From accounts of education as an academic and professional field in different parts of Europe, the moves beyond a monocentric field of knowledge during the last half century come up as an interesting area for cross national investigations of educational intellectual history. At least two historical and comparatively interesting areas, seem to be: * The Professional-Academic helix and the growth of educational knowledge * The moves beyond predominantly psychological approaches in the educational sciences New knowledge requirements following for the coming expansion of mass schooling beyond the primary level have been important throughout the second part of 20C. Thus the analysis of variations of national, scholarly and scientific interpretations of the emerging mass schooling, and of related knowledge policy initiatives as well as of new educational research areas are themes of interest in relation to the combined historical and comparative focus of the symposium. The intellectual changes include focus on areas such as : • Social theory • Language and linguistic theories • New approaches of scholarly engagement with normative theory in éducation • Classroom and curriculum as areas of empirical and theoretical investigations In German, French and Scandinavian language areas there are parallel, still diverse reconstructions of didactics as an important combined scientific and professional field within educational research. Epistemology oriented historical approaches of this area may also follow the growing attention paid to the intrinsic order of school knowledge and its impact on learning and teaching. In a reverse theoretical move from child psychology to ‘didactic’ analysis of school knowledge, new research communities have claimed that learning or teaching is always learning or teaching one particular piece of knowledge, which exhibits a specific structure and which triggers specific learning and teaching processes. As a frontal critic of psychology-based pedagogy, this new set of academic knowledge about education is made up of original theories and concepts that one cannot study without seeing them in parallel with the history of child psychology. The short examples indicate that a common focus on other educational subfields than the psychological was obviously combined with a wide variety of supplementary or alternative knowledge programs. This symposium will focus on at least three research themes and historical periods: * The first post WW2 moves to scholarly approaches beyond psychology of education * The reformulation of knowledge programs after the international anti authoritarian wave of the late 1960s and early 1970s. * The emergence of anthropological-linguistic models of the learning/teaching process, in the 1970s and onwards.

Historiography. Various sources (biographies, books, school regulations and rules, curricula, ...)

Developing the framework for broader european comparisons about the intellectual history of the educational sciences