ABSTRACT
The ongoing implementation and centrality of child-centered education has long been associated with the Nordic education model and the Nordic region more broadly. Understanding the emergence of this association has provided insight into the model’s historical development, illuminating a nexus of relations between schoolteachers, regional and international movements and discourses, and existing Nordic educational ideas. The chapter discusses a historical study using primary and secondary source document analysis. It focuses on the involvement of schoolteachers Anna Sethne and Georg Julius Arvin in two arenas of educational knowledge and practice exchange—the Nordic School Meetings and the New Education Fellowship conferences. The impact of N. F. S. Grundtvig’s educational ideas on Norwegian and Danish educational developments in combination with 19th-century Scandinavianism and 20th-century Nordic cooperation has functioned as preconditions for the development and transfer of—and receptivity towards—child-centered, progressive education ideas. The analysis has reinforced a notion that the transfer of ideas demands an interplay of people, places, and temporal contexts, and it adds to a body of literature studying the Nordic education model from an increasingly international perspective.
