Rita Hofstetter

Institutionalisation of Educational Sciences and the Dynamics of Their Development

The articles in the first issue of the European Educational Research Journal aim to analyse the moving forces of the emergence and evolution of educational sciences as a disciplinary field, i.e. as a social institution that is specialised in the production, discussion and diffusion of knowledge about education. The articles explore the hypothesis that the process of emergence and evolution is strongly interwoven with reforms that take place in the whole educational system, from primary school to university, and more generally with the evolution of social demands coming from the fields of education. They pay particular attention to the relationship between the evolution of educational sciences and professional qualification requirements.

Introduction educational sciences in dynamic and hybrid institutionalization

Taylor and Francis Ltd CPDH400501.sgm 10.1080/ 030923042000293661 P edagogica Historica 0 30-923 (pri t)/1477-674X (online) Original Article 2 04 Stichting Paeda og Historica 45-6 00October 2 0 The educational sciences, also known as educational studies, education research, educational scholarship, and sciences de l’éducation, Erziehungswissenschaft, pedagogika, onderwijswetenschappen,2 are today a vast field of research and training. As in other disciplinary fields,3 numerous institutions and communication networks have been created across the globe to ensure the increase and diffusion of knowledge of educational phenomena.

Educational Sciences: Evolutions of a Pluridisciplinary Discipline at the Crossroads of other Disciplinary and Professional Fields (20th Century)

ABSTRACT Educational phenomena and child development fascinate many disciplines for which they offer a tremendous field of experimentation and application. More than a hundred years ago, when educational sciences adopted the main institutional emblems of an academic discipline (chairs, diploma, laboratories, scientific network etc.), they obviously vacillated between the dream of becoming a unified science (as pedology testifies), and the claim of a rewarding pluridisciplinarity that could synergise all disciplines concerned with the child and with education. This paper asserts that the issue of pluridisciplinarity is constitutive for the development of sciences of education whose object is ever coveted by other disciplines. The first section adopts the point of view of a social history and, on the basis of voluminous archives, it describes the main lines of the shaping of this pluridisciplinary field in Geneva, representative of that which also occurs elsewhere. In the second part, it presents a more theoretical reflection on the tensions and pitfalls of what we call the ‘process of disciplinarisation’ of educational sciences, outlining the characteristics of this constitutively pluridisciplinary field.

La transformation de l’enfant en écolier (du 19e au milieu du 20e siècle): les “eurêkas” des sciences de l’homme naissantes, entre scientisme et romantisme: un “naturalisme” de l’enfance

Consciousness 1 of the specificities of childhood, as we know, has lasted for centuries. However, the history of childhood – in other words, the representation of it – should not be confounded with the history of the children in their everyday reality, although both influence each other. The history of the “discoveries” of childhood can, in fact, be interpreted as historically situated social constructions. And the myriad of “eurekas” that have punctuated the long history of childhood can be considered as a kaleidoscope that has reflected contrasted images of the projections by those who considered themselves as inventors of different faces of childhood. Occidental societies that have generalised education since the nineteenth century have largely disseminated the idea that childhood can be defined as a period specially dedicated to education and learning. In the first part of this paper, the huge phenomenon, with manifold consequences, of the transformation of the children into pupils – girls and boys – not, however, without discrimination, is analysed and contextualised. This phenomenon was accompanied by the appearance of a multitude of new specialists in childhood who scrutinised – as naturalists, experimentalists, social entrepreneurs, internationalist reformers – the conditions of children’s development, of their learning and education. The kaleidoscope of images emanating from their observations and discourses is the object of the analysis presented in the second part of this paper. Three “paradigmatic turning points” or “eurekas” that materialise in a particularly significant way the theories, figures and places of such images have been chosen: (1) the spreading of evolutionist theory that invested the child as origin and future of humankind; (2) the pedological blaze that installed the science of the child as queen of the sciences; (3) the so-called “Copernican revolution”, as described by Claparède, that positioned the child – and not the pupil – as the centre around which pedagogy had to turn; consequently, with Piaget, the School of Geneva became a global reference of new theories of development. The analysis presented, based on a wide range of literature and on copious research in archives, led to putting forward the following thesis. Although many emblematic representatives of this new science of the child studied the development of and were interested in childhood because of its evolutionary potentials and capacities for learning, they inclined in their theories to leave aside the questions of teaching and education. The social reality of the learning pupil was hidden in favour of a point of view heavily influenced by a sort of “naturalism” of the child, which postulated and stipulated that nature and its laws were inviolable and prominent. This naturalism was nourished both by a certain form of scientism based on the credo of the experimental approach and on a form of romanticism that regard as sacred “this piece of nature supposedly intact” that should be the prime state of childhood. 1Cet article constitue une réécriture de la Conférence de clôture d’Ische 32, donnée à Amsterdam, en août 2010. J’en ai conservé le concept, visant à proposer une réflexion générique qui s’inscrit en écho aux travaux du Congrès – d’où aussi le choix d’un fil rouge autour des “eurêkas” réinventant l’enfance – et j’y avance des thèses, à dessein assez engagées, pour susciter la réflexion et la discussion. Tout en étant spécifique par le fil rouge qui y est déroulé, cette réflexion se fonde sur des analyses historiennes empiriques plus approfondies et circonscrites, dont les références sont fournies en notes, aux endroits opportuns. Ces recherches sont liées au subside Sinergia CRSII1-127576/1 “Acteurs de la fabrique des savoirs et construction de nouveaux champs disciplinaires”.

The International Bureau of Education (1925-1968): a platform for designing a 'chart of world aspirations for education'

The international conferences and the official publications of the International Bureau of Education (IBE) comprise a platform where a growing number of governments exposed their considerations and concerns with the purpose of building up a better world through education. The resulting recommendations foster the basis of an ‘international code for public education’. The voluminous archives of the IBE comprise a particularly fertile source for understanding ‘the variants and invariants’, and of course also the purposes of school organisations and curricula as promoted by these organisations. The paradoxes of this effort carried out during the first forty years represent both the challenges for its survival and the outline of this article: (a) giving up on all obligations and political statements so as to ensure effective actions at governmental level; (b) documenting local needs so as to establish a world chart; (c) supporting mass schooling through state involvement for promoting individual emancipation; (d) promoting curricula designed on separate subjects so as to guarantee harmonious complete personal growth; (e) advocating scientific objectivity for spreading the methods and principles of New Education; (f) acting upon public schooling, the reserved hunting grounds of nations, for building up international education.

Knowledge for teaching and knowledge to teach: two contrasting figures of New Education: Claparède and Vygotsky

The debate on knowledge in New Education is generally dominated by two opposed Anglo‐Saxon positions held by Dewey and Thorndike. This paper presents another line of division. Claparède and Vygotsky, two representative European figures of New Education are both scientists constructing a theory of psychological functioning, and heavily engaged in school reforms. Their conceptions of knowledge in education are nonetheless contrasted. We demonstrate it in analyzing their work from three points of view: the relationship between education and development; the nature of knowledge to teach; and the kind of knowledge necessary for teacher education. For Claparède, education follows natural development; knowledge to teach has to be useful and linked to everyday life; knowledge for the teacher is essentially knowledge on the child. For Vygotsky, education precedes development; knowledge to teach is systematic, different from everyday knowledge, transforming the relationship to its own psychic processes; knowledge for teachers is knowledge to teach and about teaching. Claparède’s approach can be described as abstract negation of the traditional school; he wants a Copernican revolution, a completely different school linked to everyday life. Vygotsky’s approach can be characterized as determined negation; he wants to build on the traditional school, maintaining and transforming knowledge organized systematically in formal disciplines.

Going international: the history of education stepping beyond borders

Over the past two decades, historians have gradually tended to focus their attention on phenomena such as transfer, movement, dissemination, flows and exchanges between different spaces. Such is also the case with the history of education, an academic field that proved to be particularly sensitive to such circulatory processes. As a telling example of this growing interest, an international conference on internationalisation in education was held in Geneva, in June 2012, under the patronage of three societies: the International Standing Conference for the History of Education (ISCHE34), the Society for the History of Children and Youth and the Disability History Association. They came together for the first time in order to achieve an impressive worldwide gathering of about 500 participants dealing with global and transnational issues. The increase in studies, conferences and publications – including keynote books or published series – dedicated to the history of the mechanisms of internationalisation is undoubtedly due to the perceived pervasiveness, over the past decades, of phenomena linked to globalisation. Whether a matter of concern or an opportunity to rejoice in the creation of a global village, globalisation has inspired and prompted the renewal of research and input in the social sciences. As for historians, who are certainly more accustomed than their colleagues in the humanities to limiting their plot to national territories and contexts, they took their time before getting excited about internationalisation. Since the 1990s, however, they have definitely caught up, and their enthusiasm has hitherto resulted in an increase in approaches, perspectives and conceptions about processes that go beyond national boundaries. Whether labelled histoire croisée, connected or entangled history, world-global-transnational

Mapping the Discipline History of Education.

Inaugurated in 2013, this collective research programme aims to construct an international mapping of the history of education that accounts for recent developments in the field. Our goal is to create a current and retrospective assessment of the discipline’s institutional grounding and of the knowledge produced by its practitioners, stretching across national and cultural borders. Ultimately, the programme will help to increase interactions among scholars and facilitate the creation of collaborative research agendas, thereby augmenting the standing and visibility of the discipline. This text will briefly introduce the programme’s conceptual basis, explaining the methodological steps taken to ensure the comparability of data gathered and the transnational and transcontinental character of the study’s design. In the second section, we will zoom in on doctoral students’ dissertations, which are the optimal way to study a discipline’s development and potential. Doctoral students and recent graduates are part of a tradition, a school of thought, and yet they constitute that tradition’s replacement and renewal. Therefore, as graduate students carry forth the disciplinary torch, they hold the future of the field in their hands.

Changes in Mass Schooling: ‘school Form’ and ‘grammar of Schooling’ as Reagents

During the nineteenth century many European countries proclaimed sovereignty of the people and simultaneously founded their national educational systems. In order to provide public schooling, free and compulsory education was established. Political and sociocultural revolutions led to the rise of nation states, based on democratic or democratic-inspired aspirations, that then turned into ‘teacher states’. Mass schooling and the worldwide — and furthermore enforced — dissemination of this schooling model characterise the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. How can one best describe the concrete process of mass schooling? How should it be analysed, and what are the appropriate concepts to do so? How did nations contribute to its dissemination? By tackling these issues from a historical perspective and discussing, in particular, two concepts often addressed for understanding certain aspects of mass schooling — ‘school form’ and ‘grammar of schooling’ — the contributions of this volume shed a new light on the matter.

Interweaving Educational Sciences and Pedagogy with Professional Education: Contrasting Configurations at Swiss Universities, 1870–1950

This article presents some results of research aimed at analysing the emergence of pedagogy/educational science(s) in Switzerland. It focuses on the evolution of academic chairs, their holders, their denominations and their relationship to professional fields and other disciplines. In a first, empirical part, professorial chairs are analysed in four Swiss universities (Basle, Bern, Geneva and Zurich). The data show important differences between Geneva, where autonomous chairs were introduced quite early and where an empirical approach dominated, and the other universities, where pedagogy remained dependent on philosophy and became autonomous only in the 1950s. In order to understand these differences, the evolution of the universities in Geneva and Bern is analysed in more detail, particularly the relationship between the disciplinary field and teacher education. The institutional articulation between teacher education and the academic chair(s) and the orientation toward primary or secondary teacher education seem to be important distinguishing factors that led to different evolutions in the two sites. Other factors, like the relationship to school reform, to political administration, and to teacher trade unionism reinforced the differences. The question of larger cultural influences is raised in conclusion, contrasting the Swiss-German universities, clearly oriented towards Germany, with the Genevan site, which is more multifaceted, and even eclectic.