'Toward a more visual and material history of education', A Review Essay.

Toward a more visual and material history of education', A Review Essay Ian Grosvenor, Martin Lawn & Kate Rousmaniere (eds), Silences and Images: the social history of the classroom, NY, Peter Lang, 1999. ISBN 0-8204-3926-6. Martin Lawn & Ian Grosvenor (eds), Materialities of Schooling: design, technology, objects, routines, Oxford, Symposium Books, 2005. ISBN 1-8739-2730-4. Ulrike Mietzner, Kevin Myers & Nick Peim (eds), Visual Histories: images of education, NY, Peter Lang, 2005. ISBN 3-0391-0151-X.

Two significant developments in history of education over the past decade have been the increased attention to methodology, including the growing use of visual data, and the closer attention to the school itself (pupils, teachers and classrooms) alongside the older interests in educational ideas and the broader social, cultural and political contexts of education. The emergence of interest in both the visual--and thus, necessarily material--aspects of education, and to a lesser degree, the methodological issues in and implications of using visual data, can be seen to have been signalled in the 1998 ISCHE conference, 'The Visual in the History of Education'. The publication in 2005 of two collections, Material Histories, and Visual Histories, makes it timely to take stock of these developments and their implications.

Silences and Images sought to address questions of research methodology and approach in writing the history of education as a means to 'a new social history of the classroom'. Part I, 'Raising questions about classroom history' explores a range of possible sources, but more importantly the methodological issues surrounding their use--their conversion from data, to evidence. Part II, 'Seeking answers' includes a series of 'case studies' focusing principally on the teacher. This focus seems somewhat limiting for a new history of the classroom, but to some degree this is offset by the attention to the materialities of the classroom in Lawn's and Grosvenor's chapters in Part I.

The various studies raise questions about the objects of historical study in education (Lawn; Grosvenor), the reasons for conducting research into classroom history (Dams, Depaepe and Simon), and the relationship between methods and methodology (Gardner; Vincent). Sources range from conventional written documentary archives (Vincent), through teacher-generated material including 'oral' sources (Johansson; Littlefield) and personal written documents such as letters (Smaller; Preston), to photographs (Grosvenor) and artefacts (Lawn). Grosvenor's 'Visualising past classrooms' is particularly important in relation to methodological questions around the 'reading' of photographs. His use of photographs, and especially the use of photographs in the final 'chapter' (Linden) is notable for the ways they challenge the notion that data might 'speak for themselves' and for provoking a recognition of the substantial work done by captions in pre-interpreting photographs for readers, as if the captions captured the fullness and unambiguous precision of their meaning. Thus, Grosvenor presents photographs with no accompanying 'labels' to indicate their subject, and only begins to unpack their possible meanings in the text itself.

Materialities of Schooling addresses 'the technologies and objects of schooling, chained together by routines and action' (p. 7), ranging from the building of walls and fences through the internal organisation of space, and its occupation by cupboards and desks, to the material and metaphorical aspects of light in classrooms and the management of time and space. While some focus more specifically on concrete aspects of schooling and others on more seemingly abstract aspects, such as light, and 'time and space', all are constructed around the interplay between the specific tangible 'materialities' at the most literal level and the meanings playing around these materialities. Thus, for instance, Rockwell's study of walls with lockable gates examines 'conflicts and shifts in power over the use of space' (p. 19). Likewise, Vioao's meticulous account of the positioning of the Principal's office with its attendant waiting room makes visible 'greater or lesser levels of accessibility, distance or openness provide us not only with different management styles but also the conception held of the relationship between the post-holder and other members of the education community' (p. 53). Lawn's study of objects, Martinez's study of the school desk, and Burke's analysis of light explore the relation between materiality of classrooms and the ways materiality is bound up in discourses that tie objects not only to normative pedagogical discourse (Lawn; and see also Grosvenor) but to medical (Martinez) and moral (Burke) domains respectively. Ironically, perhaps, in the light of Silences' claim to offer a new social history of the classroom, the classroom itself appears to us to stand out more clearly in this later collection than in Silences itself.

In keeping with the interest in the visual archive, the authors draw heavily on photographs, plans, drawings of schools, the objects that populate them, and even the work of teachers (Jewitt and Jones) and children (White). However, in contrast to the methodological agenda of Silences and Images, several chapters in this volume pay relatively little attention to the issues around reading the data. Rather, photographs and other visual materials are used 'merely' as illustrations accompanying the text, or, where they are explicitly interpreted, the author provides his or her 'reading' of the data without explaining how that reading was derived.

Visual History provides methodological insights into the use and interpretation of images in at least three ways. First, it offers formal expositions of methodological issues, in Peim's 'Introduction', Meiztner and Pilarcsyk's 'Methods of image analysis in research in educational and social sciences', Burke's exploration of the use of archival materials, including pictures to enable students to engage with educational history, and Bunyard's 'Montage on Autobiography'. Second, it includes several studies that explicitly focus on particular examples of visual data, with careful attention to methodological issues involved in their use; these chapters include Grosvenor and Lawn's 'Portraying the School', Limond's 'Keeping your head and losing it in the celluloid classroom', Peim's 'Dangerous minds?', and Catteuw, Dams, Depaepe and Simon's assessment of films of primary schools in Belgium. And, third, it includes studies which use visual data to examine particular themes, aspects or representations, such as Myers' study of visual education through a scheme for lending pictures to schools, and Happonen's study of picture books for children.

Peim's 'Introduction: the life of signs in visual history' offers a succinct overview of a wide range of approaches and issues around representation in history. The discussion raises critical questions which recur throughout the book: (How) Does engagement with the visual in history of education effect a different conception of the field? (How) Does it transform our understandings of the objects of educational history? (How) Does it require us to change our assumptions about the historical archive? And (how) does it impact on our understandings of our own relationship to the field of study?

Four chapters, in particular, highlight the challenges the book offers us. Peim's 'Dangerous minds?' and Limond's 'Keeping your head' draw on film (as well, in Peim's case, on a photographic image) and confront us with questions about the relation between 'reality' and 'representation' and, in Peim's case, about how we might juxtapose sources which might readily be seen as representing 'reality' and others which are avowedly fictional. If Peim and Limond explore the issue of how particular visual texts might constitute parts of the historical archive, Burke and Bunyard draw us into an exploration of the process of engagement with that archive. Burke discusses the use of archival materials--verbal and visual--in enticing undergraduate students to understand contemporary education through a constructivist exploration of the history of contemporary schooling. Bunyard explores the imbrication of the historian in and with the archive and its consequences for understandings of how we might 'view', that is, order, history, in particular those commonly associated with the (positivist) notion of history as detective work, or the construction of 'the whole true picture'. The core of the chapter, like Burke's, discusses a pedagogical approach to using archival materials, in this case, by use of autobiographical but pseudonymous montages as a way of engaging with relations between experience and its representation.

Towards a more visual material history of the school

Of course, this interest in visual sources is not unique--there has been a small but noticeable use of photographic and other visual data in the major history of education journals over the past 5-10 years, including, as we have noted already, the 1998 ISCHE conference and the corresponding issue of Paedagogica Historica. (1) Within history and the humanistic social sciences more generally there has been increasing attention to both the material and the visible. (2) Further, none of these studies arises without some antecedents; thus the study of walls (Rockwell, in Materialities) is reminiscent of aspects of earlier work in the historical geography of urban schooling associated with the class analyses of the revisionists, (3) but is more focused on the interface between material and immediate political function at a local level, than on their function as enactments and signifiers of a broader class politics. Likewise work on the materiality of the school has its precursors in the work of Seaborne and Lowe on school architecture (4) and, more importantly, Tyler on spatial arrangements and social regulation in kindergartens. (5) Yet, we think, there are at least four ways in which this work makes a distinctive and important contribution to the development of education history as a field of scholarship and research that goes beyond any such precursors.

First, this work is characterised by attention to issues of methodology, both at the relatively 'technical' level of methods (Meiztner; Grosvenor), and at the more theoretical levels of epistemology, representation and the relations between subjects and objects (for example, Peim, Bunyard). While, as we have noted, this methodological attention is uneven, overall it contrasts with much of the growing use of visual data more generally, which frequently simply takes pictures, photographs, diagrams and the like and 'reads off' detailed information from them, without attending to how such readings might be produced. It is perhaps worth noting, here, too, that Silences and Images also played with the issue of methodology and visibility as it is conventionalised in publishing of educational histories, through the form of the book itself, both in the layout of the book with references positioned in the margins, and in the form of the last 'chapter' (Linden) which consists of simply a series of photographs offering one possible, minimalist, 'reading' of the photographs, confronting readers directly and tangibly with the problem of reading--the relationship between data and evidence.

Second, and more substantively, this body of work draws attention to aspects of schooling that are widely overlooked: the pencil, the placement of school offices, fences, and windows. Further, the attention to what is visible almost inescapably focuses on aspects of standard sources not usually attended to in conventional analyses. This difference can be noticed in the treatment of texts, a most conventional source for histories of school curricula, in particular. Pictorial texts, for example, are analysed not only for the messages carried, but the messages embedded in the form. For historians of education in Australia and New Zealand, where historical perspectives are overwhelmingly forged from the experience of the Anglophone world, the inclusion of examples from Mexico, Spain, Belgium, Finland, Sweden, and Argentina provide a refreshing reminder of both the commonalities and diversities that mark educational experience and practice across the world.

Third, the work is theoretically 'attuned'. Thus, there is a general recognition, across the three collections, of the importance of theorising the objects of knowledge in researching and writing history. Sometimes this is explicit and brought into sharp focus as in Grosvenor's chapter in Silences, and Lawn and Grosvenor's 'Introduction' in Materialities; elsewhere it is implicit in the way the analysis links concrete practices to their power effects, or the rise of schools as a market--a significant site of consumption of educational goods. While some theorising reflects the impact of poststructuralism, postmodernism and postcolonialism, most chapters opt for a fine-grained 'grounded', rather than a 'grand' theory, again marking out the difference between this development and the mode of theorising associated with the revisionists.

Fourth, the work reflects, in important respects, a change in the mode of production of history. In a field that readily facilitates, if not actively encourages, the 'scholar in the garret' approach to research, one of the important features of this work is the centrality of collaboration. Each of these works arose from conferences--not just as occasions for the display of already completed work, but as opportunities for shared engagement in the development of new understandings and new approaches to historical research in education. Clearly, this collaborative approach simultaneously provides support to those involved, gives focus to the problems being addressed, enhances interpretation, and adds to the collaborators' capacity to enrich understandings of the discipline of (education) history.

While clearly these collections represent the ongoing intersections of work among a number of scholars rather than a systematic 'program', there are certainly some elements of a program and there is some sense of development across the corpus. This is evident, first, in the approaches in the respective introductory chapters. In Silences the introduction makes some broad claims about absence (of discussion of a range of substantive topics) and lack (of methodological attention to and use of visual materials), with programmatic suggestions about how such absences might be remedied. Accordingly, it positions the studies as exploratory accounts that address those absences. In contrast, the introductions to both Materialities and Visual History provide much more 'worked up' theoretical and substantive overview of how the materiality of schooling, and the methodological issues surrounding working with historical archive, respectively, might be understood.

As in any developing field of research, much remains to be explored. This is most obviously true of the endless list of potential specific topics through which the materiality of schooling might be explored and for the issues of methodology, epistemology and ethics. Yet, arguably the growing achievement of this work is what was promised in Silences: to make the everyday practices and conditions of schooling visible in ways they had not previously been. Consequently, the work in these collections has a capacity to challenge the commonsense understandings and incapacity to see the obvious that follow from sheer familiarity of the school. For scholars, practitioners and others with an active interest in knowing the school as a site of (always political) practice, it offers ways of seeing afresh, of troubling taken for granted assumptions that 'we know' what is happening, what things mean, and what things do.

(1) Paedagogica Historica, vol. 36, no. 1, 2000.

(2) P. Burke, Eyewitnessing : the uses of images as historical evidence, Ithaca, NY, Cornell University Press, 2001; The Visual in History, G. Rose, Visual Methodologies: an introduction to the interpretation of visual materials, London, Sage, 2001.

(3) B. Curtis, Building the Educational State, London, Ontario, Falmer, 1988.

(4) M. Seaborne and R. Lowe, The English school: its architecture and organisation, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1971, 1977.

(5) D Tyler, 'Making better children', in D. Meredyth and D Tyler (eds.), Child and Citizen: genealogies of schooling and subjectivity, Brisbane, Faculty of Humanities, Griffith University, 1993.

MALCOLM VICK and FAY GASPARINI

James Cook University, Queensland