The class of 1980: methodological reflections on educational high school narratives from Denmark in the 1970s and 1980s1

Abstract

This paper is based on the author’s experiences of interviewing seven men and seven women who graduated from a Danish high school in 1980, at a moment when the upper secondary system underwent a process of democratisation. She questioned the informants as to the role education has played in their lives, and as to the sense their choice of education makes to them. In addition to providing extensive narrative data about the experience of going through the educational system in the 1970s and 1980s, her interview process also raised two fundamental methodological issues. The first regards the relationship between the narrative and its historical context. The second relates to how narrated truths can be understood more as split and divided between the interviewee and the interviewer than as negotiated, as is frequently argued. In the paper it is suggested that these narratives act more as a testing ground for the development of interpretations and reflections about the early years of the so‐called “educational explosion” that has taken place in Denmark from the 1960s until today than as ultimate truths. 1 This article is an expanded version of a paper presented at the European Social Science History Conference in Amsterdam, March 2006. I would like to thank the participants in the session “Narratives of education” for very helpful comments. I would also like to thank my colleague Ida Juul for urging me to confront the methodological challenges related to my share in our research project “Schooling for Life: Educational System and Educational Narratives. Denmark 1945–2005”.