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Abstract
Delivered as one of the keynote addresses at the International Standing Committee on the History of Education (ISCHE) Conference held in Chicago in August 2016, this paper offers a broad review of how the body and embodiment have been incorporated into histories of education. Based on this historiography, I extend three “inspiring provocations” intended to set the stage for new questions, new theorising, and new methods regarding the body in the field. By asking new questions of the past, drawing on innovative theoretical and methodological frameworks, I argue, historians can continue to give proper empirical standing to the body and embodiment in our histories of education. I conclude with a central question: What are the important questions in the history of education that the body might help us to answer?
Notes
1 Miranda Brady and Emily Hiltz, “The Archeology of an Image: The Persistent Persuasion of Thomas Moore Keesick’s Residential School Photographs” (unpublished paper). An extensive literature on the history of the residential school era (1870s to 1996) from the perspective of survivors and other scholars exists in the Canadian context. Some of the major studies include: Basil Johnston, Indian School Days (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1995); J.R. Miller, Shingwauk’s Vision: A History of Native Residential Schools (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1995); John Milloy, A National Crime: The Canadian Government and the Residential School System, 1879 to 1986 (Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 1999).
2 Jason Stabler notes that “(t)he term ‘killing the Indian in the child’ is widely used in referring to the goal of Canada’s Indian Residential schools and it is difficult to attribute it to any particular source. It may have evolved from ‘Kill the Indian, Save the Man’ a phrase used by Richard Pratt, the architect of the U.S. Residential School System”. For further information see Ward Churchill, Kill the Indian, Save the Man: The Genocidal Impact of American Indian Residential Schools (San Francisco: City Lights, 2004). Jason Stabler, “Canadian Identity and Canada’s Indian Residential School Apology,” E-Topia, selected papers from Intersections 2010: Encounters. Situating “Relation” in Communication and Culture, 9th Annual Graduate Student Conference: 3, https://www.yorku.ca/etopia/etopia7.html (accessed September 30, 2016).
3 Kerry Benjoe, “Thomas Moore Keesick – More than Just a Face,” Regina Leader-Post December 22, 2015, https://leaderpost.com/news/local-news/thomas-moore-keesick-more-than-just-a-face (accessed September 30, 2016). On the specific role of Aboriginal children in attempts to “infantilize” Aboriginal adults through the residential school experience, see Sarah de Leeuw, “‘If Anything is to be Done with the Indian, We Must Catch Him Very Young’: Colonial Constructions of Aboriginal Children and the Geographies of Indian Residential Schooling in British Columbia, Canada,” Children’s Geographies 7, no. 2 (May 2009): 123–40. On the toll that residential schooling took on the health and mortality of First Nations children and their parents, see Mary Ellen Kelm, Colonizing Bodies: Aboriginal Health and Healing in British Columbia, 1900 to 1950 (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1999).
4 Miller, “‘Calling In the Aid of Religion’: Creating a Residential School System,” Shingwauk’s Vision, chapter 4, 89–120.
5 Brady and Hiltz, “The Archeology of an Image,” 3–6; Gillian Whitlock, “Active Remembrance: Testimony, Memoir and the Work of Reconciliation,” in Rethinking Settler Colonialism: History and Memory in Australia, Canada, Aotearoa New Zealand and South Africa, ed. Annie E. Coombs (Manchester: University of Manchester Press, 2006), 24–44.
6 JR’s Free Thought Pages, n.d. Native Residential Schools in North America, https://www.scepticskeptic.ca/Native_Residential_SChools.htm
7 Jean Barman, “Schooled for Inequality: The Education of British Columbia Aboriginal Children,” in Children, Teachers and Schools in the History of British Columbia, ed. Jean Barman and Mona Gleason, 2nd ed. (Calgary: Detselig Enterprises, 2004), 55–79; Basil H. Johnston, Indian School Days (Toronto: Key Porter Books, 1988); Robert Carney, “Aboriginal Residential Schools Before Confederation: The Early Experience,” Historical Studies: Canadian Catholic Historical Association 61 (1995): 13–40; Miller, Shingwauk’s Vision; Milloy, A National Crime; Theodore Fontaine, Broken Circle: The Dark Legacy of Indian Residential Schools (Surrey, BC: Heritage House, 2010); Bev Sellars, Number One: Secrets and Survival at an Indian Residential School (Vancouver: Talonbooks, 2013); Andrew John Woolford, This Benevolent Experiment: Indigenous Boarding Schools, Genocide, and Redress in Canada and the United States (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2015); Isabelle Knockwood, Out of the Depths: The Experiences of Mi’kmaw Children at the Indian Residential School at Shubenacadie, Nova Scotia (Lockeport, NS: Roseway, 1992).
8 Kate Rousmaniere, “Questioning the Visual in the History of Education,” History of Education 30, no. 2 (2001): 109–16.
9 A usefully digested history of the “corporeal turn” can be found in Steven D. Brown, John Cromby, David J. Harper, Katherine Johnson, and Paula Reavy, “Researching ‘Experience’: Embodiment, Methodology, Process,” Theory & Psychology 21, no. 4 (2011): 494–5.
10 See, for example, Michael Feher, Romona Naddaff, and Nadia Tazi, eds., Fragments for a History of the Human Body, 3 vols (New York: Zone Books, 1989); Thomas Laqueur, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990); Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2000).
11 The historical and social processes of embodiment are stressed in Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “The Body in its Sexual Being,” in The Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (Boston, MA: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1962); Judith Butler, “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory,” in Writing on the Body: Female Embodiment and Feminist Theory, ed. Katie Conboy, Nadia Medina, and Sarah Stanbury (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 401–18.
12 See, for example, Catherine Gallagher and Thomas Laqueur, eds., The Making of the Modern Body (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1987); Barbara Duden, The Woman Beneath the Skin: A Doctor’s Patients in Eighteenth Century Germany (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991); Laqueur, Making Sex.
13 Kathleen Weiler and Sue Middleton, Telling Women’s Lives: Narrative Inquiries in the History of Women’s Education (Buckingham: Open University Press, 1999); Alison Jones and Kuni Jenkins, “Disciplining the Native Body: Handwriting and Its Civilizing Practices,” History of Education Review 29, no. 2 (2000): 34–46. See also “The Body of the Schoolchild in the History of Education”, ed. Catherine Burke, special issue, History of Education 36, no. 2 (2007).
14 Kenneth Osborne, “Education and Schooling: A Relationship that Should Never Be Taken for Granted,” in Why Do We Educate? Renewing the Conversation, ed. D. Coulter and J.R. Wiens, vol. 1 (Boston, MA: Blackwell, 2008), 21–41.
15 Catherine Burke, “Editorial,” in “The Body of the Schoolchild in the History of Education,” 165. In making this point, Burke cites David Kirk, Schooling Bodies: School Practice and Public Discourse, 1880–1950 (London: Leicester University Press, 1998), 8. See also Philip Corrigan, “The Making of the Boy: Meditations on What Grammar School did with, to and for My Body,” Journal of Education 170, no. 3 (1988): 142–61.
16 Karen Dubinsky, “Children, Ideology, and Iconography: How Babies Rule the World,” Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth 5, no. 1 (Winter 2012): 5–13; Tamara Myers, ““Blistered and Bleeding, Tired and Determined: Visual Representations of Children and Youth in the Miles for Millions Walkathon,” Journal of the Canadian Historical Association 22, no. 1 (2011): 245–75.
17 Neil Sutherland, Children in English-Canadian Society: Framing the Twentieth Century Consensus (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1976); Cynthia Comacchio, “Nations are Built of Babies”: Saving Ontario’s Mothers and Children, 1900–1940 (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1993); Viviana A. Zelizer, Pricing the Priceless Child: The Changing Social Value of Children (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994); Hugh Cunningham, Children and Childhood in Western Societies since the 1500s (New York: Pearson Educational Press, 1995); Harry Hendrick, Child Welfare: Historical Dimensions, Contemporary Debate (London: Policy Press, 2003); Mona Gleason, Small Matters: Canadian Children in Sickness and Health, 1900 to 1940 (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2013).
18 Eric Margolis and Sheila Fram, “Caught Napping: Images of Surveillance, Discipline, and Punishment on the Body of the Schoolchild,” History of Education 36, no. 2 (2007): 191–211; Betty Eggermont, “The Choreography of Schooling as Site of Struggle: Belgian Primary Schools, 1880–1940,” History of Education 30, no. 2 (2001): 129–40.
19 Catherine Burke and Helena Ribeira de Castro, “The School Photograph: Portraiture and the Art of Assembling the Body of the Schoolchild,” History of Education 36, no. 2 (2007): 215.
20 Rousmaniere, “Questioning the Visual in the History of Education.”.
21 Mona Gleason, “Race, Class and Health: School Medical Inspection and ‘Healthy’ Children in British Columbia, 1890 to 1930,” Canadian Bulletin of Medical History 19 (2002): 95–112.
22 Mona Gleason, “Disciplining the Student Body: Schooling and the Construction of Canadian Children’s Bodies, 1930 to 1960,” History of Education Quarterly 41, no. 2 (Summer 2001): 189–215.
23 Nic Clarke, “Sacred Daemons: Exploring British Columbian Society’s Perception of ‘Mentally Deficient’ Children, 1870–1930,” BC Studies 144 (Winter 2004/2005): 61–90; Jessica Haynes, “Creating Normal Families in Postwar Canada: The Thalidomide Babies,” in Bringing Children and Youth into Canadian History: The Difference Kids Make, ed. Mona Gleason and Tamara Myers (Toronto: Oxford University Press, forthcoming); Jane Nicholas, “Child Freak Performers in Early to Mid-Twentieth Century Canada,” in Gleason and Myers, Bringing Children and Youth in Canadian History, 308–26.
24 See, for example, Gleason, “Disciplining the Student Body”; Eggermont, “The Choreography of Schooling as a Site of Struggle”; John Horton and Peter Kraftl, “Not Just Growing Up, But Going On: Materials, Spacings, Bodies, Situtations,” Children’s Geographies 4, no. 3 (2006): 259–76.
25 See, for example, Marc Depaepe and Frank Simon, “Sources in the Making of Histories of Education: Proofs, Arguments, and Other Forms of Reasoning from the Historian’s Workplace,” in Educational Research: Proofs, Arguments and Other Reasonings, ed. Paul Smeyers and Marc Dapaepe, vol. 4 (Netherlands: Springer, 2010), 23–9; Kate Rousmaniere, “‘Those Who Can’t, Teach’: The Disability History of American Educators,” History of Education Quarterly 53, no. 1 (February 2013): 90–103; Richard Aldrich, “Neuroscience, Education and the Evolution of the Human Brain,” History of Education 42, no. 3 (2013): 396–410; Richard Aldrich, “Nature, Nurture and Neuroscience: Some Future Directions for Historians of Education,” Paedagogica Historica 50, no. 6 (2014): 852–60; Ian Grosvenor and Martin Lawn, “Ways of Seeing in Education and Schooling: Emerging Historiographies,” History of Education 30, no. 2 (2001): 105–8.
26 Aldrich, “Neuroscience, Education and the Evolution of the Human Brain”.
27 See, for example, the aim of the journal Educational Neuroscience: to “publish original studies, commentaries and opinions, and reviews on cognitive neuroscience research that stands to inform and improve educational assessment, practice, and policy,” https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/educational-neuroscience/journal202455#aims-and-scope (accessed October 7, 2016).
28 Janet N. Zadina, “The Emerging Role of Educational Neuroscience in Educational Reform, Psiología Educativa 21 (2015): 71–7.
29 Londa Schiebinger, “The Anatomy of Difference; Race and Sex in Eighteen-Century Science,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 23, no. 4 (Summer 1990): 387–405; Anne Fausto-Sterling, “Gender, Race and Nation: The Comparative Anatomy of ‘Hottentot’ Women in Europe, 1815–1817,” in Feminism and the Body, ed. Londa Schiebinger (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 203–33.
30 Nickolas Rose, “Reading the Human Brain: How the Mind Became Legible,” Body & Society 22, no. 2 (June 2016): 140–77.
31 Charlotte Epstein, “Surveillance, Privacy and the Making of the Modern Subject: Habeas What Kind of Corpus?,” Body and Society 22, no. 2 (2016): 28–57.
32 Grace Chung and Sara M. Grimes, “Data Mining the Kids: Surveillance and Market Research Strategies in Children’s Online Games,” Canadian Journal of Communication 30, no. 4 (2005): 527–48.
33 Brian Patton, “The Trouble with Taking Biometric Technologies into Schools,” The Conversation, January 6, 2016, https://theconversation.com/the-trouble-with-taking-biometric-technology-into-schools-52355
34 Danielle Simmons, “Epigenetic Influence and Disease,” Nature Education 1, no. 1 (2008): 6.
35 Anne Bombay, Kimberly Matheson, and Hymie Anisman, “The Intergenerational Effects of Indian Residential Schools: Implications for the Concept of Historical Trauma,” Transcultural Psychology 5, no. 3 (2014): 320–38.
36 Catherine Burke, “Hands-on History: Towards a Critique of the ‘Everyday’,” History of Education 30, no. 2 (2001): 191–201.
37 For a more fulsome engagement with these embodied memories, see Gleason, Small Matters.
38 See Mona Gleason, Normalizing the Ideal: Psychology, Schooling and the Family in Postwar Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999); Brenda L. Spencer, Kenneth D. Gariepy, Kari Dehli, and James Ryan, eds., Canadian Education: Governing Practices and Producing Subjects (Rotterdam: Sense Publishers, 2012).
39 Annemeike Van Drenth, “The ‘Truth’ About Idiocy: Revisiting Files of Children in the Dutch ‘School for Idiots’ in the Nineteenth Century,” History of Education 45, no. 4 (2016): 477–91; Annemieke Van Drenth and Mineke van Essen, “Dutch Special Education: Schools for Children and Learning Disabilities in the Interwar Period,” Paedogogica Historica 47, no. 6 (December 2011): 805–24; Jason Ellis, “‘Inequalities of Children in Original Endowment’: How Intelligence Testing Transformed Early Special Education in a North American City School System,” History of Education Quarterly 53, no. 4 (November 2013): 401–29; Nelleke Bakker, “A Culture of Knowledge Production: Testing and Observation of Dutch Children with Learning and Behavioural Problems (1949–1985)” (Paper presented at ISCHE 37 Culture and Education, Istanbul, Turkey, 2015).
40 See Horton and Kraftl, “Not Just Growing Up, But Going On”; Nick Peim, “The History of the Present: Towards a Contemporary Phenomenology of the School,” History of Education 30, no. 2 (2001): 177–90; Peter Kraftl, “Emotional Geographies and the Study of Educational Spaces,” in Methodological Advances in Research on Emotion and Education, ed. M. Zembylas and P.A. Shultz (Switzerland: Springer International Publishing, 2016), 151–63; Peter Kraftl, “Alter-Childhoods: Biopolitics and Childhoods in Alternative Education Spaces,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 105, no. 1 (2015): 219–37.
41 Mike Crang, “Qualitative Methods: Touchy, Feely, Look-see?,” Progress in Human Geography 27, no. 4 (2003): 495.
42 Tara Woodyer, “The Body as Research Tool: Embodied Practice and Children’s Geographies,” Children’s Geographies 6, no. 4 (2008): 349–62.
43 Kristina Ledman, “Lockers and Hangers: Defining Space and Interaction between Vocational and Academic Students,” in Engaging with Educational Space: Visualising Spaces of Teaching and Learning, ed. Catherine Burke, Ian Grosvenor, and Björn Norlin, Umeå Studies in History and Education 8 (Umeå: Umeå University, 2014), 18–29.
44 Ibid., 21, 24.
45 Horton and Kraftl, “Not Just Growing Up, But Going On,” 273.
46 Brown et al., “Researching ‘Experience’.” 496.