Network 17 has a longstanding interest in visual research and related archival sources (cf. e.g. the research workshop Cathy Burke and Ian Grosvenor organized in 2008 on Children at School, a John Grierson Documentary, 1937). Members of the network participated in 2009-10 in the British Academy funded Documentary Film in Educational Research project (DFER) of which the aim was to build upon emergent approaches to utilising school documentaries in historical research on education.

DFER was organised around a series of three workshops that resulted in a special issue of Paedagogica Historica (see references). In the workshops the contributors (from the UK, Belgium, and Portugal) presented and offered historical analysis of documentary films. The analyses and debates that emerged from these encompassed both ‘intrinsic’ analyses of the form and content of each film and ‘extrinsic’ analyses, in which the films, separately and comparatively, were used to explore methodological questions.

The overarching aim of the workshops was to consider which analytical frameworks might best further understandings of relationships between documentary makers’ intentions, their historical contexts, the forms and technologies of their work, contemporaneous audience readings and transhistorical readings. The workshops produced collective (though not consensual) analyses.

Prior to the workshop series the DFER team had agreed, for the purposes of the project, provisional definitions and boundaries, in order to ensure an operable, rather than exhaustive, range of possible film sources. Thus our definition of ‘school documentaries’ incorporated three salient genres: commercially produced cinema documentaries; locally produced documentary film not intended for commercial use; television documentaries.

The earliest material we examined was produced in the 1930s; the most recent documentary was from 2008. The films included both those in which schooling was the producers’ intrinsic focus (films that focused on aspects of educational policy, theory, practice or experience) and also documentaries that had a school setting but approached the school as a microcosm of wider social issues and debates. It is obvious to present the special issue that grew out of these workshops by means of a research workshop.

Angelo Van Gorp and Paul Warmington (Eds.), Education in motion: Documentary Film and Educational Research (special issue). Paedagogica Historica, 47 (2011). Including articles by Daniel Biltereyst, Cathy Burke, Helena Cabeleira, Peter Cunningham, Jorge Ramos do Ó, Ian Grosvenor, Jeremy Howard, Martin Lawn, Catarina Martins, James Patterson, Angelo Van Gorp, and Paul Warmington.