Keynote Speakers

Research Fellow, Sociology Institute,

Academia Sinica, Tapei

Postcolonial Conditions and Knowledge Production: History of Education Research on Taiwan, Singapore, and Hong Kong

Given that the total geographical area in the world that has in recent times been under colonial rule arguably includes more societies than those not having experienced colonial domination, it is puzzling that few scholarly efforts so far have been committed to examining the effects of postcolonial conditions on the history of education research. Through the cases of Taiwan, Singapore, and Hong Kong, I attempt to take a first step to fill this lacuna in this paper. Taiwan had been colonized by two Asian invaders—Japan from 1895 to 1945 and the mainlanders from China from 1945 to the late 1980s and early 1990s—before becoming a democratic postcolonial nation. Singapore became an authoritarian postcolonial nation in 1965 after a century and a half of British colonialization. Hong Kong was absorbed into the People’s Republic of China after the British departed in 1997. Through a sample of almost 300 pieces of education historiographies on the three places, the paper delves into the impacts of factors such as the lingering imperial influences and their tensions with the anti-colonial forces, the extent of the cultural hybridity of the postcolonial academic fields, the identities that emerged during decolonization, and political developments after power transferal on matters such as who research the educational pasts of the ex-dependencies, for whom and what the studies are conducted, which historical periods are being focused on, in which languages and venues the research products are published, and to what extent archival materials are available for historical investigation and scholars are given the freedom to study education history.

Insights from the paper will extend our understanding of the production and circulation of knowledge in the history of education research under diverse sociopolitical contexts.

Senior Lecturer in History, 

Loughborough University

Boardgame Imperialism: historical and geographical education beyond the classroom, c. 1890-1914

The debate about the domestic impact of imperialism on British society, politics, and culture at the turn of the twentieth century has been of especial interest to those of us researching histories of education. Beyond the classroom, scholars of juvenile literature and childhood culture continue to be drawn to the popular imperialism debate – and for good reason: popular novels for children extolled lessons about British imperial ideology; the Scouts and other youth groups have often been understood as militaristic in intent and experience. That debate about the impact of imperial ideology on children remains hotly contested. This paper brings together these two often distinct historiographies to examine the broader context of history and geography education within and beyond the classroom. I want to suggest that attempts to inculcate patriotism and imperialism in children was more joined up across the worlds of education and play than has previously been recognised.

To explore this cultural symbiosis, this illustrated paper will examine two children’s leisure activities that became extremely popular in the 1890s: boardgames, especially those which required an element of role play and strategy, and children’s magazines. Board games and magazine content (stories, puzzles, information guides) either assumed prior knowledge and sought to consolidate classroom-based learning about the British Empire, or to introduce new knowledge perceived lacking in formal education. The authors of boardgame instructions and children’s magazines were often the same people that wrote commercially popular textbooks and reading books used the classroom. The central focus of this paper will be the cultivation of what might be called a pedagogy of play, that is, the ways in which the same late-Victorian developments in educational psychology that shaped English elementary education in the 1890s also influenced games designers and authors. 

Lecturer in Education and Social Justice,

 University of Birmingham

Journeys through space and time: refugee educators, transnational entanglements, and peripheral traces

In April 1949 Picture Post published a photo-essay entitled ‘A School where Love is a Cure’. In the written text the journalist Fyfe Robertson described the innovative education of children with learning disabilities at the Camphill School near Aberdeen, established a decade earlier by a group of Austrian refugees inspired by the educational theories of Rudolf Steiner. It was, however, the sequence of intimate and carefully composed images by the émigré photographer Edith Tudor Hart (formerly Suschitzky) that brought the school’s ethos and pupils to life. Her photograph portrayed Camphill as a holistic environment that emphasised the relational, sensory and creative aspects of the children’s education and care. Like the school’s founders Tudor Hart hailed originally from Vienna, and had trained as a Montessori teacher. Her politically inspired photographic practice was infused both by a longstanding interest in progressive educational approaches and her experiences as the single mother of a child with autism. The pedagogic contributions of refugee educators who arrived in Britain in the 1930s have hitherto received relatively little scholarly attention. Taking the entangled histories of the Camphill experiment and its visual representation by Tudor Hart as a point of departure, this talk will consider how and where we can locate the histories and interventions of displaced educators. What knowledge and training did they bring with them, and how did this intersect with the educational landscape in which they found themselves in exile? To what extent did their personal journeys and experiences of ‘refugeedom’ (Banko, Nowak and Gatrell, 2021) impact on their pedagogic ideas and practices? Can we identify their legacies in progressive, creative and therapeutic approaches in education? I will argue that if we are to identify and critically evaluate the legacies of refugee educators we must look to spaces of formal and informal learning on the peripheries of mainstream education and its histories.