Session Information
17 SES 06 JS, Value is in the Eye of the Beholder: Using Visual Images as Sources for Research in Histories of Education
Research Workshop
Joint Session with NW 29
Contribution
It is Network 17’s tradition to explore and highlight the potential use of underused sources such as visual images, material artifacts, built environments for educational histories and to develop innovative theories and methodologies addressing them. In this workshop, a wide range of images will be used to stimulate methodological conversations across disciplinary and national boundaries. In the main, visual images have been used if at all as illustrations rather than as key sources for interpretation. Historians who have placed images at the centre of their investigations have illuminated the untapped potential of images due to their complexity as means of representation and as conveyers of meaning or information.
The workshop will be designed to move forward with the following questions: How can visual images be used creatively and innovatively as legitimate sources in histories of education? What do they reveal to us about contemporary debates, common theory and praxis, routines and technologies, acts of compliance and resistance in particular historical contexts? To what extent may images not just have vizualized, promoted and given weight to certain discourses but also have questioned and re-shaped ‘reality’, for instance, by combining existing elements in ways that allowed for new ways of thinking, acting and seeiing in education? How can the emotions to which many images appeal be significant for historical analysis and how does an engagement with the emotions promote and suggest new avenues for research?
The workshop will bring together the knowledge, experience and sensitivity of scholars from different areas of educational research (e.g.: the history of photography, art history, art education). Initiating a so-called ‘photographic conversation’, the workshop will provide a platform for cross-fertilization of ideas and perspectives in terms of theoretical and methodological approaches, towards further methodological and theoretical innovation in using images in historical educational research.
For its theoretical framework, the workshop will draw from seminal work by art historians, historians of photography and/or contemporary historians, including Erwin Panofsky, John Tagg, Peter Burke, Pierre Bourdieu, Roland Barthes, Susan Sontag, Walter Benjamin, William J.T. Mitchell, and many more. It will also build on work published by Network 17’s former and regular members, including Angelo Van Gorp, António Nóvoa, Catherine Burke, Frank Simon, Geert Thyssen, Helena Ribeiro de Castro, Ian Grosvenor, Kate Rousmaniere, Kevin Myers, Martin Lawn, Ulrike Mietzner and Ulrike Pilarczyk, among many others.
Method
Expected Outcomes
References
Barthes, R. (2000). Camera Lucida. London: Vintage. Bourdieu, P. (Ed.). (1965). Un Art Moyen. Essai sur les Usages Sociaux de la Photographie. Paris: Les Éditions De Minuit. Burke, C. & Grosvenor, I. (2007). The Progressive Image in the History of Education: Stories of Two Schools. Visual Studies, 22, 2, pp. 155-167. Burke, C., & Ribeiro de Castro, H. (2007). The School Photograph: Portraiture and the Art of Assembling the Body of the School Child. History of Education, 36, 2, pp. 213-226. Burke, P. (2001). Eyewitnessing. The Uses of Images as Historical Evidence. New York: Cornell University Press. Cunningham, P. (2000). Moving Images: Propaganda Film and British Education, 1940-45. Paedagogica Historica, 36, 1, pp. 389-406. Grosvenor, I., Lawn, M., & Rousmaniere, K. (Eds.). (1999). Silences & Images. The Social History of the Classroom. New York: Peter Lang,. Mietzner, U., Pilarczyk, U., Myers, K., & Peim, N. (Eds.). (2005). Visual History. Images of Education. Oxford: Lang. Mitchell, W. (1994). Picture Theory. Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Nóvoa, A. (2000). Ways of Saying, Ways of Seeing. Public Images of Teachers (19th-20th Centuries). Paedagogica Historica, 36, 1, pp. 21-52. Panofsky, E. (1979). Ikonographie und Ikonologie. In E. Kaemmerling (Ed.), Ikonographie und Ikonologie. Theorien – Entwicklung – Probleme. Bildende Kunst als Zeichensystem (Vol. 1). Cologne: DuMont, pp. 207-224. Sontag, S. (1977). On Photography. New York: Picador/Farrar, Straus & Giroux. Tagg, J. (2009). The Disciplinary Frame: Photographic Truths and the Capture of Meaning. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Thyssen, G. (2007). Visualizing Discipline of the Body in a German Open-Air School (1923-1939): Retrospection and Introspection. History of Education, 36, 2, pp. 243-260. Van Gorp, A., & Warmington,.P. (2011). Education in Motion: Producing Methodologies for Researching Documentary Film on Education. Paedagogica Historica, 47, 4, pp. 457-577.
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