Editorial – ‘Workspace: Dialogues, Iterations, Provocations’ – a new special section of History of Education

It has been nearly two decades since ‘Sources and Interpretations’ was introduced as ‘a new feature to appear regularly in History of Education’¹ in an article written by Peter Cunningham. The very last sentence of his article reads:

If our priorities, assumptions and ways of seeing have changed, it is nevertheless worth returning to … [the concrete focus of study]² only to understand better the dilemmas of our task as education historians that can at times induce a psychological torment bordering on schizophrenia.³

As education historians’ (and others’) understandings of ‘sources’⁴ and the nature of the ‘symbiotic relationship’⁵ of ‘sources’ with ‘interpretations’⁶ have since been changing considerably, together with their understandings of ‘temporality’ and ‘past’, ‘present’ and ‘future’,⁷ it feels only apt to return, in turn, to such a dramatic statement and propose a new special section for the journal, which – like Sources and Interpretations – can help move boundaries in and beyond the field of history of education.

Moving and changing (with) boundaries

Here, it is worth considering anew ‘boundaries and borders’ as a theoretical-methodological lens facilitating openings towards capturing movement and change rather than just working to reinforce notions of immobility, closure, status quo and parochialism.⁸ Arguably, a new border-shifting, boundary-moving special section should work productively with the tension threaded through recent thought-provoking writings like António Nóvoa’s ‘Letter to a Young Educational Historian’, in which he invited scholars in the history of education both to engage in ‘risk-taking and transgression’ to ‘broaden the repertoire of … [their] studies’, so as to ‘discover new problems’,⁹ and to ‘know the rules of … [their] discipline’ – that is: to follow ‘the norms, the methodologies, the precepts of the history of education’, albeit ‘in moderation’.¹⁰ This is to acknowledge the curious ‘warps and wefts’ and ‘uneven space-times’¹¹ that make up not only ‘education’, as a field of ‘power/knowledge’ and practice embodied, but also the history of education, as a node not only of interdisciplinary border crossing but also intradisciplinary boundary shifting, not across ‘a single, flat developmental line’, but along ‘multiple … lines (with their specific pace and own dynamics)’.¹²

Knowledge-effecting drawing(s)-together

Messy movement is also at the heart of educational historiography, which binds together the ancient Greek terms historia/ἱστορία, denoting practices of knowledge seeking and its effects, or: knowledge effecting, and graphein/γραφειν, invoking practices of both writing and drawing. Historiography of education may thus be reconfigured as ‘drawing(s)-together of knowledge effecting regarding education’¹³ involving iterative (re/de/)stabilising of boundaries making up specific phenomena studied.¹⁴ Recognising that scholars producing histories of education are indeed invested in ongoing boundary (re/)drawing(s) concerning matters of education – with some having acted to artificially consign these to the past thought bygone rather than to seize these in iterative motions of pasts, presents and futures unevenly joining – and that education historians’ Sisyphus labour lies precisely in such iteration(s) or iterative (re/)configuring(s), the new special section will seek to draw in dynamic (re)work(ings) of current and emergent issues of concern to the history of education from (across) the edges of the discipline. As a workspace it sets out to offer room for testing out new, potentially fruitful ideas, theories and methods, for staying with problems and thinking these through, and for continuing to engage readers in knowledge-expanding dialogues – perhaps at times in the form of provocations.

Reconfiguring areas, themes and issues

The special section thus aims to feature both reiterations or mullings-over of key familiar topics and issues and cutting-edge iterations or venturings into edgy themes and areas yet unfamiliar to the history of education. In so doing, it hopes to provide a map, or itineraries, for a field that remains open and unbound, while accommodating the ongoing need for work around sources and interpretations, around what may qualify as an evidence base for praxis in such domains as early childhood, primary, secondary and teacher education, and many other domains still across a range of sectors, including the social and cultural sectors.

Contributions will be sourced particularly from scholars working across the Global South and East, indigenous scholars, spokespersons for underrepresented and minority scholarly groups and communities, scholars opening up avenues of historical inquiry into periods prior to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and/or into presents and futures enfolding, and researchers venturing into less visible informal and/or nonformal areas of education in domains and sites other than those of regular compulsory schooling. Themes, in turn, are intended to rotate and include, among others, gender (specifically transgenderism and/or gender-nonconformity), sexuality (particularly, with LGBTIQ+ foci), race/ethnicity (with especial relevance to people of colour, native communities and minority groups, migrants and asylum seekers), dis/ability, and related intersectionality; media/vehicles/technologies and genres or modes of communication and (re)presentation, sites of conservation/regulation (including digital materials/repositories, artefacts, built/designed environments, and tools of (dis/mis/)information); public history foci; childhoods, youths and adult education; pedagogical approaches; science/knowledge and networks/nodes of circulation; emotions and senses; foods/diets and associated initiatives and institutions; art, sport and other areas of embodied creation; methods/approaches and lenses to pry open these and other areas.¹⁵ Submissions welcomed and solicited may be in the form of regular articles, as well as joint themed articles, conversations (provocative or otherwise), and review articles and other contributions (not exclusively in written form), and are hoped to arrive from researchers from all backgrounds and walks of life and from across the career spectrum, particularly also emerging scholars.

Scholars interested in submitting work to History of Education’s new special section are strongly encouraged to contact the special section editor with suggestions and proposals for contributions, themed or otherwise.

Notes

¹ Peter Cunningham, ‘Sources as Interpretation: Sources in the Study of Education History’, History of Education 33, no. 1 (2004): 105.

² Here: original texts containing purposely selected sources thus constituting interpretations in and of themselves.

³ Cunningham, ‘Sources as Interpretation’, 123.

⁴ Including its complex pluriform entanglement, as a material-cultural lens, with the natural world (cf. Hans Blumenberg, Die Lesbarkeit der Welt [The Readability of the World] (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1986), cited in Bernd-Olaf Küppers, The Language of Living Matter: How Molecules Acquire Meaning, Frontiers Collection Series (Cham: Springer, 2022), 11 and its oddly pre-‘new-cultural history’ implying of a single ‘origin’ or ‘primary’ reference point (cf. Thomas S. Popkewitz, Barry Franklin and Miguel Pereyra, eds., Cultural History and Education: Critical Studies on Knowledge and Schooling [New York: Routledge, 2001]).

⁵ Cunningham, ‘Sources as Interpretation’, 105.

⁶ For instance, the notion of interpretation as an act of ‘mediation’, based on ‘representational theory’, has come to be productively challenged. See Lynn Fendler, ‘The Ethics of Materiality: Some Insights from Non-Representational Theory’, in Educational Research: Material Culture and its Representation, ed. Paul Smeyers and Marc Depaepe (Cham: Springer, 2014), 115–32; and Lynn Fendler and Paul Smeyers, ‘Focusing on Presentation instead of Representation: Perspectives on Representational and Non-Representational Language-Games for Educational History and Theory’, Paedagogica Historica 51, no. 6 (2015): 691–701.

⁷ See, for instance, António Nóvoa and Tali Yariv-Mashal, ‘Comparative Research in Education: A Mode of Governance or a Historical Journey?’, Comparative Education 39, no. 4 (2003): 423–38; Thomas S. Popkewitz, Cosmopolitanism and the Age of School Reform: Science, Education, and Making Society by Making the Child (London: Routledge, 2012); Peter Seixas, ‘Progress, Presence and Historical Consciousness: Confronting Past, Present and Future in Postmodern Time’, Paedagogica Historica 48, no. 6 (2012): 859–71; António Nóvoa, ‘Letter to a Young Educational Historian’, Historia y Memoria de la Educación 1, no. 1 (2015): 23–58; Joyce Goodman, ‘Circulating Objects and (Vernacular) Cosmopolitan Subjectivities’, Bildungsgeschichte 7, no. 1 (2017): 115–26; Joyce Goodman, ‘Thinking through Sonorities in Histories of Schooling’, Bildungsgeschichte 7, no. 2 (2017): 277–88; Julie McLeod, Noah W. Sobe and Terri Seddon, eds., World Yearbook of Education 2018: Uneven Space-Times of Education: Historical Sociologies of Concepts, Methods and Practices (London: Routledge, 2017); Geert Thyssen and Fabio Pruneri, eds., Looking Back, Going Forward: School_Time in Flux and Flow in Europe and Beyond (EERA Network 17 – Histories of Education, 2018); Joyce Goodman and Sue Anderson-Faithful, ‘Turning and Twisting Histories of Women’s Education: Matters of Strategy’, Women’s History Review 29, no. 3 (2019): 377–95; Joyce Goodman ‘Afterword: Histories of Women’s Higher Education, Time, and Temporalities’, Paedagogica Historica 56, no. 6 (2020): 847–56; and Sarah Van Ruyskensvelde, Geert Thyssen, Frederik Herman, Angelo Van Gorp and Pieter Verstraete, eds., Folds of Past, Present and Future: Reconfiguring Contemporary Histories of Education (Oldenbourg: De Gruyter, 2021).

⁸ Geert Thyssen, ‘Boundlessly Entangled: Non-/Human Performances of Education for Health through Open-Air Schools’, Paedagogica Historica 54, no. 5 (2018): 659–76; Kevin Myers, Paul J. Ramsey and Helen Proctor, ‘Rethinking Borders and Boundaries for a Mobile History of Education’, Paedagogica Historica 54, no. 6 (2018): 677–90; Jonathan Doney, ‘Theorising Boundary Encounters as a Means to Understand Diffusion of Ideas in Religious Education’, in International Knowledge Transfer in Religious Education, ed. Friedrich Schweitzer and Peter Schreiner (Münster: Waxmann, 2021), 233–46. See also Lynn Fendler, ‘Apertures of Documentation: Reading Images in Educational History’, Paedagogica Historica 53, no. 6 (2017): 751–62.

⁹ Nóvoa, ‘Letter to a Young Educational Historian’, 49, 50.

¹⁰ Ibid., 49 (emphasis in the original). See also Marc Depaepe, ‘The Ten Commandments of Good Practices in History of Education Research’, Zeitschrift für pädagogische Historiographie 16 (2010): 31–4; Ian Grosvenor, ‘Laboratory/laboratoire/labor’, Paedagogica Historica 52, no. 6 (2016), 766–7; and Catherine Burke, ‘An Exploration of Liminal Pockets of Contestation and Delight in School Spaces’, Paedagogica Historica 57, no. 1–2 (2021): 11–22.

¹¹ Terri Seddon, Julie McLeod and Noah W. Sobe, ‘Reclaiming Comparative Historical Sociologies of Education’, in World Yearbook of Education 2018, 1–25.

¹² Marc Depaepe, ‘Why Even Today Educational Historiography is Not an Unnecessary Luxury: Focusing on Four Themes from Forty-Four Years of Research’, Espacio, Tiempo y Educación 7, no. 1 (2020): 227–46.

¹³ Geert Thyssen et al., ‘Introduction’, in Folds of Past, Present and Future, 5; Geert Thyssen et al., ‘Cutting Knots “Together-Apart”: Threads of Western and Southern European History of Education Research’, History of Education 52, no. 3–4 (forthcoming).

¹⁴ The precise terms used here are taken from Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), but iterative re-effecting of knowledge on education may be conceived differently from ‘intraactive enfoldments’ (Barad): for instance, as ‘rhizomatic unfoldings’ (Deleuze, Guattari), or ‘discursive effects’ (Foucault), or ‘shifting relations’ (Callon, Akrich, Latour), or ‘mycelial entanglements’ (Ingold), and in many other ways still. Only what these add and elide matters. See Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977, ed. C. Gordon (New York: Pantheon, 1980); Madeleine Akrich, Michel Callon and Bruno Latour, ‘A quoi tient le succès des innovations? Premier épisode: L’art de l’intéressement’ [What Makes Innovations Successful? First Episode: The Art of Gathering Interest], Gérer et comprendre: Annales des Mines 11 (1988): 4–17; Madeleine Akrich, Michel Callon and Bruno Latour, ‘A quoi tient le succès des innovations? Deuxième episode: Le choix des porte-parole’ [What Makes Innovations Successful? Second Episode: The Choice of Mediators], Gérer et comprendre: Annales des Mines 12 (1988): 14–29; Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. B. Massumi (London: Continuum, [1987] 2004); and Tim Ingold, The Life of Lines (London: Routledge, 2015).

¹⁵ Heather Ellis, Mark Freeman and Stephanie Olsen, ‘Editorial’, History of Education 49, no. 1 (2020): 1–3; Heather Ellis, Mark Freeman and Stephanie Olsen, ‘Mapping the History of Education: Intersections and Regional Trends’, History of Education (forthcoming), doi: 10.1080/0046760X.2022.2130442.