Bruno Vanobbergen

Bookbabies, their parents and the library: an evaluation of a Flemish reading programme in families with young children

Bookbabies, an initiative from the Flemish Reading Association and the Flemish Centre for Public Libraries, is a pilot project organised in 10 Flemish cities where local public libraries worked together with 82 couples with young babies for two years to set up a programme called “having fun with books”. The objectives of the research linked to the pilot project were: (1) mapping the parents’ experiences regarding the introduction of a reading promotion programme, and (2) presenting a wide range of good examples of practice. There was also a clear objective of including families who were more difficult to reach. Throughout the project, all families were surveyed three times in their own homes. The results of the study show, among other things, that parents particularly need more implicit support for reading to young children. The parents also greatly stress the affective side involved with reading, which resulted in the creation of reading rituals in the families.

The aspirations of Afghan unaccompanied refugee minors before departure and on arrival in the host country

This article explores the perspectives of Afghan unaccompanied refugee minors on their own motives and aspirations and on the motives and aspirations of their family and community context at the moment they left their home country and at arrival in the host country. Interviews and questionnaires were used to measure the aspirations of 52 Afghan unaccompanied refugee minors, soon after their arrival in Belgium. Aspirations at departure and evolutions in aspirations over time were examined retrospectively. Finding security and studying particularly influenced their decision to migrate. These aspirations changed over time under the impact of a diversity of factors, such as their own experiences and the opinions of others (e.g. peers, smugglers). Since motives and aspirations might influence the migration trajectories of unaccompanied refugee minors, migration policies and practitioners should take them actively into account so as to improve support for unaccompanied refugee minors.

Framing the 'child at risk' in social work reports: truth-telling or storytelling?

Summary In the field of child welfare and protection, the notion of the ‘child at risk’ implies a central ground and legitimation for intervention yet is extremely ambiguous, since it can be constructed in radically different ways in practice. This construction process might involve challenges to professional assessment and intervention, since dealing with this complex notion is about more than tools, (risk) management and protocols. We focus on the practice of writing reports as an exemplary practice in which social workers exercise their power while assessing and constructing the child as ‘at risk’. Two approaches of social workers in interpreting the complexity of situations where children are potentially at risk are considered: truth-telling and storytelling. We report on a qualitative study conducted with 152 social work students in which we explore how they construct reports. Findings In our analysis, we identify three major issues in the construction of the ‘child at risk’ when social work students approach report writing as an open-ended and reflexive practice of storytelling: recognisability, comprehensibility and stigmatisation. Applications The normative judgment processes in social work are complex, determined by the analysis of situations in which the child may potentially be constructed as being at risk. Dealing with this complexity therefore requires reflexivity of social workers regarding their perceptions and interpretations at stake in practice. We argue that normative judgment in risk assessment should be an essential area for exploration in social work education.

Discoveries of childhood in history: an introduction

Discovering childhood – that eureka moment experienced by many people, time and again, in the course of history – is the focus of this special issue of Paedagogica Historica. From religious moralists to educational practitioners, from philosophers to child scientists, from poets to painters and other artists, from lawmakers to children’s rights adherents, from adults looking back to their early years to each new generation of parents, and from historians to psychologists and sociologists: they all (re-)discovered childhood. Thus, in various actor roles, people have discovered childhood in the course of history, both inside and outside science. In his opening article, entitled “Historian’s Discovery of Childhood”, Willem Frijhoff’s starting point is that the child as a historical category has always been invented by others, that is, adults. The child is “not self-reflexive in history”, but “a pure object”, and “a virtual theme of discovery by others”. Those so-called “others” did have at least three major reasons for doing that. Firstly, discoveries of childhood can be related to the emergence of a series of major social practices, such as school. Secondly, discovering childhood became increasing a scholarly practice. Finally, for every scholar of the history of childhood, discovering childhood turns and turned out to become personal research into the discovery of the self. Firstly, discoveries of childhood in social practices are numerous. They vary from Romulus and Remus as the epoch-making founding twins of Rome to the future French King Louis XIII in the journal by Jean Héroard, made famous by Philippe Ariès in his L’enfant et la famille sous l’ancien régime (1960) and translated in 1962 as Centuries of Childhood, and from prodigious children like Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart to child-oriented public spaces, such as schools, on which contributions can be found by Rita Hofstetter, Marcelo Caruso, Josefina Granja Castro, and Anna Larsson in this special issue. Until the late nineteenth century, discoveries of childhood in history only rarely went together with discoveries of adolescence. One of the reasons seems to be that, according to Frijhoff, adolescence “could not be caught in a single institutional frame” as was happening much earlier in history for other age groups, as, for example, the group aged six to 12 with schools; as a result, a wide variety of people, caught in a variety of institutional frames, could belong to adolescence, such as “apprentices, workers, peasants, students, or idle youngsters, and occasionally even married people.” Indeed, it is true that

Visualising disability in the past

In recent years there has been a growth in interdisciplinary work which has argued that disability is not an isolated, individual medical pathology but instead a key defining social category like ‘race’, class and gender. 1 Seen in this way disability provides researchers with another analytic tool for exploring the nature of power. Running almost parallel in time with these academic developments has been a growing interest in the use of the visual in educational research. This growth in interest may be explained by Catherine Burke’s observation that images – line drawings, still photography, film, video and digital technologies – have accompanied the development of state education from its beginning and that ‘the camera within the School has its own historical narrative reflecting change and continuities in ways of seeing education and children over time’. 2 In 2007 a workshop was held at the European Conference on Educational Research, Ghent which brought together academics to engage in an interdisciplinary dialogue around a set of images that capture disability and pedagogical practice. 3 This article consists of three commentaries on the photographs (Devlieger; Van Hove and Vanobbergen; Grosvenor) which were given at the workshop and some reflective remarks written after the workshop (Simon). The commentators were given a maximum of 10 minutes each and their points are presented here very much as they were in the workshop, but references have been added and appear in the footnotes. 4 The article opens with some brief contextual information about the archive which holds the selected photographs and the process by which the workshop came into being. 1 See, for example, Catherine J. Kudlick, “Disability History: Why We Need Another ‘Other’,” American Historical Review 108, no. 3 (2003): 763–793. 2 C. Burke, “Visualising the body of the school child: critical reflections on spaces of representation,” unpublished paper, 2. 3 Thanks are offered to Dr Catherine Burke, lead convenor of Network 17 Histories of Education, for organising the workshop 4 There was a fourth commentary at the workshop by Dr Paul Conway, University of Cork.

Soon He Will Boil over Like a Kettle: Visualizing the Invisible--The Representation of "Hyperactivity" in Women's Magazines and Professional Journals for Teachers in Flanders (1965-2005).

This article takes a relational approach to childhood to focus on the discourse surrounding childrens ‘hyperactive’ bodies, currently defined as children with Attention Deficit Hyperactvity Disorder (ADHD). Based on analyses of articles in the major womens magazines and professional journals for teachers, published in Flanders from 1965 until the present, the article examines how the notion of ‘the hyperactive child’ has been constructed and reconstructed during the last four decades.

Remembering the Ghent Orphan Houses: A Never-Ending Contested Space

Our study of Ghent orphanages as a closed space initially led to a (re) construction of this educational site by contextualizing it in time and space. Through oral history research we found that the history of the Ghent orphan houses is still very much alive. Now, the former orphans control and manage the passing on and remembrance of their history. This paper provides an insight into this process by analyzing two sites—a Facebook group and the former orphan league—identifying the contestation that arises in their quest for the truth and recognition about their “mutual” past and the way(s) in which their histories should be remembered.

Changing perspectives on the child at risk at the end of the nineteenth century. The Belgian Maritime Hospital Roger de Grimberghe (1884–1914) as a space of inclusion and exclusion

In this historical‐geographical approach to the Belgian Maritime Hospital Roger de Grimberghe space is introduced as a conceptual tool to deconstruct the notion of the child at risk. The starting point for the creation of the maritime hospitals lay in the immediate relationship between the idea of improving children’s welfare with healthy sea air and concern about declining public health at the end of the nineteenth century, together with a need for the moral reclamation of the nation. Within this context particular attention focused on ‘the child at risk’, the ‘abnormal child’ and the ‘mentally retarded child’. This research shows how the maritime hospital can be considered a battlefield on which two different discursive practices about children at risk (the political and the medical) clashed. Both practices and perspectives are characterized by mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion.

Puzzling history – the personal file in residential care: a source for life history and historical research

Abstract Since the turn of the century large groups of former institutionalised children have exercised their right to see their ‘personal files’, and this has drawn widespread attention to these documents and their potential in scholarly research. This article explores the meanings of personal files from the period 1945–1984 as sources for both historical researchers and adult care leavers themselves, in the context of the orphanages in Ghent, Belgium. Based on the experiences of those who have consulted their files, we come to the conclusion that the personal files of the Ghent orphans provide some new information but, at the same time, leave a lot of issues unresolved. Although the files offered significant insights for researchers studying the most recent period in the history of the Ghent orphanages, it is difficult to see them as ‘keys to the past’ for former orphans who are trying to (re)construct their own, individual life histories.

On Cioran's Criticism of Utopian Thinking and the History of Education.

The starting point of our research is the recent discussion within history of education about the aim and scope of historical educational research. More specifically, it deals with the relationship between the past and the future and is characterized by two clashing paradigms. The recent discussion within history of education is from the perspective of philosophy of education extremely interesting. Particularly intriguing is the way in which history of education defines its role of giving shape to a (different) future. Given the criticism of the means‐end reasoning and the fact that ‘utopia’ in some sense always implies this, and that it plays itself nearly always a role when a stance is taken concerning history of education, what is defended here is the need of a different way to think about the relationship between the past, the present and the future thus to give ‘utopia’ a different place. Therefore we make use of Emile Ciorans History and Utopia. Ciorans criticism of the utopian position can be indicated by the following three sets. Not the past, neither the future, but the present is what one should be concerned with; not unity but diversity; not finding the solution, the final truth, but making room for the freedom of the human being.