ONLINE international plenary panel
Beyond the Archive: New Approaches to Sources in the History of Education.
This online keynote panel brings together five international researchers in the History of Education for a wide-ranging, interactive discussion of a rich variety of sources, questions and approaches. Topics addressed will include: re-opening the “black box” of schooling, embodied experience and haptic knowledge, place, emotion and affect, and new questions about materials and material culture.
The session will be chaired and facilitated by Kate Rousmaniere, former ISCHE President. Panellists are Frances Kelly, The University of Auckland (New Zealand), Juri Meda, The University of Macerata (Italy), Pablo Toro-Blanco, Universidad Alberto Hurtado (Chile) and Sarah Van Ruyskensvelde, KU Leuven (Belgium).
Time: 13:30-15:00, Thursday 9 July
FURTHER DETAILS
In this session Frances Kelly will speak about location, environment and place in the history of education. Drawing on her experience in two recent projects – one exploring her own university’s history and the other a 1942 radical educational experiment in a small rural town – Frances will talk about doing historical research that involves the embodied experience of place and the development of haptic knowledge. Sources discussed range from archival plans and film texts, to towns, buildings and sites.
Juri Meda will consider challenges, solutions and suggestions for the use of new (and not-so-new) sources for a material history of schooling: In recent years the historical research in education has focused on the study of the material culture of school and its evolution over time. Teaching aids, school supplies, school furniture and punitive devices have begun to be studied with growing interest by historians of education, sometimes leading them to a fetishisation of sources. Whilst this drift is certainly to be avoided, it had the merit of raising a question: are these inanimate objects merely material sources through which we can study the educational practices of the past, or can they also become research subjects? To what extent? Historians of education have devoted themselves to exploring this issue, drawing on both traditional and new sources, as industrial invention patents, commercial catalogues and inventory records. This enabled us not only to determine the use of these objects in educational practices of the past, but also to study the creativity and enterprising spirit of the "teacher-inventors" and the view of school as a marketplace over that only an institution, broadening our horizons.
Pablo Toro-Blanco will reflect on the use of material and emotional sources in the history of education, exploring how school objects, spaces, practices, and affective experiences can be approached as historical evidence. His contribution draws on case studies from Chile to discuss methodological challenges and possibilities when working with non-traditional sources.
Sarah Van Ruyskensvelde will consider the question, “Is small beautiful?” in addressing micro- and macro-historical ambitions in the History of Education: Since the 1990s, historians of education have sought to open the "black box of schooling," turning away from the sweeping grand narratives of schooling towards the granular textures of individual experience and everyday school life. While this reorientation has proven both methodologically and analytically productive, it has generated a persistent, yet underexamined tension: the closer historians of education attempt to access the lived realities of schooling, the more difficult it appears to reconnect those experiences to the larger structural and temporal scales through which "big histories" make their claims. This presentation interrogates the premise of that seeming opposition. Drawing on ongoing research, it argues that attention to the small and the mundane need not compete with macro-historical ambition but may, on the contrary, actively renew it. Rather than treating microhistorical work as ‘compensatory’ or even self-contained, the presentation advances the case for everyday practice as a methodological lever through which historians of education can produce empirically grounded and analytically ambitious accounts of modern education.
Bios:
Kate Rousmaniere is retired Professor of the Department of Educational Leadership, Miami University, Ohio. Her research has centered on the history and politics of American teachers and methodological questions in the social history of education. Her most recent publication is The Liberal Education of Lawrence Cremin: A Biography (Palgrave, 2026). Rousmaniere is past president of the International Standing Conference for the History of Education, and of the American History of Education Society.
Frances Kelly is an Associate Professor in Education at the University of Auckland. Her recent research explores places of education, including the built environment of the mid-century university; radical experiments in civic and arts education from the social-democratic decades; and mid-20th century school publications. Frances is co-Editor of the History of Education Review, and Associate Editor for Arts and Humanities in Higher Education.
Juri Meda is Associate Professor of History of Education at the Department of Education, Cultural Heritage and Tourism of the University of Macerata (Italy). His research focuses — among other things — on the material culture of schooling and biographies of teaching objects.
Pablo Toro-Blanco is a historian of education at Universidad Alberto Hurtado (Chile). His research focuses on the history of schooling, material culture, and emotions in Latin America, particularly in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He has published on citizenship education, school practices, and the cultural dimensions of educational institutions.
Sarah Van Ruyskensvelde is Associate Professor of History of Education at the Faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences, KU Leuven. Her research addresses multiple dimensions of the history of modern education systems, with a particular focus on methodological and theoretical approaches in historical studies in education.