 square miles, it’s roughly double the size of New Jersey, but that is spread over a large space when you consider the many islands) and in terms of population (~5.8 million people, similar to Wisconsin), testing seems more driven by Denmark’s desire to understand itself in relation to its neighbors, especially within the EU. I heard this echoed throughout my time in Denmark. The common perception is that once Denmark was starting to be compared to other countries, largely through PISA (Program for International Student Assessment), this created more of a focus on what Danish children are learning and how well they’re doing, especially in comparison to children in other countries.

This brings up several key points. The first is the ontological question of what scholastic “achievement” or “performance” even is. Measuring learning is a very complicated endeavor, and before educators or an education system can reliably implement a tool such as a standardized test, we should be clear as to what our motivations are for doing so in the first place. Teacher education is directly linked to developing this understanding of the purpose of assessment, as teachers’ initial understanding and attitudes of the purposes and forms of assessment are heavily influenced by their teacher preparation. I do not purport to have the correct definition and purpose of assessment, nor do I believe there is a single correct definition and purpose. However, I do think there is a lack of agreement by the various stakeholders in education as to what the US is trying to achieve with its assessment strategy and through my conversations with Karen and other Danes in the field, I was surprised to see that Denmark seems to be undergoing a similar conversation, albeit sparked by different circumstances.

Bildung & Dannelse & Education

While the similarities of course provide a common foundation for understanding, possibly what’s most interesting to discuss when speaking with someone from a different country who is an expert in your same field is what is different. In the interview, Karen briefly mentions this idea of bildung, as a quick way to acknowledge a different way of viewing education and its purpose. In the interview, it’s implied that I also understand what she means when she references bildung, let me assure you that I spent much of my time in Denmark learning about this idea, grappling with its meaning and whether or not the idea of bildung fits into the context of American education systems at all.

Bildung can be thought of as the type of education that is more about the perpetual development of one’s own self across one’s entire life.* In Danish, the word uddannelse is often the word I would see translated to mean education. And Danes would use this in many of the ways we would refer to education as it relates to the education system or the concept of public education as a good or service provided by the state. Danes would also use this word when referring to a specific person participating in a specific education program. A Dane might say “I took an education to become an electrician.” An American would likely use the word “program” or “training” in this manner. This type of education has clear parameters and is something that can be completed.

However, the Danish word dannelse, while often also translated into education, is something different entirely. At first, people would tell me, “Dannelse is the Danish word for bildung.” This was not entirely helpful as I did not know what bildung was either, but I started to think of it as Education With a Capital E. Dannelse is more about the way a person grows and learns over time as part of a process of self-realization. In some ways it is an independent process (as it has its roots in the Western emphasis on the importance of the individual as a component of society), but it also connotes an individual’s growth in relation to the larger culture and society. Dannelse relates to compulsory academic education, but also encompasses morals and ethics, as well as other societal concepts such as participation in democracy. Dannelse is the type of education that is about becoming a full human, both as an individual, but crucially as an individual in one’s own society.

When a society distinguishes between the business of compulsory education as a means for training and employment preparation, and the type of education that is about self-actualization, it then follows that the education system would provide options, pathways and programming for both. This is largely how I began to understand the Danish education system. Going to Denmark to ask, “What are you doing in your K-12 system and how does teacher education fit into this?” is not the right question. While I initially learned about the compulsory components of the system (called folkeskole which roughly aligns with elementary and middle school, and gymnasium equivalent to high school), I quickly learned that not only does dannelse/bildung play a role in this part of the system, but that the system also allows for the pursuit and development of dannelse in ways that would not make sense in an American context.

One large example I came across to illustrate this would be the way Denmark structures its education offerings for children before they enter compulsory schooling. In Denmark, the system resembles more of a blend of the American institutions of daycare and preschool. It is play-based and considers the developmental appropriateness of activities in the way pre-school does, but it is available for infants through 5-year-olds in the way daycare is in the US. It is quite different from our system however, in that it is subsidized by the national government and many families receive stipends to help cover the costs, ensuring widespread access to these institutions and programs.

The second large example would be the other education offerings available to children and teenagers as they move through the compulsory school system. One such manifestation of this is through Denmark’s system of efterskoler. An efterskole is a type of residential boarding school, open to teenage students between 14 and 18 years old. At their efterskole, a student would likely take the typical academic curriculum, but many also specialize in other disciplines that the young person may be interested in, such as arts, specific sciences, sports, etc. Additionally, these boarding schools require co-living and shared chores of the students as a way to build community and facilitate responsibility and camaraderie. Oftentimes, the student may attend an efterskole for a single year before returning to their original school. Boarding schools certainly exist within the US, but the way they are more tightly integrated with the broader school system, and the way students can move between them is something that does not exist here for the typical American.

Bringing Lessons Home

Visiting another country for an extended period of time makes it easy to think that everything back home could be solved if we could just be a little more like, in this case, Denmark. And while I do think there are some policies we could almost directly emulate (such as universal access and financial subsidies to birth-to-5 education and childcare), I think the more sustainable use for an international exchange like this is to consider why Denmark has arrived at its current state, and what this type of system could look like in an American context. Danes will be the first to tell you that they are very proud of their country and their education system, and that they are a small country in the middle of the massive European Union, and that this has a large influence on how they see the world and their place in it.

Denmark is shown in red on this map, EU member countries (other than Denmark) are blue.

In my experience in Denmark and through my many conversations with Karen, I see not only concrete ideas of the way education can function (in both the uddanelse & dannelse senses) but also ways to better talk about why we have schools and what we want to achieve with them in the first place. This feels especially relevant in the current American context where we are renegotiating common understandings of many of our social, cultural and political institutions and norms. Even though my initial purpose for visiting DPU was to learn about the teacher education system (which is something I am very much interested in, and is the main focus of my dissertation which I am currently writing), I ended up spending much more time learning about the history and context of the Denmark’s schools. This is directly related to their teacher education system today, as teachers are being trained to sustain and reproduce this system in all its strengths and its flaws. This experience is also powerful in shaping how I think about California’s own teacher education system. By spending some time away from it, and also explaining how and why we do things the way we do in California, it has helped me understand how our history and context shapes our own system, and helps me more explicitly describe how it may be improved.

 

*Many many others have written extensively on the topic of bildung and I am mainly trying to describe my meeting with this topic for the first time. For an English translation of the original German writing by Willhelm von Humboldt who first articulated the concept, visit here.