Mapping the discipline history of education

Abstract

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.

Keywords:

• mapping the discipline
• history of education
• dissertations
• cultural transfer

Notes

¹ Numerous existing reports (position papers, analytical records and guides, in particular The International Guide to the History of Education edited by P. Caspard since 1990 for the International Standing Conference on the History of Education, etc.) have been compiled into a systematic bibliography on the discipline’s historiography. Our programme will catalogue and disseminate this list. See http://kartografy.wordpress.com/bibliography-1980-2014/ (accessed June 30, 2014). As this bibliography demonstrates, a number of historians of education have been long-time, substantial contributors to these assessments – first and foremost the successive presidents of ISCHE, who are also participants in this programme – M. Depaepe, J. Dekker, A. Nóvoa, F. Simon, and E. Fuchs.

² Contact: [email protected]