conférences plénières / keynotes addresses

conférences plénières / keynotes addresses

mercredi / wednesday 27 16:30 – 18:15 Room: R380

Table ronde «Genève, Institutions Internationales et éducation»

Eckhardt FUCHS (Georg Eckert Institut, Technical University Braunschweig, Deutschland)

Based on recent concepts and approaches developed in the field of transnational history this presentation will examine the emergence and spread of transnational organizations as new agency in educational policies during the interwar period. I will situate the emergence of educational multilateralism within time – the economic and social effects of World War I and the attempts of establishing a new world order; within space – the role Geneva played as the spatial nucleus for many of these organizations; and within the educational field – the expanding and changing meaning of education in professional and public discourse. Within these contexts the protection and welfare of children and minors as well as the issue of children’s rights became a central topic in the international debate. I will examine the respective transnational activities and the institutional networks and argue that their impact contributed to create new forms of educational governance.

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Eckhardt Fuchs is Deputy Director of the Georg Eckert Institute for International Textbook Research and holds the Chair for History of Education/Comparative Education at the Technical University Braunschweig. His main interests are transnational relations in modern history of education, history of teaching material, and curriculum studies. He has widely published about these topics, among the most recently published books are Connecting Histories of Education: Transnational Exchanges and Cross-Cultural Transfers (forthcoming, co-editors B. Bagchi, K. Rousmaniere), Regionen in der deutschen Staatenwelt. Bildungsräume und Transferprozesse im 19. Jahrhundert (2011, co-editors S.Kesper-Biermann, C.Ritzi); Contextualizing School Textbook Revision (2010, co-editor Tatsuky Y.), and Schulbuch konkret: Kontexte – Produktion - Unterricht (2010, co-edited J.Kahlert, U.Sandfuchs).

Sandrine KOTT (Université de Genève, Suisse)

My contribution will be of methodological nature. I wish to study how “internationality” is constructed at the intersection of, and interacting with, international networks, but also specific groups and milieus within different national and local societies. To be able to carefully “unwrap” this construction, I propose to use International organizations as open social spaces where information, know how, expertise and ideas produced by actors coming from various national scenes are exchanged, denationalized and internationalized. This allows for a better understanding of the role of national actors and models in the construction of internationality. This also leads us to question the hegemonic nature of particular national groups of actors in the construction of this internationality. This methodological presentation will be fed by empirical studies that I have undertaken on the Geneva based International Labor Organization, seen as a place of internationalization of social models. This approach could further serve as an inspiration to study the processes of internationalization of education during the 20th Century.

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Sandrine Kott has been educated in France (Paris), Germany (Bielefeld and Berlin) and the USA (New York). Since 2004 she is professor of European contemporary history at the University of Geneva. Her principal fields of expertise are the history of social welfare and labor law in France and Germany since the end of the nineteenth century and labor relations in those countries of real socialism, in particular in the German Democratic Republic. Since 2004, she has developed the transnational and global dimensions of each of her fields of expertise in utilizing the archives and resources of international organizations and particularly the International Labor Organization. She has published over 80 articles in French, German and Anglo-Saxon journals and collective volumes, edited 4 volumes and published 6 books.

Anne-Françoise PRAZ (Université de Fribourg, Suisse)

Au début du 20e siècle, la question de l’éducation sexuelle de la jeunesse fait irruption dans le débat public, par le biais d’initiatives locales, mais aussi de congrès internationaux dans des disciplines très différentes, témoignant ainsi des enjeux multiples et parfois contradictoires dont ce thème est porteur: éducation morale, hygiène sociale, médecine et prophylaxie sanitaire, démographie, eugénisme, néo-malthusianisme, féminisme. Genève est un lieu de carrefour pour plusieurs milieux actifs dans ce domaine: des associations locales, nationales et internationales de moralité comme la Fédération abolitionniste; des pédagogues engagés dans une réflexion sur l’éducation morale, dont les congrès sont repris par le Bureau international de l’éducation; des féministes attentives à concilier morale et droits des femmes; un groupe néo-malthusien lié au mouvement international qui organisera à Genève le premier congrès international de la population.

L’identification des réseaux et personnalités qui se mobilisent sur cette « question sexuelle » permettra de vérifier dans quelle mesure ce thème participe à l’affirmation de certaines spécialisations dans le champ scientifique, tout en légitimant, au niveau national, l’action et l’influence de certains groupes de pression. A ce titre, la frontière entre éducateurs et médecins eugénistes, les liens entre congrès internationaux et sociétés cantonales d’hygiène, de moralité, ou d’éducation méritent examen.

Toutefois, au vu des contenus proposés, les oppositions entre option éducative ou simple prévention vénérienne, entre morale religieuse ou morale biologique, n’empêchent pas de partager des visions communes en matière de rapports sociaux de sexe, marquées par un certain essentialisme; les voix dissidentes (masculines ou féminines) sont marginalisées, réduisant sérieusement le potentiel d’innovation du mouvement. Ces contradictions éclairent-elles l’échec relatif de l’éducation sexuelle en Suisse au cours de l’entre-deux guerres et sa lointaine renaissance à l’orée des années soixante?

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Anne-Françoise Praz is Associate Professor of Social History in the Department of Historical Sciences at the University of Fribourg. Between 2004 and 2009, she was junior assistant professor in history and gender studies at the University of Geneva. She has worked on the history of the first fertility transition in Switzerland, which led her to analyse the gendered investment in education. Her areas of research and publication include historical demography, history of family and sexuality, history of education, childhood and youth. More recently she focuses on comparative analysis of family planning policies and on historical construction of adolescence through policies regulating education, work and sexuality.

Jeudi / Thursday 28 17:00 – 18:00 Room: R380

Conference: Within, Between, Above, and Beyond:Pr(e)positions for a History of internationalization of educational practices and knowledge

Marcelo CARUSO (Humboldt Universität, Berlin, Deutschland)

Not only in education, but also in other social practices, the history of “internationalization” is correlative to the history of “nationalization”. In this broad sense, the conference outlines four main constellations of the links between education and the nationalization/internationalization dynamics. After a brief description of the creation of “nations” within communities in Church and University since the Middle Age, the lecture focuses on the communicative links referring to educational practices and knowledge in a context where the modern sense of “nations”, based on the redefinition of nations as a difference between distinct communities emerged at the turn of the 19th century.

This classical form of internationalization between separate units led eventually to the emergence of a supranational level of communication above nations, basically in the form of international organizations and meetings. These experiences shaped the international communication about education for many decades. “Nations” certainly enacted this first wave of inter-nationalization. The breakthrough of new media and world-market economy during the late 20th century seems, however, to have favoured a second wave of supranational practices and discourses about education beyond the national frame. Only in this narrow sense the lecture refers to our present supranational communication as “globalization”, as late stage of internationalizing discourses and practices. The conference will sketch these main four constellations and will analyze main features of the scholarship dealing with them. It will succinctly consider close related themes such as special education and children’s rights.

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Marcelo Caruso, PhD, is professor of history of education at the Institute of Educational Studies at Humboldt University, Berlin/Germany. Born in Buenos Aires/Argentina, he obtained his degree in educational studies at the University of Buenos Aires. After his PhD in Munich/Germany, he worked as senior lecturer for comparative education at Humboldt University and then became a full professor for history of education at the University of Münster/Germany. His research focuses on the international circulation and reception of educational projects and technologies in the modern world, including local developments in Germany, Spain, Argentina, and Colombia.

Vendredi / Friday 16:15 – 17:15 Room: R380

Conference: Rooted Cosmopolitans: Internationalisation of Education and Aspects of the Innovations of Colonial Modernity in South Asia

Barnita BAGCHI (Universiteit Utrecht, Nederland / Institut of Development Studies Kolkata, India)

This lecture has its heart three figures powerfully active in the field of education in South Asia/ India in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: Ramabai Saraswati Medhavi Dongre (1858-1922), Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941), and Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain (1880-1932). India between about 1800 and 1950 was an educational laboratory where educational actors such as those in focus here created fascinating international dialogues and cooperative practices, while evolving highly rooted, local practices of education. In the complex educational arena of India, where competing deprivations, demands, practices, and institutions subsisted, actors such as Ramabai, Rabindranath, and Rokeya, through their agency, writing, and educational practices brought into being innovative spaces and discourses in the field of education, each in her different way engaging fearlessly with and producing what we may term the rootedly cosmopolitan.

Ramabai wrote a rich travelogue about her experiences in the United States of America, delineating the ability of American women to harness social capital in educational and welfarist work. She drew on her alliances with women in a variety of countries, including the US, Britain, and Australia, to further her extremely rooted work in the multiple educational-welfarist institutions she founded in both urban and rural parts of western India. Ramabai was also a pioneer in creating institutions that provided education and livelihoods to blind, hearing-impaired and otherwise disabled women.

Rokeya, Bengali Muslim writer and founder-leader, again, of multiple educational and welfarist institutions, was a genuinely rooted or vernacular cosmopolitan, who never travelled outside India, yet was a Muslim educational actor whose writings and imagination ranged from Britain to Afghanistan, and one who, as an educator, worked with women of multiple races, religions, and nationalities.

Rabindranath Tagore, winner of the Nobel Prize, a near-messianic, cosmopolitan poet, writer, and traveller to countries in Europe, Asia, and the Americas, founded and ran dissenting educational institutions, at both school and university level, at Visva-Bharati in Shantiniketan in rural Bengal; here, Asian languages such as Chinese and Japanese were taught pioneeringly, as were Asian crafts such as batik, and pedagogues and social actors from countries such as India, the UK, the US participated in the educational work. Advocating internationalism and decolonization, fiercely critical of the ideology of nationalism, which he sees as intrinsic to European imperialism, Tagore negotiated his mutual interdependences while maintaining independence, premised above all on his creativity. The gendering of his own educational work and creative writing is a complex site. Tagore also played a particularly enriching role in encouraging creativity (in writing, song, dance, theatre) among students, and in evolving pedagogical methods and material that were not woodenly didactic, and unpatronizing towards children and adolescents.

I argue that analysis of the heterogeneous, adventurous, often fractured educational worlds of these genuinely local-and-global figures offers entry into new ways of conceptualizing the connected histories of south Asian and global education. Earlier Eurocentric approaches saw models of Western education being received either passively or derivatively in areas under colonialism such as South Asia: instead, I argue, the practices and writings of figures such as Tagore, Ramabai, and Rokeya show that fascinatingly hybrid, rootedly cosmopolitan educational writings, practices, and institutions were being innovated and formulated in South Asia, mingling elements from past and present, and global influences from India, other parts of Asia, Europe, or the Americas. I argue that these actors were constitutive producers of internationalisation in the field of education.

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Barnita Bagchi is a faculty member in Comparative Literature at the Department of Modern Languages at Utrecht University. Educated at Jadavpur, Oxford, and Cambridge universities, she was previously on the faculty at the Institute of Development Studies Kolkata in India. Her areas of research and publication include eighteenth-century and Romantic-era British fiction (with a particular interest in female-centred and female-authored fiction), South Asian (especially Bengali) narrative writing, utopian writing, and South Asian and transnational history of culture and education. She straddles the humanities and the social sciences, and is currently editing and authoring books on non-Eurocentric utopian studies and connected histories of global education.

Samedi / Saturday 11:00 – 12:00 Room: R380

Conference: Reflections on Globalization and Children’s History

Paula FASS (University of California, Berkeley, USA, former President of SCHY)

Most historians agree that, however the globalization process is understood, it did not begin in the twenty-first century. The expansion outward of market capital, knowledge, and people has been going on for some time, certainly since the age of exploration and enlightenment in the West. In fact, the history of the United States is deeply embedded in that process and early on became an example of it. Nevertheless, it is useful to think of the current phase of the process as having certain characteristics that make it notable and unique. From the point of view of the history of childhood, these characteristics include broad and early access to enormous quantities of information and forms of play not managed by or supervised by adults; the participation in an international market for goods and services (both as producers and as consumers); the rapid expansion of the need for schooling at all levels; the existence of a genuinely global youth culture with significant social and political implications. All these can be said to have transformed childhood in the Western World and are having important consequences for children everywhere.

Paula S. Fass has worked on several of these areas and will use her keynote to examine these new facets of globalization in a longer historical perspective. Her address will ask how we can understand the new features of contemporary globalization through a more probing and comprehensive quest for historical antecedents and comparisons, in the United States especially, but elsewhere as well, and how our historical understanding can be sharpened by examining the specific ways globalization is affecting children, youth, and childhood in the world today. By using globalization as a form of perception, our knowledge of the world past and present can be significantly sharpened and expanded.

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Paula S. Fass is the Margaret Byrne Professor of History at the University of California at Berkeley and Distinguished Scholar in Residence at Rutgers University in New Brunswick. A social and cultural historian, she has recently been active in developing the field of children’s history and has worked to make this an interdisciplinary field with a global perspective. Paula Fass earned her A. B. degree from Barnard College, and M. A. and Ph. D. degrees from Columbia University. In 2008 she was awarded an honorary Ph. D. degree from Linkoping University in Sweden.

Samedi / Saturday 12:00 – 13:00 Room: R380

Table Ronde «Grands témoins de la Conférence»

Sous la présidence de / under the presidence of Catherine KUDLICK (University of California, USA/ Davis Humanities Institute, former President of DHA)

Maria DEL MAR DEL POZO (Universidad de Alcalá, Madrid, Spain)

Mª del Mar del Pozo Andrés is Professor of Theory and History of Education in the University of Alcalá and Director of its Department of Psychopedagogy and Physical Education. In the years 2000-2006 she was Secretary of the Spanish Society of Pedagogy and Deputy Director of the journal Bordón. From 2005 she is also Secretary of the Spanish Society for the History of Education. From 2006 she is member of the Executive Committee of the International Standing Conference for the History of Education. Her main lines of research and publications are: the role of education in the building of national identities, urban education, teachers training, reception of international pedagogical movements in Spain, iconography and education, women and education, ethnography of the school, and history of curriculum.

Martin LAWN (University of Edinburgh, UK)

Martin Lawn taught in a London comprehensive school and then moved to the new Faculty of Educational Studies at the Open University as a research assistant before working for many years in teacher education in Birmingham, latterly as a Professor of Education at the University of Birmingham. He is an ex Academic Secretary of the British Educational Research Association and ex-Secretary General of the European Educational Research Association. Moving to the University of Edinburgh, Martin became a Research Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities, and then a Professorial Research Fellow at the Centre for Educational Sociology. In addition, he is a Senior Research Fellow at the University of Oxford as well. He has been a Visiting Professor at the Faculty of Teacher Education, and earlier the Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Umea, Sweden; and currently at the University of Turku, Finland. He is the Editor of the ‘European Educational Research Journal’, the academic journal of the European Educational Research Association.

António NÓVOA (Universidade de Lisboa, Portugal)

António Nóvoa is President of the University of Lisbon (Portugal), since 2006. He has been Vice-President from 2002 to 2006. He earned a Ph. D. in History at Sorbonne University (Paris) and a Ph. D. in Educational Sciences at Geneva University (Switzerland).Main advisor for Education of the Portuguese President of the Republic (1996-1998), he has been the President of ISCHE - the International Standing Conference for the History of Education (2000-2003). Throughout his academic career he has been Professor in several international universities (Geneva, Wisconsin-Madison, Oxford, and Columbia-New York), and Visiting Professor for short periods in 20 universities around the world.

The work of Nóvoa has been published in 15 countries. He is the author of several books (about 12) and chapters or articles (about 100), and editor of 12 books, mainly in the fields of History of Education and Comparative Education, discussing issues related with educational policies and the teaching profession.