Social Cohesion as a Didactic Category and Facilitator for School Attendance

School Attendance Problems have been a rising concern in most educational systems for the last decade. The pandemic represented an unforeseen disruption of education, with school lockdowns, restrictions, social distancing, and gradual re-openings. In the aftermath of the pandemic, there were hopes that schools would 'build back better' and create alternative learning environments. However, the takeaway lessons from the COVID-19 pandemic seem to have somehow been forgotten in ‘normalized’ post-pandemic school life. Based on qualitative interviews with school personnel from two Danish public schools, this article will explore how the global pandemic created new insights regarding didactic structures and how these insights may inform the prevention of school attendance problems in the future within an ecological and situated framework. Juxtaposing the two paradoxes of 1) individual versus community and 2) freedom versus compulsion showed how exploring social cohesion as a didactic category could influence research on the prevention of SAPs.