Rethinking borders and boundaries for a mobile history of education

ABSTRACT

National borders and school boundaries are integral components of the history of education. Configured as sites of governance and regulation, as spaces of continuity and order, they also introduced a sedentary bias into much historical research. This article presents an argument for writing migrants, migration, and human mobility into the history of education. It does so by drawing on an eclectic range of work associated with the study of migration and by introducing five empirical papers stretching from the seventeenth century to the present and across a range of locations. Each paper shifts migrant subjects from the periphery to the centre of interest and in doing so raises some suggestive possibilities for a mobile history of education.

KEYWORDS:

• Migration
• mobility
• culture
• education

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

¹ S. Castles and M.J. Miller, The Age of Migration (New York: Guildford Press, 2003), 4; Michael H. Fisher, Migration: A World History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014); Rogelio Saenz and Maria Isabel Ayala, “Migration,” in International Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences, ed. William A. Darity, Jr, 2nd ed. (Detroit: Macmillan Reference, 2008), 156–59.

² See, for example, Andreas Wimmer and Nina Glick Schiller, “Methodological Nationalism, the Social Sciences, and the Study of Migration: An Essay in Historical Epistemology,” International Migration Review 37, no. 3 (2003): 576–610; Susan L. Robertson and Roger Dale, “Researching Education in a Globalising Era: Beyond Methodological Nationalism, Methodological Statism, Methodological Educationism and Spatial Fetishism,” Centre for Globalisation, Education and Societies, University of Bristol, Bristol, http://susanleerobertson.com/publications. For a balanced and critical discussion of understanding and applying methodological nationalism in different disciplines see Daniel Chernilo, “The Critique of Methodological Nationalism: Theory and History”, Theses Eleven 106, no. 1 (2011): 98–117.

³A. Sager, “Toward a Cosmopolitan Ethics of Mobility”, in Mobility & Politics (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), ch. 3.

⁴ Leah D. Adams and Anna Kirova, eds., Global Migration and Education: Schools, Children, and Families (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2006), 1–12; Fisher, Migration; Saenz and Ayala, “Migration,”  156–59.

⁵ Barbara Lüthi, “Migration and Migration History,” Version: 1.0, in: Docupedia-Zeitgeschichte, 28.9.2010, URL: http://docupedia.de/zg/Migration_and_Migration_History?oldid=123616Versions: 1.0 (accessed August 2, 2017).

⁶ See the argument in Leo Lucassen and Aniek X. Smit, “The Repugnant Other: Soldiers, Missionaries, and Aid Workers as Organizational Migrants,” Journal of World History 26, no. 1 (2015): 1–39, and an indication of its potential in Maria Patricia Williams, “Mobilising Mother Cabrini’s Educational Practice: The Transnational Context of the London School of the Missionary Sisters of the Sacred Heart of Jesus 1898–1911,” History of Education 44, no. 5 (2015): 631–50.

⁷ See, for example, Christiane Harzig, Dirk Hoerder, and Donna Gabaccia, What is Migration History? (Cambridge: Polity, 2009); Patrick Manning, Migration in World History, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 2013); D. Hoerder, “Migration Studies: Deep Time and Global Approaches,” Journal of Global History 11, no. 3 (2016): 473–80.

⁸ Leo Lucassen, Jan Lucassen, Rick de Jong and Mark van de Water, “Cross-Cultural Migration in Western Europe 1901–2000: A Preliminary Estimate,” International Institute History of Social History Research Paper No. 52, https://socialhistory.org/sites/default/files/docs/publications/researchpaper-52-lucassen-lucassen-et.al-versie_voor_web140801.pdf (accessed August 2, 2017).

⁹ B. Finkelstein, “Teaching Outside the Lines: Education History for a World in Motion,” History of Education Quarterly 53, no. 2 (2013): 126–38, doi:10.1111/hoeq.12011.

¹⁰ Donna R. Gabaccia, ‘Time and Temporality in Migration Studies’ in Migration Theory: Talking Across Disciplines, ed. Caroline B. Brettell and James F. Hollifield, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 2008), 54; see also Caroline B. Brettell and James F. Hollifield, eds., Migration Theory: Talking Across Disciplines, ed., 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 2008); Harzig, Hoerder, and Gabaccia, What is Migration History, 3; Finkelstein, “Teaching Outside the Lines,” 128.

¹¹ Kevin Myers and Ian Grosvenor, “Cultural Learning and Historical Memory: A Research Agenda,” Encounters/Encuentros/Rencontres on Education 15 (2014): 3–21.

¹² Karin Priem, “Seeing, Hearing, Reading, Writing, Speaking and Things: On Silences, Senses and Emotions During the ‘Zero Hour’ in Germany,” Paedagogica Historica 52, no. 3 (2016): 286–99, 298.

¹³ Ana Bravo-Moreno, “Transnational Mobilities: Migrants and Education,” Comparative Education 45, no. 3 (2009): 421–4; Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, revised ed. (New York: Verso, 1991), 47–65; Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Capital, 1848–1875 (New York: Vintage Books, 1996), 309–11.

¹⁴ Paul J. Ramsey, “Toiling Together for Social Cohesion: International Influences on the Development of Teacher Education in the United States,” Paedagogica Historica 50, nos 1-2 (2014): 111–6; Karl-Ernst Jeismann, “American Observations Concerning the Prussian Educational System in the Nineteenth Century,” in German Influences on Education in the United States to 1917, ed. Henry Geitz, Jürgen Heideking, and Jurgen Herbst (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 21–41. Andy Green. “Education and State Formation in Europe and Asia,” in Education, Globalization and the Nation State, ed. Andy Green (London: Palgrave Macmillan UK, 1997), 29–51, http://dx.doi.org/10.1057/9780230371132_3.

¹⁵ Ramsey, “Toiling Together for Social Cohesion,” 111–6; Sophie Rudolph, “To ‘Uplift the Aborigine’ or to ‘Uphold’ Aboriginal Dignity and Pride? Indigenous Educational Debates in 1960s Australia,” Paedagogica Historica, DOI:10.1080/00309230.2018.1472112; G. Antonio Espinoza, Education and the State in Modern Peru: Primary Schooling in Lima, 1821–c. 1921 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 3–17; Bravo-Moreno, “Transnational Mobilities,” 421–3; Hobart A. Spalding, Jr., “Education in Argentina, 1890–1914: The Limits of Oligarchical Reform,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 3, no. 1 (1972): 33–6; Carlos Newland, “The Estado Docente and its Expansion: Spanish American Elementary Education, 1900–1950,” Journal of Latin American Studies 26, no. 2 (1994): 454; Mark D. Szuchman, “In Search of Deference: Education and Civic Formation in Nineteenth-Century Buenos Aires,” in Molding the Hearts and Minds: Education, Communications, and Social Change in Latin America, ed. John A. Britton (Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources, 1994), 1–18; Ines Dussel and Marcelo Caruso, “Dewey Under South American Skies: Some Readings from Argentina,” in Latin American Education: Comparative Perspectives, ed. Carlos Alberto Torres and Adriana Puiggros (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1997), 106; David N. Plank, The Means of Our Salvation: Public Education in Brazil, 1930–1995 (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1996), 63–6; Simphiwe A. Hlatshwayo, Education and Independence: Education in South Africa, 1658–1988 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2000), 30–5; E. Patricia Tsurumi, Japanese Colonial Education in Taiwan, 1895–1945 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1977), 18–22; B. Edward McClellan, Moral Education in America: Schools and the Shaping of Character from Colonial Times to the Present (New York: Teachers College Press, 1999), 15–33; Paul J. Ramsey, “Education and Migration,” in Oxford Handbook of the History of Education, ed. John Rury and Eileen Tamura (Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming).

¹⁶ Quentin Beresford and Gary Partington, eds., Reform and Resistance in Aboriginal Education (Perth: University of Western Australia Press, 2003); Geoffrey Sherington, “Families and State Schooling in the Illawarra, 1840–1940,” in Family, School and State in Australian History, ed. M.R. Theobald and R.J.W. Selleck (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1990) 114–33; Craig Campbell and Helen Proctor, A History of Australian Schooling (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2014).

¹⁷ Marc Depaepe and Paul Smeyers, “Educationalization as an Ongoing Modernization Process,” Educational Theory 58, no. 4 (2008): 379–89; Marc Depaepe and Karen Hulstaert, “Creating Cultural Hybridity by Exporting Metropolitan Structures and Cultures of Schooling and Educationalisation? The Emergence of a Congolese ‘Elite’ in the 1950s as a Starting Point for Further Research,” European Educational Research Journal 12, no. 2 (2013): 201–14 For a detailed historiographical analysis of this issue in the US context see Milton Gaither, American Educational History Revisited: A Critique of Progress (New York, Teachers College, 2003); for Latin America, and its relationship with the Iberian peninsula, see the judgements of Gabriela Ossenbach and María del Mar del Pozo, “Postcolonial Models, Cultural Transfers and Transnational Perspectives in Latin America: A Research Agenda,” Paedagogica Historica 47, no. 5 (2011): 579–600.

¹⁸ Marc Depaepe et al., Order in Progress: Everyday Educational Practice in Primary Schools, Belgium, 1880–1970 (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2000); D. Tröhler, “Educationalization of Social Problems and the Educationalization of the Modern World,” in Encyclopedia of Educational Philosophy and Theory, ed. M.A. Peters (Singapore: Springer, 2017).

¹⁹ James Belich, Replenishing the Earth: The Settler Revolution and the Rise of the Angloworld (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).

²⁰ For a summary of the reception of Belich’s work see Stephen Howe, “British Worlds, Settler Worlds, World Systems and Killing Fields,” The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 40, no. 4 (2012): 691–725. Important historical and educational studies of hybridisation include Heike Niedrig and Christian Ydesen,eds., Writing Postcolonial Histories of Intercultural Education (Frankfruta.M: Perter Lang Verlag, 2011); Barnita Bagchi, Eckhardt Fuchs, and Kate Rousmaniere, eds., Connecting Histories of Education: Transnational Exchanges and Cross-Cultural Transfers in (Post)=Colonial Education (New York: Berghahn, 2014).

²¹ For analysis that locates this process at the centre of British state formation and which identifies domestic colonialism, see Mary J. Hickman, “The Impact of Britain’s Historical Legacy on the Contemporary Ethno-Racial Regime,” in Ethnicity, Social Mobility and Public Policy. Comparing the US and UK, ed. G. Loury, T. Modood, and S. Teles (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).

²² J. McLeod and F. Paisley, “The Modernization of Colonialism and the Educability of the ‘Native’: Transpacific Knowledge Networks and Education in the Interwar Years,” History of Education Quarterly 56, no. 3 (2016): 473–502; M. Lake and H. Reynolds, Drawing the Global Colour Line: White Men’s Countries and the International Challenge of Racial Equality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press); Nicole Anae, “‘Among the Boer Children’: Australian Women Teachers in South African Concentration Camp Schools, 1901–1904,” History of Education Review 45, no. 1 (2016): 28–53; Shirleene Robinson and Simon Sleight, eds. Children, Childhood and Youth in the British World (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016); Emmanuelle Saada, Empire’s Children: Race, Filiation, and Citizenship in the French Colonies, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012); Ellen Boucher, Empire’s Children: Child Emigrants, Welfare, and the Decline of the British World, 1869–1967 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014).

²³ On the significance of imperial memory for decolonising cultures in Britain and Europe see, for example, Bill Schwarz, Memories of Empire, Volume I. The White Man’s World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011); Kalypso Nicolaïdis, Berny Sèbe, and Gabrielle Maas, eds., Echoes of Empire: Memory, Identity and Colonial Legacies (London: I. B. Tauris, 2015). The continued significance of the bussing debate is also explored in Brett Bebber, “‘We Were Just Unwanted’: Bussing, Migrant Dispersal, and South Asians in London,” Journal of Social History 48, no. 3 (2015): 635–61.

²⁴ Thomas A. O’Donoghue, Upholding the Faith: The Process of Education in Catholic Schools in Australia, 1922–65 (New York: Peter Lang, 2001); Remy Low, “A Genealogy of the Religious Versus Secular Schooling Debate in New South Wales (Part II): Populism and Patriotism,” Journal of Religious Education 62 (2014): 53–64; Paul J. Ramsey, Bilingual Public Schooling in the United States: A History of America’s “Polyglot Boardinghouse” (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 18–34; James W. Fraser, Between Church and State: Religion and Public Education in a Multicultural America (New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 2000), 49–65; Stephan F. Brumberg, Going to America, Going to School: The Jewish Immigrant Public School Encounter in Turn-of-the-Century New York City (New York: Praeger, 1986), 64–9; Spalding, “Education in Argentina, 1890–1914,” 42–4; Eileen H. Tamura, “The English-Only Effort, the Anti-Japanese Campaign, and Language Acquisition in the Education of Japanese Americans in Hawaii, 1915–40,” History of Education Quarterly 33, no. 1 (1993): 37–58; Adolf Douai and John Straubenmueller, “German Schools in the United States,” in The Bilingual School in the United States: A Documentary History, ed. Paul J. Ramsey (Charlotte, NC: Information Age, 2012), 9–10; Ramsey, “Education and Migration”.

²⁵ Mrs James Sadlier, The Blakes and Flanagans: A Tale Illustrative of Irish Life in the United States (New York: P.J. Kenedy & Sons, 1858), 250, 255; David Nasaw, Schooled to Order: A Social History of Public Schooling in the United States (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981), 69–79.

²⁶ “Third Plenary Council of Baltimore, 1884,” in The School in the United States: A Documentary History, ed. James W. Fraser (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2001), 145; Lloyd P. Jorgenson, The State and the Non-Public School, 1825–1925 (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1987), 70–136; Fraser, Between Church and State, 57–65.

²⁷ Newland, “The Estado Docente and its Expansion,” 457–8; Paul J. Ramsey, “In the Region of Babel: Public Bilingual Schooling in the Midwest, 1840s-1880s,” History of Education Quarterly 49, no. 3 (2009): 267–90; Common Schools of Cincinnati, “Annual Report,” in The Bilingual School in the United States, 19–21; Ramsey, “Education and Migration”..

²⁸ Victor Low, The Unimpressible Race: A Century of Educational Struggle by the Chinese in San Francisco (San Francisco: East/West, 1982), 6–37, 54–84; Ronald Takaki, Strangers from a Different Shore: A History of Asian Americans (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1989), 79–131.

²⁹ Carter Godwin Woodson, The Mis-education of the Negro (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 1990); James D. Anderson, The Education of Blacks in the South, 1860–1935 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988), 33–78; Ramsey, Bilingual Public Schooling, 77–94; Katherine Ellinghaus, “Assimilation and Absorption in the United States and Australia,” Pacific Historical Review 75, no. 4 (2006): 563–85; Mark Francis, “The ‘Civilizing’ of Indigenous People in Nineteenth-Century Canada,” Journal of World History 9, no. 1 (1998): 51–87; David Wallace Adams, Education for Extinction: American Indians and the Boarding School Experience, 1875–1928 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1995), 28–59; Anna Haebich, Broken Circles: Fragmenting Indigenous Families 1800–2000 (Fremantle: Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 2000); Beth Marsden, “The System of Compulsory Education is Failing: Assimilation, Mobility and Aboriginal Students in Victorian State Schools, 1961–1968,” History of Education Review 47, no. 2 (forthcoming 2018).

³⁰ Donna R. Gabaccia, “Is Everywhere Nowhere? Nomads, Nations, and the Immigrant Paradigm of the United States,” in Race and Immigration in the United States: New Histories, ed. Paul Spickard (New York: Routledge, 2012), 30–52; Philipp Eigenmann, “Schooling for Two Futures: Italian Associations on the Education of Italian Children in Switzerland (1960–1980),” History of Education Researcher 96 (2015): 55–63.

³¹ N. Sigona, A. Gamlen,G. Liberatore, and H. Neveu Kringelbach, eds., Diasporas Reimagined: Spaces, Practices and Belonging (Oxford: Oxford Diasporas Programme, 2015).

³² See, for example, the discussion on the limitations of ethnic fade and the idiom of diaspora in Rogers Brubaker, “The ‘Diaspora’ Disapora,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 28, no. 1 (2005): 1–19; Rudolph, “To ‘Uplift the Aborigine’”.

³³ Jessica Gerrard, Radical Childhoods: Schooling and the Struggle for Social Change (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2014); Kevin Myers, Struggles for a Past: Migrants and their Histories, 1951–2000 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2015); Ian Grosvenor and Kevin Myers, “Questioning Difference: Bodies, (Re-)Presentation, and the Development of ‘Multicultural Britain’,” Paedagogica Historica 53, no. 6 (2017): 730–50, DOI:10.1080/00309230.2017.1349157.

³⁴ Geoff Eley, A Crooked Line: From Cultural History to the History of Society (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 2005).

³⁵ Accounts of curricula change and textbook revision have been particularly rich topics for historians of education. See, for example, Christiane Hintermann and Christina Johansson, eds., Migration and Memory: Representations of of Migration in Europe since 1960 (Innsbruck: Studienverlag, 2010) and, for a summary of research patterns, Eckhardt Fuchs, “Current Trends in History and Social Studies Textbook Research,” Journal of International Cooperation in Education 14, no. 2 (2011): 17–34.

³⁶ A timely review of European practices notes that notions of interculturalism are becoming widespread in compulsory schooling but “current policies and practices seldom address deep political roots”: see Pier-Luc Dupont “Theorising the (De)Construction of Ethnic Stigma in Compulsory Education”, University of Oxford Centre on Migration Policy and Society Working Paper No. 132, https://www.compas.ox.ac.uk/media/WP-2016-132-DuPont-Ethnic-Stigma.pdf (accessed).

³⁷ Jennifer Jensen Wallach, “Building a Bridge of Words: The Literary Autobiography as Historical Source Material,” Biography 29, no. 3 (2006): 446–61; Kevin Myers, “Historical Practice in the Age of Pluralism: Educating and Celebrating Identities,” in Histories and Memories: Immigrants and their History in Britain since 1800, ed. P. Panayi and K. Burrell (London: I.B. Tauris, 2006), 35–53; Tony Kushner, “Selling Racism: History, Heritage, Gender and the (Re)Production of Prejudice,” Patterns of Prejudice 33, no. 4 (1999): 67–86.

³⁸ Ben Rogaly, “Disrupting Migration Stories: Reading Life Histories Through the Lens of Mobility And Fixity,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 33, no. 3 (2015): 528–44; Naomi Norquay, “Life History Research: Memory, Schooling and Social Difference,” Cambridge Journal of Education 20, no. 3 (1990): 291–300. DOI:10.1080/; Tom Woodin, “‘Chuck Out the Teacher’: Radical Pedagogy in the Community,” International Journal of Lifelong Education 26, no. 1 (2007): 89–104; M.A. Mahoney and B. Yngvesson, “The Construction of Subjectivity and the Paradox of Resistance: Reintegrating Feminist Anthropology and Psychology,” Signs 18, no. 1 (1992): 44.

³⁹ Ian Grosvenor and Kevin Myers, “Questioning Difference: Bodies, (Re-)Presentation, and the Development of ‘Multicultural Britain,’” Paedagogica Historica, 53, no. 6 (2017): 730–50; Stuart Hall and Mark Sealy, Different. A Historical Context (London: Phaidon, 2001).

⁴⁰ Bain Attwood, “In the Age of Testimony: The Stolen Generations Narrative, ‘Distance,’ and Public History,” Public Culture 20, no. 1 (2008): 75–95; Christine Nicholls, “Embodying Affect: The Stolen Generations, the History Wars and PolesApart by Indigenous New Media Artist r e a” (2010 14th International Conference Information Visualisation (IV), London, United Kingdom, 2010, pp. 415–21). doi:10.1109/IV.2010.64

⁴¹ Kevin Myers and Ian Grosvenor, “Cultural Learning and Historical Memory: A Research Agenda,” Encounters/Encuentros/Rencontres on Education 15 (2014): 3–21.

⁴² See, for example, Elliot West, Growing Up with the Country: Childhood on the Far Western Frontier (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1989).

⁴³ Julie McLeod, “Belonging as Pedagogical, Practical and Political,” in Interrogating Belonging of Young People in Schools, ed. C. Halse (London: Palgrave, 2018), 367–80; M. Savage, “Histories, Belongings, Communities,” International Journal of Social Research Methodology 11, no. 2 (2008): 151–62; Nira Yuval-Davis, The Politics of Belonging: Intersectional Contestations (London: Sage, 2000).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Kevin Myers

Kevin Myers is Reader in Social History and Education at the University of Birmingham. His recent book, Struggles for a Past: Irish and Afro-Caribbean Histories in England, 1951–2000 (Manchester University Press, 2015), investigated the production and distribution of histories by migrant and ethnic minority people. He is currently working on project exploring Black and Minority Ethnic participation in the commemoration of the First World War.

Paul J. Ramsey

Paul J. Ramsey is Professor of Social Foundations and Community Education at Eastern Michigan University. He completed his Master’s and PhD degrees in the history of education at Indiana University and is the author of Bilingual Public Schooling in the United States: A History of America’s “Polyglot Boardinghouse” (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010).

Helen Proctor

Helen Proctor is an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at the University of Sydney, and a co-convener of the ISCHE Standing Working Group, “Migrants, migration and education”. Her current research focusses on twentieth- and twenty-first-century histories of family–school relations.