Kerstin TE HEESEN, University of Luxembourg, Luxembourg; Geert THYSSEN, University of Luxembourg, Luxembourg

Activism, agency and archive: British activists and the representation of educational colonies in Spain during and after the Spanish Civil War

In the late 1930s the Spanish Civil War captured the international imagination to an extraordinary degree. As in other countries British men and women were moved to intervene directly through military, political, medical and humanitarian activism, and the memory of the war, and of British participation in it, has held an enduring appeal in the UK (Buchanan 2007). The Civil War was also notable for its use of the visual as a weapon of propaganda by both sides in the conflict. As Brothers and others have argued, it was the first war to be photographed for a mass international audience, and coincided with the growth of documentary photojournalism in the 1930s and its employment by newly founded magazines such as Life from 1936 and Picture Post from 1938 (Brothers 1997, Epps 2005). The Spanish Republican Government deployed visual imagery to great effect as an instrument through which it exhibited its progressive educational and welfare reforms to an international audience (Mendelson 2005). This paper will focus on the visual and textual representations of displaced children in Republican educational colonies in Spain that are preserved in British archive collections. Taking as its starting point a series of 128 photographs of children in colonies gathered together as part of the International Brigade Memorial Archive in London, the paper will consider the construction, use, and circulation of these images and associated texts by British and American political and humanitarian ‘networks of collection and exchange’ (Edwards 2001). It will consider their reception by the international audience at which they were aimed, and their subsequent collection and preservation in British archival institutions. The paper will asses the effectiveness of the images and texts as pedagogical and political agents and consider how they traveled through a range of performative spaces - including exhibitions, public meetings, political propaganda and humanitarian campaign literature - during their journey from construction to archive. In so doing it will also address questions about how their meaning shifted between these spaces, and how they developed from artefacts designed initially to record and communicate the Spanish Republic’s progressive educational project, to political and humanitarian agents in an international ‘Aid Spain’ campaign, and finally to commemorative objects in the archive, aimed at redressing the historical silence surrounding the British International Brigades and ‘Aid Spain’ movement from the mid 1970s onwards and providing a lasting ‘memorial’ to their activism.

Texts, travel and translation: exploring methodological issues in history of education

Ian GROSVENOR, The University of Birmingham, United Kingdom; Natasha MACNAB, The University of Birmingham, United Kingdom

Over the last two decades there has been a growing interest in the exploration of ‘transnational history’. This work has focused in general on understanding the ‘movement, ebb and circulation’ of ideas across borders and in particular on the ‘introduction, transmission, reception and appropriation of ideas through the process of cultural transfer [Ossenbach and del Pozo, 2011; Lawn 2008]. This interest in the transnational and cultural transfer at the same time has been paralleled by an increasing use of spatialised approaches to understand the making and maintenance of knowledge and the influence in particular of geographies of texts, talk and testimony [Livingstone, 2005; Gilbert, 2004; Grosvenor 2009]. Historians in recent years, whether operating within a ‘transnational’ or ‘spatial’ paradigm, have given increasing attention to the role of exhibitions in the circulation of ideas and practices and to the power of the visual in carrying knowledge across borders [Cote 2000; Edwards 2001]. The present paper attempts to engage with methodological questions associated with adopting a transnational or spatial approach by exploring two case studies involving texts, travel and translation. The first case study, from the late nineteenth century to the period up to the Second World War, considers the transmission role of annual reports of a charitable institution dedicated to projects of social reform which linked England, Canada and Australia. In particular attention will be focused on the construction, function and reception of photographic evidence ‘displayed’ in the reports. The second case study from the second half of the twentieth century, analyses campaigns for textbook revisions based on the development of multicultural societies and new forms of intercultural pedagogy and in particular focuses on an exhibition of 1974 [Anderson]. In choosing thematically distinct topics from different periods, the paper attempts to engage with issues raised by the conference generally and the panel more specifically. It is concerned with the publication of different kinds of educational texts, some directly didactic, others more informally so; it considers mechanisms for travel in two different periods and explores the significance of this and, most importantly, it explores the ways in which different cultural settings shape the reception and meaning of different educational ideals.

Poetic journeys. The cultural transfer of new successful strategies of moral education in late 18th century Europe

Jeroen J.H. DEKKER, University of Groningen, Netherlands; Sanne PARLEVLIETM, University of Groningen, The Netherlands

One of the most popular Dutch educational enlightenment authors was Hieronymus van Alphen. His three volumes of Little poems for children published in 1778 and 1782 were extremely successful, both in the Netherlands and abroad. Inspired by the German poets Christian Felix Weisse and Gottlob Wilhelm Burmann, Van Alphen brought about an expansion of educational space based on the integration of moral education in the spirit of the educational ideas of Locke, Rousseau and the philanthropinists with poetical ideas and the nature of the child in both the content and the form of his poems. His poems were translated almost immediately into English, French and, surprisingly, as many of his poems were more or less an adaptation of poems of Weisse and Burmann, into German too. Van Alphen’s trump card was a reversal of former strategies of education: instead of pressing moral ideas upon the children from an adult point of view, he aimed at identification by 1) writing from the perspective of children, 2) situating the poems in the world of experience of children, 3) using a childlike style with a frolicking metre, rhyme scheme and prosody, and 4) combining text and images, so putting the moral message through visually and textually at the same time. In this presentation we will follow the journey of poems for children as media for the cultural transmission of moral educational ideas from Germany to the Netherlands and further on from the perspective of cultural transmission, moral literacy and educational space. We will explore the interaction between national and international moral educational ideas transmitted by poetry for children. The emphasis will be on the representation of family education and its responsibility for moulding children into enlightened future citizens, the theme of nature and childhood, the role of religion and the simultaneous education of children and their parents by means of poetry and by the combined power of text and image.

Récits en transit: notes sur l'internationalisation de l'historiographie de l'éducation dans les Amériques (1916-1934)

The mexican regional historiography on the basic educación in Mexico 20th century

Since 1980’s in Mexico, the historiography of education has developed strongly. One of the most important approaches has been the regional approaches, specially in the study of the basic education. In several works about state of art of history of education in Mexico, their authors underline the contributions of the history regional of education, but they didn’t evaluate themes as basic education. In this work I focus in evaluate the contributions of the researches about basic education in the XX century in some Mexicans regions for two objectives: 1) trying to underline in themes as literacy/illiteracy, rural education and indigenous education; and 2) trying to understand the possibilities for make comparison among other countries in America Latina.

Aspects du national, régional et mondial dans l'historiographie de l'éducation au Chili (c.1850-c.1970)

Cette comunication vise à fournir des repères dans l'historiographie de l'éducation au Chili et à décrire les interactions entre ses dimensions nationale, régionale (l'Amérique latine) et mondiale. Pour cela, nous avons choisi d’analyser ce que nous considérons comme une première étape dans ce domaine d'étude au Chili dont les bornes initiales sont constituées par les premiers textes qui ont essayé de présenter un aperçu de l'éducation, qui comprend les changements dans les premières décennies de l’indépendance et dont la fin est définie par la transition vers une historiographie de l'éducation à caractère théorique et méthodologique dès les années 1960, en conformité avec le renouvellement général de l'historiographie chilienne et l'émergence de nouvelles recherches et approches, y compris l'histoire sociale. A partir de ces bornes thématique et chronologique, le but de notre travail est d'étudier les données dans une double perspective. Du point de vue de la construction de l'ensemble des textes, il est intéressant d'analyser quelles sont les références théoriques et les modèles narratifs reconnus comme propres ou comme repris des cultures américaines de l'Atlantique et qui apparaissent dans les études historiques de l'éducation Chili. Ainsi, dans le but d'évaluer l'existence de la circulation des idées sur la façon d'écrire l'histoire de l'éducation, il s’agit de reconnaître la présence possible d'écoles et d'auteurs qui servent de guides à la section locale d'historiographie. Deuxièmement, du point de vue du contenu et des jugements évaluatifs présents dans l'historiographie pédagogique révisée, il s’agit de comprendre la perspective comparative utilisée par les auteurs analysés comme un moyen pour expliquer les caractéristiques et les particularités de l'éducation au Chili.

Circulation et appropriation en Argentine des constructions historiographiques européennes et Nord-américaines sur l'éducation et la pédagogie "mondiale" (1900-1950)