Karin Priem

Mobilising meaning: multimodality, translocation, technology and heritage

This special issue explores how meaning is created, conveyed and transformed through multiple modes of communication, representation and interaction (the textual, the visual, the material, the spatial, the aural, the imaginary, etc.); through movement across spaces; through media and technologies; and, finally, through collective memoryand identity-making. In short, this issue is concerned with meaning mobilised through “multimodality”, “translocation”, “technology” and “heritage”. As such, it closely connects to several core dimensions of education which in the past few decades have undergone a revival of interest in histories of education: visuality, materiality, spatiality, transfer and circulation. Related to these key education dimensions are issues to do with the diffusion of knowledge, values, practices and ways of seeing, perceiving and feeling across and beyond borders. Such issues were at the heart of a symposium organised at the 34th International Standing Conference for the History of Education (ISCHE), which took place in Geneva in June 2012 in cooperation with the Society for the History of Children and Youth (SHCY) and the Disability History Association (DHA) and addressed the theme of “internationalization in education”. The specific topics addressed in this issue include: (1) the promotion, circulation and reception of educational undertakings through annual reports with photographic material distributed by an internationally active charitable institution and through a reading group campaigning for textbook revisions by means of pamphlets and exhibitions (Macnab, Grosvenor and Myers); (2) the changes of meaning undergone through textual and visual representations of displaced children in educational colonies travelling from Republican Spain to Britain and from networks of humanitarian–pedagogical activism to the archives (Roberts); (3) imaginings of artists, educators and policy-makers materialised in school decoration and the latter’s relation to school buildings as well as the education of taste and consumption (Burke); the journey from Germany to the Netherlands of poetry written for children as part of the educational programme of the Enlightenment, its remodelling in the function of new perceptions of the child and of forms of citizenship and its reception and use as illustrated textbooks (Parlevliet and Dekker); and, finally, the educational power

Gender and educational achievement

In many countries, gender differences in educational success are part of long standing political, public and scientific debates about education. Whereas, for example, at the end of the nineteenth c...

Avant-gardes and educational reforms in history: futures past revisited

Education is future-oriented because its scope relates to societal, social and individual progress and change. This orientation to the future often fosters the questioning of dominant or agreed-upon educational conventions and traditions and implies an affinity to aesthetic avant-gardes, social reform movements, intellectual networks and educational innovation. In turn, societal reform concepts and ideas of progress and renewal often embrace educational intentions to realise their visions of the future. The articles in this special section of the issue will approach educational reforms and visions of the future from the perspective of the history of education. Their different languages, conceptual specificities and implementation have sometimes taken on a hybrid character as they were integrated into existent traditions while other reforms and visions never went beyond their conceptual stage. The term ‘future pasts’ (vergangene Zukunft) was coined by Reinhart Koselleck (1979) to characterise utopian or future-oriented semantics in history.1 In contrast with this, Thomas Popkewitz looks critically from a methodological point of view at rather recent research. In his view many scholars often engage in what he perceives as a ‘history of the present’ in that past rhetoric of a better future has not only impacted on present pedagogical concepts, but also shaped the history of education as an academic field in many ways.2 Our understanding of ‘futures pasts’ refers to both: the fact that educational concepts were developed within specific historical contexts by promising a better future, and an awareness that their innovative impetus or rhetoric of the future still subtly impacts on how we look at the histories of education. The following two papers adopt both perspectives while studying different concepts of reform – modernist school architecture and the education of the body in the context of the modern dance movement – which focus on educational goals, educational practices, new anthropological concepts and social innovation. The human body, the structuring of space, concepts of childhood, the intertwinement of humans and technology, the close relationships between education, ideology and power and, finally, modern visions of the future all enter into the focus. These questions will be studied in terms of regional, national and transnational relations and interdependencies.

Beyond the collapse of language? Photographs of children in postwar Europe as performances and relational objects

Abstract This paper explores photographs of children, taken after 1945 by the Swiss photographer Werner Bischof (1916–1954), as visual objects and social agents. In the summer of 1945, Bischof embarked on his first journey through war-ravaged Western Europe – specifically Germany, France, Belgium, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands – to visually capture the lives of men, women, and children who had experienced the destruction, cruelties and trauma of World War II. Bischof’s photographic mission focused on children in particular. His ambitions drew upon the power of photography to present, represent, and perform, to make and articulate histories, to evoke emotions, and to relate to and resonate with various audiences. This very agency of photography, which has been argued by Bischof and also serves as a central hypothesis of this paper, is intensified when a photographer works with children and thus enhances and more strongly emphasises photography’s inherent and irreducible agency. The paper looks at how Bischof’s photographs, as performances, not only evoked but also disturbed and disrupted narratives of war-ravaged Europe.

The visual in histories of education: a reappraisal

Abstract This introduction to the special issue on Images and Films as Objects to Think With presents a historiographical reflection on how images are being approached in the field of educational history. In recent years, much of the work has been situated at the intersection of visual and material studies; images are considered objects with which humans interact, carrying affects and particular materialities that condition their experience; they are taken as historical artefacts that bring out a plurality of meanings, which continue to grow with each new reading or approach. This introduction presents the articles that are included in this special issue as well as a final commentary written by Lynn Fendler that engages in a dialogue with them. The articles move away from considering the visual as a transparent source with a stable meaning, and open up different possibilities for working with and through it. They also problematise and expand the archives in which historians work; by looking at various surfaces in which images are exhibited and circulate, such as books, reports, art shows, films, magazines, and collective memories, these studies point to the “affective and effective histories” that images tell, and invite new research agendas for a visual history of education.

Learning How to See and Feel: Alfred Lichtwark and His Concept of Artistic and Aesthetic Education.

Abstract Focusing on Lichtwark’s concept of museology, this article shows what role he envisaged for art in public life at a time when the rise of mass consumption and popular culture created new lifestyles. Lichtwark’s concept of artistic and aesthetic education did not only extend to museums and classrooms but also to dilettantism as a basis for educating taste and developing an appreciation of the arts that would have a positive economic impact. The article looks at the contemporary entanglements and different contexts of Lichtwark’s ideas and relates them to recent approaches to cultural learning. Generally speaking, it argues that concepts of cultural learning are a bundle of entangled threads that connect and concern not only the sphere of art but also contradictory values and norms, economic production, and the emergence of new important status groups such as consumers.

Body_Machine? Encounters of the Human and the Mechanical in Education, Industry and Science

Abstract This paper unveils the body_machine as a key element of dynamic mental maps that have come to shape both educational praxis and research. It traces and analyses instances in which the human and the mechanical encountered each other in metaphorical, material and visual forms, thereby blurring to some extent the boundaries between them while capturing and mobilising specific forms of knowing and acting. The paper studies, first, how certain ‘orienting frames of reference’ and associated ‘experimental systems’ managed to materialise around the body_machine and penetrate theory and praxis; and, second, what visual and textual sources related to a vocational school may reveal about where and how the body_machine has come to operate in education, industry and science. The paper centres on early twentieth-century photographs and analyses these not only as media presenting, representing and interrogating common thought and practice but also as agents of meaning-making around the body_machine.

Seeing, hearing, reading, writing, speaking and things: on silences, senses and emotions during the “zero hour” in Germany

Abstract This article focuses on senses, emotions and cultural practices such as writing, reading and speaking in West Germany after 1945. The period immediately following the end of the Second World War – the so-called Stunde Null, or “zero hour” – has generally been seen as a time of new beginnings, also with regard to cleansing the German language and breaking the silences of the past. This historical examination of sensory-emotional and material contexts and related cultural practices takes as its source Hanns-Josef Ortheil’s autobiographical novel Die Erfindung des Lebens (The Invention of Life), published in 2009. Ortheil’s novel is about a child’s enormous struggle to learn how to feel, see, read, write and speak. This so-called “ego document”, told by a first-person narrator, focuses on the links between things, objects, senses, emotions, and the acquisition of cultural skills and techniques while at the same time providing subtle commentary on post-war West German society.

5.8 Nonformal Education on Display

The arrangement of photographs in public spaces is an important aspect of cultural policy. Within this chapter questions of visual policy are related to the exhibition “The Family of Man”. It was first shown from January 24 to May 8, 1955 at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and, then, toured around the world. The photographs included focused on aspects that were supposed to be common to all people and cultures around the world. Nevertheless the American photographic gaze has been the main frame of reference of the show. Its design can be described as a mobile set of elements and images. The venues of the show were spaces made for mass audiences. The exhibition is analysed in the context of cultural propaganda during the 1950s and how western concepts of universal mankind and humanity then were fabricated by using means of photography. The chapter reflects on visual governance as a didactic strategy and analyses the show as a horizon of corresponding visual references that give form to concepts of reality and what viewers should see as “real”, “essential” and “true. The chapter underlines the enormous epistemological impact of images in respect of the order of knowledge and meaning.

Visual, Literary, and Numerical Perspectives on Education: Materiality, Presence, and Interpretation

This chapter analyses how modes of enquiry relate to the materiality of education and to educational presence. Presence, according to Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht (Diesseits der Hermeneutik. Die Produktion von Prasenz (trans: Schulte J). Edition Suhrkamp, Frankfurt, 2004), implies material or physical experience in space before interpretation comes to the fore. Concentrating on materiality explicitly means to focus on what can be seen, sensed and touched. Thus, materiality studies can be related to sensual perception and necessitate reflection on substantial differences between objects and discourses. This not only implies a reflection on the materiality of cultural representations, like books, images and other media, but also on cultural practices as technologies of knowledge-making and meaning-making through the handling of things and artefacts. Materiality of education stresses the laboratory-like nature of education in the sense that it reveals education as an apparatus, essentially operating within a matrix of time, space, function, form, handling and interaction. Modes of enquiry, in contrast, refer to interpretation or methodological operations that ultimately process and transform educative manifestations into meaningful cultural representations and/or social structures. Educational presence is subject to visual, literary and numerical transformation. Whereas visual and literary reflections on education are categorized as cultural, artistic or documentary, numerical transformations are referred to as results of research and methods of quantification. The chapter focuses on the way in which visual, literary and numerical aspects of education are shaped and how they refer to educational presence in schools at the turn of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Its central thesis questions how quantitative educational research is commonly understood. It argues that educational research following a numerical logic is in fact highly normative and interpretative, whereas visual and literary approaches to education (e.g. photography and fictional texts) get closer to education’s essence or experience, as they operate through sensual perception and thus question norms and emotional conditions of schooling.