Modes and Meaning: Displays of Evidence in Education

In the past few decades there has been a growing interest and debate amongst historians of education surrounding issues of visuality, materiality, spatiality, transfer, and circulation. This collection of essays – with its focus on the interaction between ideas, images, objects, and/or spaces that contain an educational dimension – is a contribution to this ongoing debate. The contributors address how meaning is created, conveyed, and transformed through multiple modes of communication, representation, and interaction; through movement across spaces; through media and technologies; and through collective memory- and identity-making. The collection demonstrates that meaning is mobilized through ‘multimodality’, ‘translocation’, ‘technology’, and ‘heritage’, and that it assumes different qualities which need to be reflected upon in the history of education in particular and in education research in general. This book was originally published as a special issue of Paedagogica Historica.

Geert Thyssen is a Senior Lecturer at Liverpool John Moores University, UK, a research associate at the University of Liège, Belgium, and a visiting scholar at the University of Sassari, Italy. He is also a convenor of the European Educational Research Association’s ‘Network 17: Histories of Education’. His interests are in education and early childhood studies, and in the social and cultural history of education, with a focus on health, the body, nutrition, and educational reform initiatives, as well as the visual, audio-visual, material, spatial, sensual, and emotional.

Karin Priem is Professor of the History of Education at the University of Luxembourg. She has been president of the German History of Education Association (2007-11), is a member of the advisory board of the Revue Suisse des Sciences de l’Education, is co-editor of two book series, and is currently Executive Secretary of the International Standing Conference for History of Education. Her research focuses on the history of educational theories and concepts, the social, visual, and material history of education, and the history of curriculum and cultural practices.