Editorial

Abstract

This editorial discusses how bodies have mattered to historians of education in the past and situates the collection of articles in this special issue within current debates concerning approaches to the use of visual materials as sources of new knowledge. First, existing literature relating to aspects of corporality in educational settings is reviewed, pointing out significant concerns and particular silences in the historiography. It is suggested that history of education has to date operated in an ontological framework that has privileged mind and ignored, to a large extent, corporeality in learning and manipulation of the body in teaching. Then, the articles in this issue are each introduced and key themes are noted. Finally, comments are made regarding the ways in which these articles are united by the attention paid to unravelling discourses of knowledge essential to the everyday nature of school.

Notes

¹Shilling, Chris. The Body and Social Theory. London: Sage Publications, 1993: 22.

²Paechter, Carrie. “Reconceptualizing the Gendered Body: Learning and Constructing Masculinities and Femininities in School.” Gender and Education 18, no. 2 (2006): 121–35.

³Kirk, David, Schooling Bodies. School Practice and Public Discourse, 1880–1950. London: Leicester University Press, 1998: 7.

⁴Key texts include Evans, John, Brian Davies, and Jan Wright eds. Body Knowledge and Control: Studies in the Sociology of Education and Physical Culture. London: Routledge, 2004; Shilling, The Body and Social Theory.

⁵Livingstone, David N. Putting Science in its Place: Geographies of Scientific Knowledge. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2003: 77.

⁶Locke, John. Some Thoughts Concerning Education, First edition, 1692, reprint London: Clarendon, 1985: section 23.

⁷Livingstone, Putting Science in its Place, 78.

⁸See, for example, Butler, Judith. Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex. New York and London: Routledge, 1993; Weiss, Gail. Body Images: Embodiment as Incorporeality. New York and London: Routledge, 1999.

⁹See, for example, Barman, Jean. “Encounters with Sexuality: The Management of Inappropriate Body Behaviour in Late Nineteenth‐Century British Columbia Schools.” Historical Studies in Education 16, no. 1, available from http://www.edu.uwo.ca/HSE/04barman.html#_edn1; INTERNET (accessed 10 October 2006).

¹⁰See, Gleason, Mona. “Race, Class, and Health: School Medical Inspection and ‘Healthy’ Children in British Columbia, 1890 to 1930.” Canadian Bulletin of Medical History 19, no. 1 (2002): 95–112.

¹¹Corrigan, Philip. “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. Corrigan uses the phrase ‘bodies matter schooling’ (i.e. not bodies matter in schooling) to draw attention to the often overlooked ways that the regulative practices that constitute schooling require culturally shaped bodily responses from those who inhabit school spaces.

¹²Kirk, Schooling Bodies, 25.

¹³Hendrick, Harry. Child Welfare, Historical Dimensions, Contemporary Debate. London: Policy Press, 2003: 2.

¹⁴Burke, Catherine. “Contested Desires: the Edible Landscape of School.” Paedagogica Historica 41, nos 4–5 (2005): 571–87.

¹⁵See, for example, Lowe, Margaret A. Looking Good: College Women and Body Image, 1875–1930. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003.

¹⁶See Grosvenor, Ian, and Martin Lawn. “The Challenge of the Visual in the History of Education.” Paedagogica Historica 36, no. 1 (2000); “Ways of Seeing.” History of Education 30, no. 2, (2001); Myers, Kevin, U. Mietzner, and N. Peim, eds. Visual History: Images of Education. Bern, Switzerland: Peter Lang, 2005; Burke, “Contested Desires: the Edible Landscape of School”.

¹⁷Shilling, The Body and Social Theory.

¹⁸Catteeuw, K. K. Dams, et al. “Filming the Black Box: Primary Schools on Film in Belgium, 1880–1960: A First Assessment of Unused Sources.” In Visual History: Images of Education, edited by U. Mietzner, K. Myers and N. Piem: 217.

¹⁹Rousmaniere, Kate. “Questioning the Visual in the History of Education.” History of Education 30, no. 2 (March 2001): 110.

²⁰Grosvenor, Ian, Martin Lawn, and Kate Rousmaniere. “Imaging Past Schooling: the Necessity for Montage.” In the review of Education/Pedagogy/Culture 22, no. 1 (2000): 71–85; see also Grosvenor, Ian and Martin Lawn. “‘When in Doubt, Preserve’: Exploring the Traces of Teaching and Material Culture in English Schools.” History of Education 30, no. 2 (2001): 117–27.