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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 Porto in July 2019, this paper offers an example of a hitherto overlooked embodied space and place in the history of education. Taking the simple pocket found in children’s clothing as a significant, if hidden, site of pupil experience, the article addresses the challenge of thinking with and through the body in opening up new and risky avenues of enquiry. The article demonstrates the potential of a research framework that uses the concept of the vertical imaginary in identifying submerged landscapes of education. I experiment in addressing some of the methodological challenges of researching what we might identify as the “under-stories” in past experiences of schooling. Finally, I conclude with some reflections on the potential of this subterranean research adventure and suggest some reasons why it may be worthwhile for us to examine the potential of other “under-stories” in the history of education.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1 Antonio Nóvoa, “Letter to a Young Educational Historian,” Historia y Memoria de la Educación 1 (2014): 113–29.
2 Mona Gleason, “Metaphor, Materiality, and Method: The Central Role of Embodiment in the History of Education,” Paedagogica Historica 54 (2018): 1–2, 4–19.
3 Robert Macfarlane, Underland: A Deep Time Journey (London: Hamish Hamilton, 2019).
4 Ibid., 17.
5 Ibid., .
6 Ibid., 13.
7 Catherine Burke, “Containing the School Child: Architecture and Pedagogies,” Paedagogica Historica 4, no. 4–5 (2005): 492; Catherine Burke and Ian Grosvenor, School (London: Reaktion Press, 2008); C. Burke, “Inside Out: A Collaborative Approach to Designing Schools in England, 1945–1972,” Paedagogica Historica 45, 3 (2009): 421–33; Burke, “Putting Education in its Place: Mapping the Observations of Danish and English Architects on 1950s School Design,” Paedagogica Historica 46, no. 5 (2010): 655–72; Burke, “Creativity in School Design,” in The Routledge International Handbook of Creative Learning, ed. J. Sefton-Green, P. Thomson, and K. Jones (London: Routledge, 2011): 417–27; Burke, A Life in Education and Architecture: Mary Beaumont Medd 1907–2005 (London: Ashgate 2013); Burke, “Looking Back to Imagine the Future: Connecting with the Radical Past in Technologies of School Design,” Technology, Pedagogy and Education 23, no. 1 (2014): 39–55; Burke and Karen D. Könings, “Recovering Lost Histories of Educational Design: A Case Study in Contemporary Participatory Strategies,” Oxford Review of Education 42, no. 6 (2016): 721–32.
8 See for example Julie Willis and Kate Darian-Smith, eds., Designing Schools: Space, Place and Pedagogy. (London: Routledge [Architecture], 2016).
9 Diana Jordan, Childhood and Movement (London: Blackwell, 1966), 79.
10 Alison Clark, “In-between Spaces in Postwar Primary Schools: A Micro-study of a ‘Welfare Room’ (1977–1993),”History of Education 39, no. 6 (2010): 767–78.
11 Ibid., 768.
12 Marc Armitage, “The Influence of School Architecture and Design on Outdoor Play Experience within the Primary School,” Paedagogica Historica 41 (2005): 535–53.
13 Inés Dussel, “School Bathrooms as Spaces for Public and Private Interaction: A History of School Design and Technologies for (Un)Touching Bodies, 1870–1940” (paper presented at ISCHE 37, Istanbul, June 2015).
14 Ian Grosvenor and Martin Lawn, “In Search of the School: Space over Time,” Building und Erzhung 1 (2001): 55–70; Ian Grosvenor and Martin Lawn, “Ways of Seeing in Education and Schooling: Emerging Historiographies,” History of Education 30, no. 2 (2001): 105–8; Ian Grosvenor 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): 117–29.
15 Catherine Burke, “Editorial,” History of Education 36, no. 2 (2007):165–71; Frederik Herman and Michèle Hofmann, “Bodies and Minds in Education,” History of Education 48, no. 4 (2019): 443–51.
16 Mona Gleason, “Metaphor, Materiality, and Method: The Central Role of Embodiment in the History of Education,” Paedagogica Historica 54 (2018): 1–2, 4–19
17 Inés Dussel, “The Shaping of a Citizenship with Style: A History of Uniforms and Vestimentary Codes in Argentinean Public Schools,” Materialities of Schooling: Design, Technology, Objects, Routines, ed. Martin Lawn and lan Grosvenor (Oxford: Symposium Books, 2005), 97–125; Stephanie Spencer, “A Uniform Identity: Schoolgirl Snapshots and the Spoken Visual,” History of Education 36, no. 2 (2007): 227–46.
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; Mona Gleeson, “Metaphor, Materiality, and Method: The Central Role of Embodiment in the History of Education,” Paedagogica Historica 4, no. 1–2 (2017): 4–19.
19 Barbara Burman, “Pocketing the Difference: Gender and Pockets in Nineteenth-Century Britain,” in Material Strategies: Dress and Gender in Historical Perspective, ed. Barbara Burman and Carole Turbin (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2003), 90.
20 Barbara Burman and Ariane Fennetaux, The Pocket: A Hidden History of Women’s Lives 1660–1900 (London: Yale University Press, 2019), 212.
21 Radclyffe Hall, The Well of Loneliness (London: Jonathan Cape, 1928).
22 Burman and Fennetaux, The Pocket, 11.
23 Kristi S. Lekies and Thomas H. Beery, “Everyone Needs a Rock: Collecting Items from Nature in Childhood,” Children Youth and Environments, 23, no. 3 (2013): 66–88, 76.
24 Pauliina Rautio, “Children who Carry Stones in their Pockets: On Autotelic Material Practices in Everyday Life,” Children’s Geographies 11, no. 4 (2013): 394–408.
25 Jean Jacques Rousseau, Emile [1762] (London: Yale University Press, 1921): 67.
26 Sarah Young, “Mother’s Photo of What She Found in her Four Year Old’s Pockets Goes Viral,” The Independent, April 27, 2018, https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/mother-photo-child-pockets-found-twitter-viral-kate-munnik-cardiff-a8324936.html (accessed November 26, 2019).
27 “Student Life in Lower Russia,” Armagh Guardian, September 9, 1853. https://www.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk/viewer/bl/0001372/18530909/056/0007
28 Belfast Telegraph, January 21, 1911. The same story was published in newspapers across Ireland and England.
29 “Search Your Boys Pockets,” Eastern Districts Chronicle, May 7, 1917.
30 C.F. Burk, “The Collecting Instinct,” The Pedagogical Seminary 7, no. 2 (1900): 179–207, 179.
31 Harvey C. Lehman and Paul A. Witty, “The Present Status of the Tendency to Collect and Hoard,” Psychological Review 34, no. 1 (1927): 48–56; “Further Studies in Children’s Interest in Collecting,” Journal of Educational Psychology 21, no. 2 (1930): 112–27; “The Collecting Interests of Town Children and Country Children,” Journal of Educational Psychology 24, no. 3 (1933): 170–84; See also M.T. Whitley, “Children’s Interests in Collecting,” Journal of Educational Psychology 20, no. 4 (1929): 249–61.
32 Elizabeth Howe, “Can the Collecting Instinct Be Utilized in Teaching?” The Elementary School Teacher 6, no. 9 (1906): 466–71,467.
33 Burman and Fennetaux, The Pocket, 197.
34 John Paull, Through My Own Eyes: On Becoming a Teacher (Bloomington, IN: Xlibris, 2012); Catherine Burke, “Nature Tables and Pocket Museums: From the Leicestershire Classroom to the Mountain View Center for Environmental Education, Colorado,” Pedagogia Oggi: Spazi E Luoghi Dell’educazione 17, no. 1 (2019): 17–30.
35 Gerard Holmes, The Idiot Teacher: Edward O’Neill of Prestolee School (London: Faber & Faber, 1952), 21.
36 “Codware” like “cod” is slang for scrotum or genitals.
37 Charles Dickens, American Notes (London: Chapman & Hall, 1842), 17.
38 “World’s Use of Pockets,” New York Times, August 28, 1899.
39 “Portraits of Teachers and Thinkers,” in Thomas Eakins, ed. Darrel Sewell Portrait of Kenton Thinking Man! (n.d), 10.
40 Daphne Meadmore and Colin Symes, “Of Uniform Appearance: A Symbol of School Discipline and Governmentality,” Discourse 17, no. 2 (2006): 209–25, 213.
41 Devizes and Wiltshire Gazette, July 30, 1863.
42 “Hands in Pockets,” The Maitland Daily Mercury, January 4, 1932. The school’s sporting colour is pink, an honour reportedly hard-won from Eton. Those who excel at sports are awarded “full pinks” and can wear a pink tie with their uniform.
43 “Fine For Hands In Pockets,” The Sun (Sydney) May 25, 1940.
44 Newcastle Morning Herald, November 20, 1951.
45 Betty Eggermont, “The Choreography of Schooling as Site of Struggle: Belgian Primary Schools, 1880–1940,” History of Education 30, no. 2 (2001): 138.
46 Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1992), 46.
47 Burman and Fennetaux, The Pocket, 15.
48 Catherine Burke and Peter Cunningham, “Ten Years On: Making Children Visible in Teacher Education and Ways of Reading Video,” Paedagogica Historica 47, no. 4 (2011): 525–41.
49 This phrase was often used in speeches by Sir Alec Clegg, Chief Education Officer for the West Riding of Yorkshire 1945–1974.
50 Colin Ward, The Child in the Country (London: Robert Hale, 1988): 88.
51 Herman Hertzberger, Notes from Space and Learning: Lessons from Architecture (Rotterdam: 010 Publishers, 2008), 104.
52 Burman and Fennetaux, The Pocket, 211.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Catherine Burke
Catherine Burke is Emerita Professor of the History of Education at the Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge, UK.