This article presents research results from an ongoing project funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG), which is dedicated to the analysis, digital processing and open access provision of the international pedagogical correspondence between Wilhelm Rein and more than 3,500 authors from more than 40 countries. The source corpus covered a period of six decades (1869-1929), marked by two prominent wars (the Franco-Prussian War of 1870/71 and World War I) and social, political, and cultural realignments, tensions, and rapprochements. The circle of authors involved, was less exclusive or elitist in the contemporary comparison. It consisted to a substantial degree of individuals who were generally underrepresented in educational history due to inequality factors such as gender, social, professional, or academic status, religion, or geographic origin. This makes the correspondence estate remarkable as a source corpus. It overcame cultural, geographical and social boundaries, gender boundaries, ideological, professional and institutional demarcations and makes the work of different groups of actors, their contacts and synergies both in international comparison and with regard to transnational educational developments and phenomena exemplarily explorable. Common to all participants was the search for new paradigms of education and new paths in teaching theory, school practice, adult education, teacher training, university teaching and pedagogical research - across national and cultural borders, across differences, political and social shock waves, institutional and structural resistance and different professional locations and positions.

In addition to women teachers, who constituted a large part of the pedagogical staff and contributed significantly to the testing and implementation of new pedagogical practices, but who rarely published and whose positions and experiences are often not handed down in terms of educational history, the source corpus gives e.g. Women's rights activists, for example, or people from socially deprived backgrounds who were committed to education or educational policy, whose interest in pedagogical issues stemmed essentially from a critique of social ills, and who hoped for individual and social empowerment through access to and innovation in education. Also preserved, however, are the voices of individuals who were culturally, socially, or politically engaged, particularly at the local level, and who discussed pedagogical issues more as a means to an end of consolidation, reform, or counter-reform in such areas. It was not uncommon for these diverse groups of people to be part of a common discourse on educational reform.       

Accordingly, the research focus of this project is on the study of educational reform as a unifying, as well as ambiguous, motif that has enabled and animated discourses, understandings, and innovations in education transnationally and across other boundaries mentioned above during the period under study, but that may also have contributed to misunderstandings in such discourses between heterogeneous actors through different connotations, such as interpretations, and different motivations. Accordingly, the focus of this contribution is on insights into the question of how groups of actors underrepresented in the history of education, here in particular persons of the women's rights movement, local or socio-politically engaged persons, have become involved in discourses on educational reform, what synergies have formed between these groups, but also how different motives, perspectives and interpretations have led to misunderstandings and contradictions in developed positions and practical approaches to educational reform. And how have these synergies or misunderstandings transcended contemporary resistances, contradictions, and limitations, or how have they been reinforced by such factors, and how have they had a lasting effect on commonalities and differences in pedagogical paradigms, positions, or structures from a transnational as well as from a comparative perspective? These are the questions that this article seeks to explore according to selected aspects. 

The research approach pursued in the project from which this article emerges combines transnational as well as comparative perspectives and proceeds both deductively and inductively. It combines methods of DH (e.g., collocation and cooccurrence analyses) with elements of classical hermeneutic, qualitative, and quantitative methods, and also incorporates aspects of contact and network analysis. Digitized and indexed full texts of the original sources are used. MAXQDA Plus and NodeXL, among others, are used as supporting analysis tools.

This article will show, on the basis of selected aspects, that reformist movements and efforts that became transnationally perceived and effective at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were also essentially carried by (groups of) people who are either underrepresented in official pedagogical discourses, since their voices are less often handed down and therefore less often received, or who were initially not primarily active in pedagogical contexts, or who were interested in education primarily as a means to achieve other goals. Synergies between these groups of people and genuinely pedagogical actors will be shown. At the same time, selected examples will be used to show how a mixture of reformist motives, aspirations, and connotations has led to misunderstandings, impediments, or discontinuities in the development and implementation of "new" pedagogical positions, approaches, and practices.

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