Histories of educational technologies. Introducing the cultural and social dimensions of pedagogical objects

ABSTRACT

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, Spanish scholars started to pay particular attention to the history of schools’ material culture, defining this as “etnohistoria de la escuela”. Reflections on the “materiality of schooling” and “school heritage” continued in the years that followed. Teaching tools or, more widely, “school objects” challenge the concepts of space, time and sociality. They speak of school practices, cultural history, and ideology. School artefacts are either handmade products created by pupils and teachers, or the school equipment that is made up of commercial products, which also respond to an industrial and economic logic, linked to the achievement of mass schooling. The aims and means of education are intermingled, but if educational theories have long attracted scholars’ attention, the history of educational objects can be further explored from different angles. This paper shows the connection between educational models and pedagogical tools, but also between ideology and the cultural dimension of pedagogical objects, and between economy and pedagogical artefacts. ISCHE 43 was dedicated to the histories of educational technologies and the articles in this special issue of Paedagogica Historica represent some of the leading papers presented at the conference, which was held for the first time as a hybrid event at the Catholic University of Milan from 31 August to 6 September 2022.

KEYWORDS:

• History of educational technologies
• history of learning tools
• material history of education

Pointing out the importance of technology for education, as well as for everyday life today, seems a truism after the Covid-19 pandemic. Today, we consider educational technology as encompassing the combined use of computer hardware and software, and educational theory and practice for the purpose of facilitating learning, but we can also say that we started using technologies in the classroom long before the advent of Information and Communication Technologies, Burrhus F. Skinner’s programmed instruction and machine learning. In fact, if we consider educational technologies as a set of techniques, methods and objects used in the learning process, our heuristic perspective expands significantly and includes a wide range of pedagogical tools, some of which have already attracted scholars’ attention, while others have yet to be investigated.

Indeed, if the history of educational ideas has a very long tradition and the history of schools and educational institutions has been a significant topic for decades, new heuristic approaches have widened the research in history of education, as we can see if we think of the cultural turn, the corporeal turn, or the visual turn. While the question of the history of pedagogy and its tools is embedded in these perspectives, it deserves to be researched with a specific focus. Intent on encouraging scholars in this direction, ISCHE 43 was dedicated to the histories of educational technologies and the articles in this special issue of Paedagogica Historica represent some of the leading papers presented at the conference, which was held for the first time as a hybrid event at the Catholic University of Milan from 31 August to 6 September 2022 (400 scholars attended in person with a further 132 online, from 48 countries across five continents). As the reader will see, the articles in this special issue cover a range of different geographical areas and topics (transnational travel and the change and adaptation of pedagogical methods and tools, including a colonial perspective; classroom furnishings in indoor and outdoor classrooms; the scientific-technical revolution and pedagogical transformations; commercial catalogues of educational aids; body hygiene and school lavatories; television programmes in a transnational perspective) and are reflective of the breadth of subjects presented and discussed at the ISCHE 43 conference. Thus, in this introductory essay it is worth briefly sketching out the tremendous heuristic potential of the topic.

In the conference we used the term “educational technologies” in a broad sense, meaning the various objects and artefacts that were used in classrooms but also in other educational environments, and which were designed and produced according to pedagogical theories and teaching methods, but also according to other cultural, economic and social demands.

As regards school history, focussing on learning tools is a way of accessing the “black box” of schooling and everyday school life, with its social aspects as well as didactic ones. This need was highlighted in the 1990s by D. Julia, M. Depaepe, F. Simon, I. Grosvenor, M. Lawn and K. Rousmaniere.¹ The concept of school culture allows us to grasp the active role of school communities as producers of culture and not just passive transmitters of official content, as demonstrated by A. Chervel.² Therefore, the construct of school culture enables scholars to consider school communities as social actors and to conduct research into material culture.³ I. Dussel and M. Caruso have shown how the material system of the classroom has influenced the way in which teaching (and learning) takes place as well as the way in which pupils are controlled: the structure of the classroom answers not only to pedagogical aims, but also to the need of disciplining pupils.⁴

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, Spanish scholars started to pay particular attention to the history of schools’ material culture, defining this as “etnohistoria de la escuela”.⁵ Reflections on the “materiality of schooling” and “school heritage” continued in the years that followed.⁶ It is now clear that a technological change effected by new objects brings with it the transformation of school relationships (among pupils, between pupils and teachers, among teachers, and between inspectors,⁷ headmasters and teachers).⁸ Teaching tools or, more widely, “school objects” challenge the concepts of space, time and sociality. They speak of school practices, cultural history, and ideology.⁹ School artefacts are either handmade products created by pupils and teachers, or the school equipment that is made up of commercial products,¹⁰ which also respond to an industrial and economic logic, linked to the achievement of mass schooling.¹¹

Images and objects are signs that “acquire meanings by the discourses that surround them” as “entities” with an “active role in meaning-making as nonhuman actants in social networks”.¹² In this perspective in fact, blackboards, books, exercise books, school desks and various kinds of pens can also be considered educational technologies. New technologies have consistently produced changes in teaching tools and methods. But, as Martin Lawn has shown, the introduction of new technologies into schools has not necessarily been effective: in the case of digital and audiovisual technologies, partly because of the rapidity with which they age, and partly due to the resistance of teachers, who were not trained in the new tools.¹³

This historiographical development, briefly summed up here, was given significant attention in 2019, at ISCHE 41 Porto, a conference dedicated to “Spaces and places of education”, which also provided new suggestions relating to the material history of schools.¹⁴

1. Educational models and pedagogical tools

Nowadays it is quite common to seek pedagogical innovation: ministerial policies and project evaluations ask for updated teaching methods, with distance learning, flipped classrooms, and simplexity all common terms. But searching for innovation in educational history allows us to discover the roots of some contemporary methods and to better understand how educational processes changed. New pedagogical theories have consistently produced a change in teaching tools and methods. The aims and means of education are intermingled, but if educational theories have long attracted scholars’ attention, the history of educational objects can be further explored from different angles.

In recent decades, scholars have concentrated on school textbooks, a topic that has been widely researched in Spain, Germany, France, Italy and many other countries, but which is still capable of offering new insights, such as the discourse on gender or the representations of otherness in school textbooks, the transnational dissemination of intuitive teaching through textbooks and the use of picture books. Examining primers and school textbooks allows us to take the first step in accessing the “black box” of real classroom teaching. School exercise books and teachers’ diaries are other sources that enable scholars to better understand how teaching and learning took place.

In this respect, there is often a gap between pedagogical theories and their actual implementation by individual teachers. It is very rare for a method to be applied “purely” as different factors intervene to alter it: parents’ hostility; teachers’ unwillingness or conversely their desire to adapt the method to their pupils; cultural differences; economic conditions, etc. Handbooks for teachers are an important source that acts as a connecting rod between a pedagogical theory and its everyday application in classrooms: they are a medium between a high-level pedagogy and teachers’ actual skills and knowledge. By conducting research into the pedagogy textbooks used in Normal schools / teacher training courses / teachers’ colleges we can detect how complex pedagogical theories were adapted / simplified / made more rigid for future teachers.¹⁵

If educational theories set out the aims and prescribed the necessary tools, the means of reaching these aims were not only the prescribed artefacts (textbooks, blackboard, globe, scientific instruments, etc.) but also the teacher’s competence and culture, without which the system would fail. Alongside the study of the curriculum, elementary and secondary school teachers’ training is therefore a key to understanding the application of an educational theory with regard to concrete pedagogical applications of school didactics. In this respect, curriculum studies also relate to teaching tools. The full panoply of artefacts one could find (or not) in a classroom is therefore significant. Were the prescribed tools present? Were they actually used? Were they used as they were supposed to be used? For example, the big blackboard in the classroom was obviously thought of as a means of making what the teacher wrote visible to all pupils, but it could also be used as an instrument of punishment, making the punished child stand behind it. As we know, in history, absence is by no means less important than presence: the lack of basic learning materials in the classrooms of poor towns in Southern Italy in the nineteenth but also the twentieth century, up until the fifties, as testified by paintings or photographs, is an example of the gap between prescribed rules and the reality of school materiality.¹⁶

In secondary schools, one could research the catalogue of the instruments used in science labs for the teaching of physics and, later, also of chemistry and biology, not only in state schools but also in religious schools, such as the colleges run by the Society of Jesus or the Barnabites.

But apart from the most obvious didactic tools, there are also means of informally educating behaviours, perspectives and attitudes that are not included in the formal curriculum of students but are transmitted by the school system (the so called “hidden curriculum” – a term coined by Jackson (1968) in his book Life in Classrooms). Cultural and social conceptions of gender, behaviour, and ethics can be taught in a non-explicit way and can be transmitted by teachers without a deliberate process of rational thought, but, as Bloom highlighted, can be more pervasive and therefore more effective than the formal curriculum.¹⁷ Analysed by educational psychologists and sociologists, the hidden curriculum theory shows how the dynamics of classroom life and its relationship to wider society constitute goals of social education.¹⁸ Since the word “hidden” may convey a negative meaning, it has been suggested that it is preferable to rather use the expression “implicit curricula” of schooling, as a set of “messages imparted by the classroom and the school environment”, also involving peer behaviour.¹⁹

However, temporal organisation also impacts on everyday habits and on ways of learning. One obvious example is the introduction of a common timetable in elementary schools, with an hourglass being placed on the teacher’s desk as prescribed by the Normalmethode, in contrast with teachers’ free individualised control of the time and of lessons in the old system. In this respect the absence of an hourglass or a clock or watch clearly tells us that the timetable was not respected .²⁰

Educational models were also conveyed through didactic tools by using feelings and emotions, particularly where the moral education of children was concerned.²¹ The control of bodies and of the emotions were typical ways of disciplining childhood and adolescence at different times, such as in medieval monastic schools, or the Victorian age.²²

The shape of school desks, for instance, and the inappropriate use of potty chairs for toddlers were instruments of body control. The tools specifically dedicated to punishment were even more so, having the constant aim of inciting feelings of shame, or even contempt.²³ In the same vein, school uniforms are not neutral, but are instruments of discipline which aim to elicit specific feelings.²⁴

The design, decoration and material culture of educational and school settings have also aroused scholars’ interest.²⁵ Different teaching theories require different educational settings, which impact not only on learning but also on feelings and on relationships (between the teacher and the pupils and between the pupils themselves). The Montessori classroom environment, for instance, aimed to let children move about freely, choose a material and concentrate on it without direct intervention from the teacher, who indeed did not have a desk. The smaller dimensions of the desks, chairs and lavatories, and generally speaking the artificiality of the didactic tools (meaning they were all pedagogically designed), became a key character of the Montessori school, whether it was contested or praised. Open-air schools, on the other hand, were educational spaces that were organised in a natural environment, for both health and pedagogical purposes. Schools’ architectural designs and furniture, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, often had a pedagogical aim,²⁶ but also an ideological one, such as the connection between the architecture of school premises and the concept of nation-building.²⁷

Classroom decoration and furnishing can influence not only the immediate learning, but also the general attitude towards study. The environment can stimulate pupils’ well-being, emotions and cognitive development.²⁸

Other pedagogical tools that have recently been researched but require much more investigation are school reports, school registers and evaluation forms. The evaluation system and its changes over time and in different contexts is a topic where subject competence and discipline are intertwined. When mass schooling was imposed, a (theoretically) homogeneous system of evaluation was also introduced, with a simple scale of evaluation, either in numbers (0–10) or in letters (A–D) or in adjectives (excellent, very good, good, sufficient, insufficient). The mark had an implicit claim of objectivity, which went on to be strongly criticised during the ’68 period, when authority and selection were sharply criticised as unfair expression of social and economic discrimination rather than recognition of merits. University students contested the entire examination system, demanding the same single mark for every student. In the Sixties and Seventies of the last century, the academic theory of evaluation was discussed, with the new definition of formative and summative assessment,²⁹ while the traditional schooling and evaluation were refused by educationalists, teachers and thinkers, from don Lorenzo Milani to Ivan Illich.³⁰

Besides pedagogical questions (e.g. using letters or numbers to certify the level of learning attained or using words and phrases to describe it better), there may also be social questions involved. During the Restoration (1814–1859) the three Ginnasi and two Licei (Gymnasia and Lyzeen; high schools) in Milan, the capital city of the Kingdom of Lombardy and Venetia, suffered from substantial overcrowding, which stemmed from the high attendance at public elementary schools and the fact that Milan was a rich city, with many artisans and shopkeepers who desired a better education for their sons. This high attendance constantly worried Vienna, which tried repeatedly to make high schools more selective, fearing social mobility. Research into the class registers of the five Milanese high schools plus the private college allowed a quantitative analysis (of more than 17,000 pupils) that produced a detailed picture of the social family background of the pupils and their school performances. The research proved that the majority of the Ginnasi’s pupils belonged to the middle and lower classes, whereas upper-class pupils prevailed in the Licei. Vienna’s fears were actually grounded in reality. The overcrowding of Ginnasi had severe drawbacks for the teaching system. Discipline was rigid, and the teaching was mainly mnemonic, with a strict and obsessive system of examinations, which were actually also a disciplinary tool.³¹

Another example of the importance of school examinations as sources is provided by research concerning the competitive public examinations for future headmasters in Spain in 1932 and under the Franco regime, which has demonstrated the continuity in school practices before and after the Civil War.³²

Compulsory mass schooling also created the need for intelligence screening, in order to divert “abnormal” children, who did not have obvious physical deficiencies but presented with learning difficulties, into special schools or classes. From the Binet-Simon tests to those of Wechsler, the question of measuring intelligence became, increasingly during the twentieth century, a theoretical question as well as a pedagogical and practical one. Intelligence tests for children were indeed not only psychological but also educational tools, since their results determined schools’ and teachers’ decisions. The objectivity of these tests has long been questioned, and their possible cultural and educational bias is a question of interest from the point of view of history of education, involving anthropological perspectives, possible cultural bias, colonial approaches, and racism.³³ The materiality of the testing – the objects used, the room setting, the time necessary to complete the mental tests – are all elements that are important both for the evaluation of the children and for the professionalization of the examiners.³⁴

Possible mistakes in the administration of the tests by teachers and doctors in special institutes or in the resulting evaluations is another research track that may show the gap between the original meaning of a test and the actual skills of the figures who used it.³⁵

The history of special education can also widen its perspective to focus on special educational objects and teaching methods for those who are, for example, cognitively impaired, visually impaired or deaf, a topic that is also connected to sensory and emotional history. Itard and Sèguin invented new learning materials, which Montessori developed, acknowledging her debt to them. These materials are characterised by their strict relation to learning theories that are based on a scientific approach, which assign the teacher a strong role in the French educationalists’ views, and a more subtle function in Montessori’s pedagogy. In both cases, teachers for “abnormal” children had to be very competent. The requirement for detailed knowledge of the scientific learning material and its use made it necessary to improve teachers’ training. Research into the specific education provided for future teachers of disabled children is a topic of great interest.³⁶ Special education has sometimes worked as a forerunner, e.g. in coeducation, and the pedagogical use of music and visual art, with visits to museums, the use of visual material for the study of history, and the use of slides by Sèguin and Giuseppe Ferruccio Montesano, one of the founders of child psychiatry in Italy and the father of Montessori’s son.³⁷

The choice between one “special” method or another (e.g. the oral method or sign language) implied the use of different learning materials. Additionally, the moral values and the idea of the child that were taught to disabled children can be found in the reading books and textbooks they used.³⁸

2. Ideology and the cultural dimension of pedagogical objects

Learning tools have an obvious pedagogical aim. However, they may also imply cultural aspects: religious, political, or ideological. The political use of educational tools in totalitarian regimes has been researched in many aspects. It is sufficient to recall the covers of school exercise books under Fascism or the content of schoolbooks under different regimes.³⁹ K. Mahamud, for instance, has shown how sentimental narratives employed in primary education textbooks in Spain during the Franco dictatorship helped indoctrinate children in order to socialise them politically and religiously.⁴⁰ Not only primers and textbooks, but also children’s literature is imbued with ideological content: texts present the explicit social, political or moral beliefs of the individual writer, and his/her wish to recommend them to children through the story, but they also contain the author’s unthinkingly accepted assumptions, that he/she communicates without really realising as they are commonly and naturally shared values.⁴¹ However, children are not just passive receptors of adults’ views: they assimilate book contents, adapting them to their own way of thinking and perceiving the world.⁴² This also happened, for instance, with religious teaching in the modern age, when children’s comprehension of the Trinity or the Eucharist sometimes resembled heretical beliefs.⁴³

Ideology is also reflected in the use of language, which is rarely neutral.⁴⁴ Today the question of gender and cultural neutrality is much felt⁴⁵ but examining children’s literature historically allows us to detect many cultural ideas and educational aims that have previously been proposed to children. The Enlightenment views are clearly present in the children’s literature and school textbooks of the time,⁴⁶ while the First World War heavily influenced children’s literature with nationalistic messages.⁴⁷ Examining children’s and juvenile literature historically enables us to grasp cultural and ideological meanings that are entangled with the history of education. The history of emotions can also use these sources as valuable research tools.⁴⁸

Other important sources for our topic are the media used for education. There is a wide range of educational objects, not necessarily for schools, that can enrich the history of education of the last century: radio, TV and cinema.⁴⁹ These sources contain great heuristic potential, but also pose methodological questions. Indeed, there are specific educational films or programmes⁵⁰ or there is film-making as a school subject, but in the case of fictional films, where the educational aim is not openly affirmed, historians need to be more careful. While one can examine slides used in schools (for instance, photographs of animals for science lessons) just like other school visual sources, such as images in schoolbooks, fictional movies raise other questions. Historians of education need to relate these sources to the history of cinema, but it is not the artistic value of the film in itself that is primarily important: a mediocre film that enjoyed great audience success becomes important as it bears witness to the mentality of the viewers. It has already been made clear that movies depict a reality that represents not only the director’s, scriptwriter’s and film production house’s views, but also what they expect people to like, to understand, and to empathise with.⁵¹ TV is “a facilitator of cultural history”: it creates “modes of interaction with the past. Although these models of interaction are subversive of many of the implicit goals of academic history, they play a significant role in cultural memory and the popular negotiation of the past”.⁵² A. Erll states that “cultural memory is unthinkable without media”.⁵³ Fictional movies, as well as historical movies, are sources that are important for cultural history, in so much as they shape the collective memory. “Fiction needs to be taken seriously as a factor influencing the human mind and our individual and collective memory”,⁵⁴ especially on account of its emotional power. As Rosenstone noted, “fiction has by far the greatest emotional impact on viewers”.⁵⁵

In the case of school memories,⁵⁶ for instance, school movies do not necessarily represent the true reality, but they certainly depict an image of school and of teachers that contributed to the building of cultural stereotypes and to defining the collective school memory of the last century.⁵⁷

As with children’s literature, we need to uncover the intentional and unintentional educational messages of the work and the audience’s reception of them. It is not only film critics in newspapers who are therefore important, but also viewers’ opinions: contained in letters from children and young people to journals, evaluations on cinema websites or on e-commerce platforms such as Amazon, or in blogs.⁵⁸

Ideology is also entangled in the tools and methods used in physical education: gymnastics and sport have long been influenced by nationalistic views as well as particular conceptions of the body, not only under dictatorships such as Fascism, Francoism and Nazism, but also in democratic countries. Imperial views conditioned the British attitude towards the male body, health, fitness and bravery in the Victorian age as well as in the twentieth century. Most countries shared military-oriented objectives in school gymnastics, but there were particular national differences in the process of the transferring, rejecting, or reshaping of methods (e.g. from Jahn’s method to Swedish gymnastics) and of aims (training the citizen-soldier or the future athlete, educating individuals to sporting skill or to pedagogical goals). Politics, economic conditions and cultural conceptions were interwoven with the teaching of physical education and sport, leading them to use certain tools or others. Examining the textbooks for future schoolteachers of gymnastics, as well as school programmes and specialised journals, allows us to better understand these processes.⁵⁹ The pendulum swing between paramilitary and disciplining methods that were uniformed, orderly and methodical and the use of games and a more playful approach demonstrates the oscillation between a nationalist approach and the acceptance of the New School’s idea of the child. A strong masculine culture also underlies most of these perspectives: a “virile” nation has to educate strong, courageous, determined boys, with no sign of weakness in either their character or their body. Collective choreographed exercises would strengthen the feeling of belonging and being part of the nation. A lack of economic sources, however, interfered with biopolitical aims: when there were no gymnasiums in schools and therefore no equipment (ropes, wall bars, poles, Jäger sticks, etc.), teachers had to settle for exercises in the classroom.⁶⁰

3. Economy and pedagogical artefacts

If pedagogical tools have existed since ancient times, when the first schools were established, they became objects of mass production in the era of industrialisation and compulsory schooling, that is to say when a writing tool or mathematical device or reading tool or item of stationery ceased to be an object of school consumption and became a means of mass education.⁶¹ At the end of the nineteenth century, when in the Western world mass schooling generally started, a school industry developed which gradually acquired increasing economic significance. The very question of access to literacy is connected with teaching objects, their production and their cost.

Publishing houses (which often produced not only schoolbooks but also scientific tools, slides and projectors, blackboards etc.) specialised in the production of items for schools. Their commercial catalogues are an important source for the history of these tools.⁶² The study of school publishing houses, and of their economic, cultural and political strategies, has been carried out with in-depth research undertaken in Italy, particularly through Giorgio Chiosso’s projects,⁶³ and has shown the growth and bankruptcy of certain publishing houses (the strict policy on school books under Fascism, for instance, determined the closure of some national publishing houses and the flourishing of others).⁶⁴ The mass production of school tools, the “industries éducatives” as Pierre Mœglin defines it,⁶⁵ requires an interdisciplinary approach, where industrial and economic dynamics are explored together with policies and educational theories.⁶⁶

The intervention of a capitalistic mass industry introduces in fact another factor that has to be taken into account. School industries have to adhere to ministerial indications; however, they possess the power to influence ministerial or municipal decisions and therefore to condition teaching. The purchase of school desks of one kind or another or of a certain type of computer or interactive whiteboard has an impact on the way teaching takes place. Researching the technological devices and techniques used in classrooms, from Skinner’s teaching machine to e-learning, requires historians of education to possess technological knowledge.⁶⁷

The industrial production of school tools also involves their spreading internationally: it was not only educational theories and methods that travelled from one country to another, but also didactic means. Between the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century, for instance, school desks were imported to Italy from Germany, where the debate about health and posture, with anthropometric ranges, was more advanced.⁶⁸ Standardised teaching models involving a deliberate organisation of classroom space that facilitated maintaining discipline also spread to different countries thanks to industrial production and logic.⁶⁹

It is therefore important to consider the catalogues and archives relating to industrial school production, for the different school disciplines from geography to sciences or gymnastics.⁷⁰ School museums contain extensive material, from school desks to schoolbooks and various kinds of didactic tools: Froebel’s gifts, globes, stationery, wall posters, etc. A possible research path lies in the crossover between the didactic means preserved in school museums, school industry catalogues, ministerial prescriptions and pedagogical theories. Teaching objects acquire a complexity but also a heuristic potential that allows their enhancement as sources, with regard to their conceptualisation, design, patenting, production, dissemination and actual use in the classroom.⁷¹

If teaching tools are hence important for the material history of schooling, toys are also significant sources for a material history of childhood. The history of toys is a multifaceted one, since it touches on popular culture and attitudes regarding gender, education and social classes. Psychology, anthropology, sociology and education are possible research perspectives, from a historical point of view. Besides, in the Western world, toys had a growing industrial dimension from the end of the eighteenth century, which led to commercial policies that were tightly interwoven with a changing idea of childhood and family.⁷² Toy advertisements become another possible source for a sociological or economic history as well as for a history of education.⁷³

4. Conclusions

It is quite clear from the above-mentioned historiographical paths and suggestions that the history of school technologies makes a plea for interdisciplinary research, including with scholars specialised in other fields. One possible risk lies in concentrating on the production of individual learning tools, forgetting the history of pedagogical ideas and school policy and providing detailed descriptions, marked with a Positivist stamp, of school objects. School and educational artefacts can enrich our knowledge if they are examined within a network of relations, of space and time, actors and institutions, theories and policies.

The articles in this special issue of Paedagogica Historica represent some of the most interesting papers presented at the conference by leading scholars as well as young researchers. The transnational dissemination, change and adaptation of pedagogical methods and tools are addressed in the first two articles. The speech delivered by Maria del Mar del Pozo Andrés as the keynote of the Milan conference is the opening article of this issue. It describes how Ovide Decroly’s pedagogy of “centres of interest” travelled from Belgium to Spain, with acknowledgement of the actors responsible for this, and how it was widely applied in Spain, changing the material school culture in the first decades of the twentieth century, before dying out after the Spanish Civil War, since the Decrolyan educators, who had travelled to Brussels and had introduced and spread Decroly’s method in Spain, were executed, exiled or removed from teaching. Their books were eliminated, along with the memory of the New School. But Decroly’s ideas were rediscovered in the 1960s, when a new generation looked for new methods. Del Pozo Andrés also shows the emotional engagement of these two generations of educators, shedding new light on the Spanish history of pedagogy and on transnational adaptation of pedagogical tools.

Marcelo Caruso’s article shifts the attention to a colonial perspective, arguing that the British introduction of new learning objects in India caused the native “old gurus” to diminish in influence, before they were then replaced by teachers trained in India’s new normal schools. The change in the material nature of teaching tools, swapping sand-boards and palm leaves for paper books and exercise books, meant a shift from an artisan-teacher, who prepared the writing materials himself, to a teacher who simply used the school materials, rather than producing them. Caruso underlines the differences between Persian, Hindu and Muslim schools, and the efforts of missionaries, educators and inspectors during the nineteenth century to introduce Western Christian curricula and school objects, replacing memorisation, orality and manuscripts with a culture of printed textbooks, maps and blackboards, so that gradually the “old gurus” came to be replaced by differently educated native (or Western) teachers.

The pedagogical, hygienic and aesthetic reasons in favour of the change from slates to paper in schools and the economic, pedagogical, social and political consequences of this are examined by Maria Eugenia Chaoul in her article about the transformation that took place in Mexican elementary schools between 1880 and 1920. The slow change in the technology used in learning to write, in favour of an expensive material such as paper, is in fact approached here through an examination of the intersection of different actors, institutions and enterprises. The Monitorial system, which used slates, was accused of being a mechanical and mnemonic system. The adoption of the New School pedagogy meant the use of new materials and a change in schoolroom furniture and desks. The production of paper, which was originally handmade in Mexico, had to become industrial to guarantee large quantities of exercise books, but the Mexican revolution (1910–17) stopped the beginning of this process. Hence the use of paper was limited to an elite group of pupils for economic reasons.

Matteo Morandi presents a broad analysis of how the “object lesson” (leçon de choses, Anschauungsunterricht, lezione di cose, lección de cosas) spread as a teaching method in Europe through three generations of educators in the nineteenth century. Based on Pestalozzi’s intuitive method, it assumed a scientific dimension in the Positivist age, but it was also modified according to national sensibilities and aims. The dissemination of the “object lesson” thus contributed on the one hand to the standardisation of a pedagogical method in elementary and infant schools, while on the other hand it was recontextualised according to different cultural traditions and political and patriotic feelings. By using teaching textbooks, encyclopaedias and pedagogical dictionaries, Morandi sheds new light on the transnational history of a teaching technology.

Francesca Davida Pizzigoni deals with the commercial catalogues of businesses producing teaching aids, which developed in the second half of the 1800s linked to the “object lesson” and the production of school objects by a new educational industry. Pizzigoni demonstrates the heuristic potential but also the risks associated with this source, which was born with the clear aim of making profits through selling “mass products” to the new school market. The author reconstructs the international historiography relating to the commercial catalogues for school aids and points out the strategic importance of joint international research in this area.

Aleksandra Ilic Rajkovic and Nataša Nikolić concentrate on the case of outdoor learning in Serbia through the work carried out by the teacher Sreten Adžić between the end of the nineteenth and the first decades of the twentieth century. Derived from Pestalozzi, his idea of outdoor learning was integrated with the New School pedagogy, and with Adžić’s socialist political ideas. According to him, all first-grade classes should be based on sense-perception and the lessons should be founded on the principle of self-activity and use a problem-solving approach. The outdoor external environment is an educational object, with both natural and social aspects. He visited Sweden and Norway and was enthusiastic about the Nordic open-air schools. In 1897 the Ministry of Education offered him the opportunity to organise the Teacher’s College in Jagodina according to his ideas and he set up classrooms in the park by the school buildings. His method was applied to all students, not just those who were weak or tubercular, and served as the forerunner to the ecological education in Serbia.

If nature can be an educational object, Josefine Wähler and Kerrin von Engelhardt instead concentrate on the progressive adoption of technology in the subject classroom system in the German Democratic Republic between 1949 and 1990. They focus on the furnishing of subject classrooms with seating, tables, and teaching and learning objects including technical equipment. By considering the subject classroom as a technically shaped apparatus, they reconstruct the material aspect of pedagogical practices as well as the pedagogical objects and technical devices involved, particularly for physics and music classrooms. The article examines the ambivalent relationship between the rationalisation of the classroom as a subject-specific classroom and its emotionalisation through engineering, paying particular attention to the role of technical media. It also shows the political instrumentalisation of technology in education, e.g. audio-visual teaching aids were considered important for political-ideological education for their emotional implications, as well as being more effective for being scientifically updated. Due to a lack of material equipment or the scarcity of teachers adhering to the official programme, the ministerial euphoria about technology ceased in the 1980s.

Lucila Da Silva deals with a rather new topic that lies at the crossroads between school architecture, hygiene, schools’ everyday practice and sociality: she examines how and why school lavatories changed in the city of Buenos Aires between 1880 and 1930. In doing so, she manages to trace a relationship between school spaces, materials, objects and practices that existed in school bathrooms. The author examines a wide variety of sometimes scattered sources, and reconstructs a material history of items that were gradually included in school buildings, in response to industrial and scientific progress.

With Wooyeong Kim we come to educational TV as a source with the author looking at the adaptations of Sesame Street in Japan and South Korea. The highly successful US children’s television show was used to teach English not only to children but also to adults. New educational materials were produced, such as Sesame Street textbooks with scripts of the episodes, to help study English. In Korea, the involvement of the central government appears crucial in the import of Sesame Street. The article shows how different cultural and political contexts can influence the reception of an educational TV programme.

This special issue does not present all aspects of school objects and technologies, but it certainly brings to scholars’ attention a range of relevant and original sources, as well as fresh methodological approaches. Furthermore, it underlines the importance of interdisciplinary research and of an international perspective when dealing with the history of school materials.

Lastly, I would like to point out that this issue is also testament to the valued participation of Early Career Researchers in Milan’s ISCHE conference, since three of the authors/co-authors are ECRs (Lucila Da Silva, Wooyeong Kim and Josefine Wähler).

Finally, I would like to thank the many scholars who submitted their proposals; the colleagues who acted as reviewers for this issue, providing an invaluable contribution; Fanny Isensee of the editorial office for her peerless precision and efficiency; and Ian Grosvenor, who was the managing editor of this issue and whose experience has made this publication possible.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Simonetta Polenghi

Simonetta Polenghi is Professor of History of education at the Catholic University of Sacred Heart in Milan, Italy, where she teaches School history and History of special education. Member of ISCHE EC 2016–2022, she chaired ISCHE 43 in Milan (31 August – 6 September 2022). Former president of the Academic Italian Society of Education SIPED (2017–2020), she is the author of four volumes, has edited/coedited 25 volumes/special issues and published more than 120 essays and articles.

Notes

¹ Dominique Julia, “La culture scolaire comme objet historique”, in The Colonial Experience in Education: Historical Issues and Perspectives, ed. Antonio Nóvoa, Marc Depaepe and Ervine W. Johanningmeier (Ghent: Paedagogica Historica – Supplementary Series I, 1995), 353–82; Marc Depaepe and Frank Simon, “Is there any Place for the History of ‘Education’ in the ‘History of Education?’ A Plea for the History of Everyday Educational Reality in‐ and outside Schools”, Paedagogica Historica 31, no. 1 (1995): 9–16; and Ian Grosvenor, Martin Lawn and Kate Rousmaniere, eds., Silences & Images: The Social History of the Classroom (New York: Peter Lang, 1999).

² André Chervel, La culture scolaire: Une approche historique (Paris: Belin, 1998).

³ Diana Gonçalves Vidal and André Paulilo, “School Culture”, Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Education (2018), https://doi-org.ezproxy.unicatt.it/10.1093/acrefore/9780190264093.013.59.

⁴ Inés Dussel and Marcel Caruso, La invención del aula, una genealogía de las formas de enseñar (Buenos Aires: Santillana, 1999).

⁵ Juan Alfredo Jiménez Eguizábal et al., eds., Etnohistoria de la escuela. XII Coloquio nacional de historia de la educación (Burgos: Universidad de Burgos- SEDHE, 2003); for a criticism on the concept of “etnohistoria de la escuela” see Juri Meda, Mezzi di educazione di massa. Saggi di storia materiale della scuola tra XIX e XX secolo (Milano: FrancoAngeli, 2016), 21–2; cf. Agustín Escolano Benito, ed., La cultura material de la escuela (Berlanga de Duero: CEINCE, 2007).

⁶ Martin Lawn and Ian Grosvenor, eds., Materialities of Schooling: Design, Technology, Objects, Routines (Oxford: Symposium Books, 2005); Sjaak Braster, Ian Grosvenor and Maria del Mar del Pozo Andrés, eds., The Black Box of Schooling: A Cultural History of the Classroom (Brussels: Peter Lang, 2011); and Maria João Mogarro, ed., Educação e património cultural: escolas, objectos e práticas (Lisbon: Ed. Colibri, 2015).

⁷ Tomáš Kasper, et al., From School Inspectors to School Inspection: Supervision of Schools in Europe from the Middle Ages to Modern Times (Bad Heilbrunn: Verlag Julius Klinkhardt, 2022).

⁸ Latour’s theory about actors and networks may be useful in this respect: Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social. An Introduction to Actor-Network Theory (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005). In the words of Lawn and Grosvenor: “Technology moves from the shadows and into an effect, and even into a relational position, connecting people and objects into a close series of affiliations and actions”; Lawn and Grosvenor, Materialities of Schooling, 10.

⁹ For a critical review of the historiography of material school culture in different countries, see Vera Lucia Gaspar da Silva, Juri Meda and Gizele de Souza, eds., “The Material Turn in the History of Education”, special issue, Educació ihistòria: Revista d’història de l’educació 38 (2021).

¹⁰ Agustín Escolano Benito, Etnografia della scuola (Parma: Junior, 2023).

¹¹ Meda, Mezzi di educazione di massa.

¹² Inés Dussel, Visuality, Materiality, and History, in International Handbook of Historical Studies in Education, ed. Tanya Fitzgerald (New York: Springer, 2019), 144. See also Frederik Herman, Iconography and Materiality, ivi, 329–47.

¹³ Martin Lawn, Abandoned Modernities (Lisbon: Education Instituto, 2015).

¹⁴ Luís Grosso Correia, “Spaces and Places of Education: Prelude”, Paedagogica Historica 57, no. 1–2 (2021): 1–10.

¹⁵ See for instance, about the application of Herbart’s method: Edvard Protner, Herbartianism and its Educational Consequences in the Period of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy: the Case of Slovenia (Frankfurt a.M.: Peter Lang, 2014); about the Habsburg text books for elementary school teachers from Felbiger to Peitl: Simonetta Polenghi, “Habsburg Legislation on the Training of Elementary and Ginnasio-Liceo (Secondary) Teachers and its Implementation in the Italian Territories across the 18th and 19th Centuries”, in Kulturen der Lehrerbildung in der Sekundarstufe in Italien und Deutschland. Nationale Formate und “cross culture”, ed. Rita Casale, Jeannette Windheuser, Monica Ferrari and Matteo Morandi (Bad Heilbrunn: Verlag Julius Klinkhardt, 2021), 19–32; and Simonetta Polenghi, “Elementary School Teachers in Milan during the Restoration (1814–59): Innovations and Improvements in Teacher Training”, History of Education & Children’s Literature VIII, no. 1 (2013): 47–166.

¹⁶ Juri Meda, “The ‘Agony of the School’ in Southern Italy in the Images of Italian Photojournalists, 1940s-1950s”, in They did not stop at Eboli. UNESCO and the campaign against illiteracy in a reportage by David “Chim” Seymour and texts by Carlo Levi (1950), ed. Karin Priem, Giovanna Hendel and Carole Naggar (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2019), 198–220; Juri Meda and Simonetta Polenghi, “The Impossible Schools: Rural Classrooms in the Paintings of Italian Artists During the Second Half of the Nineteenth Century”, in Media Matter. Images as Presenters, Mediators, and Means of Observation, ed. Francisca Comas Rubí, Karin Priem and Sara González Gómez (Oldenbourg: De Gruyter, 2021), 203–74.

¹⁷ Avi Assor and David Gordon, “The Implicit Learning Theory of Hidden‐curriculum Research”, Journal of Curriculum Studies 19, no. 4 (1987): 329–39.

¹⁸ Henry A. Giroux and Anthony N. Penna, “Social Education in the Classroom: The Dynamics of the Hidden Curriculum”, Theory & Research in Social Education 7, no. 1 (1979): 21–42; see also John P. Portelli, “Exposing the Hidden Curriculum”, Journal of Curriculum Studies 25, no. 4 (1993): 343–58.

¹⁹ Catherine Cornbleth, “Beyond Hidden Curriculum?”, Journal of Curriculum Studies 16, no. 1 (1984): 29–36.

²⁰ For a good contemporary example about time in a secondary school vocational programme see: Gerd Johansen, Kristin Solli, “The Hidden Curriculum of Temporal Organization: An Empirical Comparison of Classroom and Workshop Practices”, Journal of Curriculum Studies 54, no. 6 (2022): 792–808.

²¹ Claudia Soares, “Emotions, Senses, Experience and the History of Education”, History of Education 52, no. 2–3 (2023): 516–38.

²² George Ferzoco and Carolyne Muessig, eds., Medieval Monastic Education (London: Leicester University Press, 2000); Luca Odini, “The Rule for Freedom: The Pedagogical Function of Monastic Rules Between Care and Coercion”, Jahrbuch für Historische Bildungsgeschichte 28 (2022–23): 17–36; and Jane Hamlett, “Space and Emotional Experience in Victorian and Edwardian English Public School Dormitories”, in Childhood, Youth and Emotions in Modern History, ed. Stephanie Olsen (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 119–38.

²³ Juri Meda and Marta Brunelli, “The Dumb Child. Contribution to the Study of the Iconogenesis of the Dunce Cap”, History of Education & Children’s Literature XIII, no. 1 (2018): 41–70; Heather Ellis, “Corporal Punishment in the English Public School in the Nineteenth Century”, in Childhood and Violence in the Western Tradition, ed. Heather Montgomery and Laurence Brockliss (Oxford: Oxbow Books, 2010), 141–50; see also Peter N. Stearns and Clio Stearns, “American Schools and the Uses of Shame: An Ambiguous History”, History of Education 46, no. 1 (2017): 58–75.

²⁴ Inés Dussel, “When Appearances Are Not Deceptive: A Comparative History of School Uniforms in Argentina and the United States (Nineteenth – Twentieth Centuries)”, Paedagogica Historica 41, no. 1–2 (2005): 179–95; Inés Dussel, “Historicising Girls’ Material Cultures in Schools: Revisiting Photographs of Girls in Uniforms”, Women’s History Review 29, no. 3 (2020): 429–43.

²⁵ Karin Priem, Gudrun M. König and Rita Casale, eds., “Die Materialität der Erziehung: Kulturelle und soziale Aspekte pädagogischer Objekte”, Zeitschrift für Pädagogik, 58 (2012); Marguerite Figeac-Monthus (dir.), Éducation et culture matérielle en France et en Europe du XVI^e siècle à nos jours (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2018).

²⁶ Catherine Burke and Ian Grosvenor, School (London: Reaktion Books, 2008).

²⁷ “Architecture and School Space”, Francisco Javier Rodríguez Méndez and Carlos Manique da Silva, eds., special issue of Historia y Memoria de la Educación 13 (2021).

²⁸ Lawn and Grosvenor, Materialities of Schooling; Catherine Burke, “The Decorated School: Cross-Disciplinary Research in the History of Art as Integral to the Design of Educational Environments”, Paedagogica Historica 49, no. 6 (2013): 813–27.

²⁹ Michael Scriven, The Methodology of Evaluation, in Perspectives on Curriculum Evaluation, ed. Ralph W. Tyler, Robert M. Gagné and Michael Scriven (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1967) (AERA Monograph. Series on Curriculum Evaluation, I), 39–83.

³⁰ For the French case, see Pierre Merle, “L’école française et l’invention de la note. Un éclairage historique sur les polémiques contemporaines”, in Revue française de pédagogie 193 (2015): 77–88, who goes back to the Jesuitic school classification. For the Italian case, see Matteo Morandi, “Il Sessantotto della docimologia. Una nota sull’osservatorio di «Scuola e città»”, Educazione. Giornale di pedagogia critica 8, no. 2 (2019): 33–50; Matteo Morandi, “Dar voti a scuola. Appunti per una storia”, in Maestri e pratiche educative dall’Ottocento a oggi. Contributi per una storia della didattica, ed. Monica Ferrari and Matteo Morandi (Brescia: Scholé, 2020), 99–127; for Germany (1770–1850): Nils Lindenhayn, Die Prüfung: Zur Geschichte einer pädagogischen Technologie (Wien: Böhlau Verlag, 2018); for Spain: Marcelo Caruso, “Technologiewandel auf dem Weg zur ‘grammar of schooling’. Reform des Volksschulunterrichts in Spanien (1767–1804)”, Zeitschrift für Pädagogik 56, no. 5 (2010): 648–65.

³¹ Valentina Chierichetti, I ginnasi e i licei di Milano nell’età della Restaurazione. Professori, studenti, discipline (1814–1851) (Lecce, Rovato: PensaMultimedia, 2013); and Valentina Chierichetti and Simonetta Polenghi, “Learning in Ginnasio and Liceo in Habsburg Milan (1814–1859)”, History of Education & Children’s Literature XV, no. 1 (2020): 41–67.

³² Carlos Menguiano-Rodríguez, María del Mar del Pozo Andrés and Gabriel Barceló-Bauzà, “A New Source for the Study of Educational Practices: Competitive Exams for School Headteacher Positions (Spain, 20th century)”, History of Education & Children’s Literature XV, no. 2 (2020): 199–218.

³³ John Carson, The Measure of Merit: Talents, Intelligence, and Inequality in the French and American Republics, 1750–1940 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007); Christian Ydesen, The Rise of High-Stakes Educational Testing in Denmark, 1920–1970 (Frankfurt a.M.: Peter Lang, 2011); Christian, Ydesen, Kari Ludvigsen and Christian Lundahl, “Creating an Educational Testing Profession in Norway, Sweden and Denmark, 1910–1960”, European Educational Research Journal 12, no. 1 (2013): 120–38; Annette Mülberger, “The Need for Contextual Approaches to the History of Mental Testing”, History of Psychology 17, no. 3 (2014): 177–86; Nelleke Bakker, “A Culture of Knowledge Production: Testing and Observation of Dutch children with Learning and Behavioural Problems (1949–1985)”, Paedagogica Historica 53, no. 1–2 (2017): 7–23; Antonio Canales and Simonetta Polenghi, eds., “Classifying Children: a Historical Perspective on Testing and Measurement”, special issue of Paedagogica Historica 55, no. 3 (2019); Nelleke Bakker, “Professional Competence and the Classification and Selection of Pupils for Schools for ‘Feebleminded’ Children in the Netherlands (1900–1940)”, Paedagogica Historica 57, no. 6 (2021): 728–44, Jona T. Garz, Zwischen Anstalt und Schule. Eine Wissensgeschichte der Erziehung »schwachsinniger« Kinder in Berlin, 1845–1914 (Bielefeld: transcript, 2022).

³⁴ Ydesen, The Rise of High-Stakes Educational Testing in Denmark, 92–3.

³⁵ Gian Paolo Cappellari and Diana de Rosa, Il padiglione Ralli: l’educazione dei bambini anormali tra positivismo e idealismo (Milano: Unicopli, 2003).

³⁶ Anna Debè, Maestri “speciali” alla Scuola di padre Gemelli. La formazione degli insegnanti per fanciulli anormali all’Università Cattolica (1926–1978) (Lecce, Rovato: PensamUltimedia, 2017).

³⁷ Yves Pelicier, Un pionnier de la psychiatrie de l’enfant: Edouard Seguin (1812–1880) (Paris: AEHSS, 1996); Bruno Di Pofi, L’educazione dei minori “anormali” nell’opera di Giuseppe Ferruccio Montesano (Roma: Nuova cultura, 2008).

³⁸ Maria Cristina Morandini, La conquista della parola: l’educazione dei sordomuti a Torino tra otto e Novecento (Torino: SEI, 2010).

³⁹ To quote just a few examples: Gianluca Gabrielli, Il curricolo «razziale». La costruzione dell’alterità di «razza» e coloniale nella scuola italiana (1860–1950) (Macerata: EUM, 2015); Anna Ascenzi and Roberto Sani, “The Totalitarian Child. The Image of Childhood in the Fascist School Notebooks (1922–1943)”, History of Education & Children’s Literature XIII, no. 1 (2018): 251–78; and Simonetta Polenghi, “Educating the ‘New Man’ in Italian Schools during the Fascist Era. Children’s Education through Traditional and Totalitarian Models in Images and Texts of Schoolbooks”, Historia Scholastica 6, no. 1 (2020): 7–28.

⁴⁰ Kira Mahamud, “Emotional Indoctrination through Sentimental Narrative in Spanish Primary Education Textbooks during the Franco Dictatorship (1939–1959)”, History of Education 45, no. 5 (2016): 653–78.

⁴¹ Peter Hollindale, “Ideology and the Children’s Book”, in Literature for Children: Contemporary Criticism, ed. Peter Hunt (London: Routledge, 1992), 18–40.

⁴² Sabrina Fava, Piccoli lettori del Novecento. I bambini di Paola Carrara Lombroso sui giornali per ragazzi (Torino: SEI, 2015).

⁴³ Dominique Julia, “L’infanzia agli inizi dell’epoca moderna”, in Storia dell’infanzia vol. 1, ed. Dominique Julia and Egle Becchi (Roma: Laterza, 1996), 231–311.

⁴⁴ John Stephens, Language and Ideology in Children’s Fiction (London: Longman, 1992).

⁴⁵ Beverly Lyon Clark, Girls, Boys, Books, Toys: Gender in Children’s Literature and Culture (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000).

⁴⁶ Hans-Heino Ewers and Theodor Brüggemann, eds., Handbuch zur Kinder- und Jugendliteratur. Von 1750 bis 1800 (Stuttgart: J.B. Metzler, 1982).

⁴⁷ Hans-Heino Ewers, ed., Erster Weltkrieg: Kindheit, Jugend und Literatur: Deutschland, Österreich, Osteuropa, England, Belgien und Frankreich (Frankfurt a.M.: Peter Lang, 2016); Marnie Campagnaro, ed., La Grande Guerra raccontata ai ragazzi (Roma: Donzelli, 2015).

⁴⁸ Ute Frevert, Pascal Eitler and Stephanie Olsen, Learning How to Feel: Children’s Literature and Emotional Socialisation, 1870–1970 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014).

⁴⁹ Grevatt Wallace, BBC Children’s Hour. A Celebration of those Magical Years (Lewes: The Book Guild, 1988); Robert A. Rosenstone, Visions of the Past. The Challenge of Film to Our Idea of History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995); Josephine Dolan, “Aunties and Uncles: The BBC’s Children’s Hour and Liminal Concerns in the 1920s”, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 23, no. 4 (2003): 329–39; Robert A. Rosenstone, History on Film/Film on History (Harlow: Pearson Longman, 2006); Stephen G. Parker, “Teach Them to Pray Auntie: Children’s Hour Prayers at the BBC, 1940–1961”, History of Education 39, no. 5 (2010): 659–76; Josephine May, “A Field of Desire: Visions of Education in Selected Australian Silent Films”, Paedagogica Historica 46, no. 5 (2010): 623–37; Graham Roberts and Philip M. Taylor, eds., The Historians, Television and Television History (Luton: University of Luton Press, 2011); Motti Neiger, Oren Meyers and Eyal Zandberg, eds., On Media Memory. Collective Memory in a New Media Age (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011); “Education in Motion: Producing Methodologies for Researching Documentary Film”, ed. Angelo Van Gorp and Paul Warmington, Paedagogica Historica 47, no. 4 (2011); Thierry Lefebvre, “À la recherche de la radio scolaire. Une patrimonialisation en cours”, Sociétés & Représentations 1, no. 35 (2013): 109–16; Alessandra Carenzio, “Mass media e infanzia”, in Mario Gecchele, Simonetta Polenghi and Paola Dal Toso, eds., Il Novecento: il secolo del bambino? (Bergamo: Edizioni Junior, 2017), 295–305; Carla Ghizzoni, “La radio per ragazzi nei primi anni del fascismo (1925–1933)”, History of Education & Children’s Literature XIII, no. 2 (2018): 219–50; Maria Hrickova and Adriana Kičkova, “History of Radio Broadcasting for Schools in the Czechoslovak Republic”, History of Education & Children’s Literature XIII1 (2018): 393–409; Joseph Casanovas Prat and Núria Padrós Tuneu, eds., “La historia de la educació a través dels films”, special issue, Educació i Història 31, no. 1 (2018); and Conrad Vilanou Torrano, Núria Padrós Tuneu and Raquel Cercós i Raichs, eds., “The Representation of Education in Documentaries Produced by European Totalitarism”, special issue, Historia y Memoria de la Educación 16 (2022).

⁵⁰ Sylvain Wagnon, “The Filmstrip. History and Evolution of an Educational Tool”, History of Education & Children’s Literature XV, no. 2 (2020): 151–61.

⁵¹ Vivian Sobchack, ed., The Persistence of History. Cinema, Television and the Modern Event (New York: Routledge, 1996); Marc Ferro, Cinéma et Histoire (Paris: Denoël-Gonthier, 1977); Pierre Sorlin, Sociologie du cinéma (Paris: Aubier-Montaigne, 1977); and Roberts and Taylor, The Historians, Television and Television History.

⁵² Steven Anderson, “History TV and Popular Memory”, in Television Histories. Shaping Collective Memory in the Media Age, ed. Gary R. Edgerton and Peter C. Rollins (Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 2001), 20–1.

⁵³ Astrid Erll, Memory in Culture (Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2011), 113.

⁵⁴ Ib Bondebjerg, Screening Twentieth Century Europe. Television, History, Memory (Cham: Palgrave European Film and Media Studies, 2020), 31. See also Geert Thyssen and Karin Priem, “Mobilising Meaning: Multimodality, Translocation, Technology and Heritage”, Paedagogica Historica 49, no. 6 (2013): 735–44.

⁵⁵ Rosenstone, History on Film/Film on History, 47. See also Gary R. Edgerton, Introduction: Television as Historian: A Different Kind of History Altogether, in Television Histories. Shaping Collective Memory in the Media Age, ed. Edgerton and Rollins, 1–16.

⁵⁶ Cristina Yanes Cabrera, Juri Meda and Antonio Viñao, eds., School Memories. New Trends in the History of Education (Cham: Springer, 2017).

⁵⁷ Paolo Alfieri, “Introduzione”, in Immagini dei nostri maestri. Memorie di scuola nel cinema e nella televisione dell’Italia repubblicana, ed. Paolo Alfieri (Roma: Armando, 2019); see also Paolo Alfieri and Imre Garai, eds., Individual and Collective School Memories. Research Perspectives and Case Studies in Italy and Hungary (Roma: Armando, 2022); and Josep Casanovas, Núria Padrós and Eulàlia Collelldemont, “The Representation of School on NO-DO: Visions of School Practice on Francoist Newsreels”, History of Education & Children’s Literature XV, no. 2 (2020): 163–82.

⁵⁸ Simonetta Polenghi, “Film as a Source for Historical Enquiry in Education. Research Methods and a Case Study: Film Adaptations of Pinocchio and their Reception in Italy”, Educació i Historia 31, no. 1 (2018): 89–111.

⁵⁹ Paolo Alfieri, “‘A qual fine vero e proprio debba rispondere la ginnastica nelle scuole’. Emilio Baumann e la manualistica ad uso degli insegnanti elementari all’indomani della legge De Sanctis”, History of Education & Children’s Literature VIII, no. 2 (2013): 195–220.

⁶⁰ Marta Brunelli and Juri Meda, “Gymnastics between School Desks. An Educational Practice between Hygiene Requirements, Healthcare and Logistic Inadequacies in Italian Primary Schools (1870–1970)”, History of Education Review 46, no. 2 (2017): 178–93. For an overview on UK, France, Switzerland, Italy, and Spain see the essay by Grégory Quin, Michaël Attali and Yohann Fortune, Grégory Quin and Christelle Hayoz, Paolo Alfieri and Xavier Torrebadella-Flix in Simonetta Polenghi, András Németh and Tomáš Kasper, eds., Education and the Body in Europe (1900–1950), Movements, Public Health, Pedagogical Rules and Cultural Ideas (Berlin: Peter Lang, 2021), 109–85; moreover: James Anthony Mangan, Athleticism in the Victorian and Edwardian Public School (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981); Richard Holt, Sport and the British: A Modern History (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989); Pierre Arnaud, Le militaire, l’ecolier, le gymnaste. Naissance de l’education physique en France (1869–1889) (Lyon: Presses Universitaires de Lyon, 1991); Hajo Bernett, ed., Körperkultur und Sport in der DDR: Dokumentation eines geschlossenen Systems (Schorndorf: Hofmann, 1994); Bernd Wedemeyer-Kolwe, Der neue Mensch. Körperkultur im Kaiserreich und in der Weimarer Republik (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2004); Natalia Bazoge, “La gymnastique d’entretien au XXe siècle: d’une valorisation de la masculinité hégémonique à l’expression d’un féminisme en action”, Clio 23 (2006): 197–208; Jean-Claude Bussard, L’ éducation physique suisse en quête d’identité (1830–1930) (Paris: l’Harmattan, 2007); Natalia Bazoge, Jean Saint-Martin and Michaël Attali, “Promoting the Swedish Method of Physical Education throughout France for the Benefit of Public Health (1868–1954)”, Scandinavian Journal of Medicine & Science in Sports 23, no. 2 (2013): 232–43; Alessio Ponzio, Shaping the New Man. Youth Training Regimes in Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2015); Doriane Gomet and Michaël Attali, “Éducation des corps et disciplinarisation: le processus d’intégration des sports dans l’éducation scolaire française (1918–années 1990)”, Paedagogica Historica 54, no. 1–2 (2018): 66–82; Grégory Quin, Le mouvement peut-il guérir? Les usages médicaux de la gymnastique au 19ème siècle (Lausanne: BHMS Editions, 2019); and Paola Dogliotti and Pablo Ariel Scharagrodsky, “Eugenics and Sexuality in Physical Education Teacher Training in Uruguay (1948–1970)”, Paedagogica Historica (2021), https://doi.org/10.1080/00309230.2021.1987483.

⁶¹ Meda, Mezzi di educazione di massa, 12.

⁶² León Esteban Mateo, “Los catálogos de librería y material de enseñanza como fuente iconográfica y literario-escolar”, Historia de la educación: revista interuniversitaria 16 (1997): 17–46; Pedro Luis Moreno Martínez, “El mobiliario escolar en los catálogos de material de enseñanza: consideraciones metodológicas,” in La infancia en la historia: espacios y representaciones I, ed. Luis M. Naya Garmendia and Pauli Dávila Balsera (Donostia-San Sebastian: Erein, 2005), 342–55; and Maria Cristina Morandini and Francesca Davida Pizzigoni, Looking for the First “Educational Technologies”. Commercial Catalogues as Sources for the Study of the Birth of School Materialities (Macerata: Eum, 2023).

⁶³ TESEO: tipografi e editori scolastico-educativi dell’Ottocento, Giorgio Chiosso (dir.) (Milano: Bibliografica, 2003); TESEO ‘900. Editori scolastico-educativi del primo Novecento, Giorgio Chiosso (dir.) (Milano: Bibliografica, 2008).

⁶⁴ Monica Galfré, Il regime degli editori: libri, scuola e fascismo (Roma: Laterza, 2005); see also Fabio Targhetta, La capitale dell’impero di carta: editori per la scuola a Torino nella prima metà del Novecento (Torino: SEI, 2007); and Anna Ascenzi and Roberto Sani, eds., Il libro per la scuola tra idealismo e fascismo: l’opera della Commissione centrale per l’esame dei libri di testo da Giuseppe Lombardo Radice ad Alessandro Melchiori, 1923–1928 (Milano: Vita e Pensiero, 2005).

⁶⁵ Pierre Mœglin, Les industries éducatives (Paris: PUF, 2010).

⁶⁶ Meda, “Mezzi di educazione di massa. Nuove fonti e nuove prospettive di ricerca per una ‘storia materiale della scuola’ tra XIX e XX secolo”, History of Education & Children’s Literature VI, no. 1 (2011): 253–79; Meda, Mezzi di educazione di massa.

⁶⁷ Larry Cuban, Teachers and Machines: The Classroom Use of Technology since 1920 (New York: Teachers College Press, 1986).

⁶⁸ Meda, Mezzi di educazione di massa, 39–64.

⁶⁹ Marcelo Caruso, ed., Classroom Struggle: Organizing Elementary School Teaching in the 19th Century (Frankfurt a.M.: Peter Lang, 2015).

⁷⁰ Domenico F.A. Elia, “Giuseppe Pezzarossa’s (1880–1911) gymnastic equipment workshop”, History of Education & Children’s Literature VII, no. 1 (2012): 465–84; Marta Brunelli, “Per una storia della circolazione dei sussidi botanici in Italia tra XIX e XX secolo. Appunti di lavoro sulle collezioni scolastiche e sui cataloghi commerciali per la Scuola”, in Prospettive incrociate sul patrimonio storico educativo: atti dell’Incontro internazionale di studi, Campobasso, 2–3 maggio 2018, ed. Alberto Barausse, Tatiane de Freitas Ermel and Valeria Viola (Lecce, Rovato: Pensa Multimedia, 2020): 433–58.

⁷¹ Marta Brunelli, “Pour une histoire de la production industrielle des matériels didactiques en Italie de la fin du XIXe a la première moitié du XXe siécle: premières indications et perspectives de recherche”, in Éducation et culture matérielle en France et en Europe du XVIe siècle à nos jours, ed. Marguerite Figeac-Monthus (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2019), 109–31.

⁷² Christa Berg, “Ansätze zu einer Sozialgeschichte des Spiels: Toward a Social History of Play”, Zeitschrift für Pädagogik 29, no. 5 (1983): 735–53; Brian Sutton-Smith, Toys as Culture (New York: Gardner Press, 1986); Dan Fleming, Powerplay: Toys as Popular Culture (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996); Gary Cross, Kids’ Stuff: Toys and the Changing World of American Childhood (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998); Gary Cross, The Cute and the Cool. Wondrous Innocence and Modern American Children’s Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004); Lisa Jacobson, Rising Consumers (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004); Bryan Ganaway, Toys, Consumption, and Middle-Class Childhood in Imperial Germany, 1871–1918 (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2009); Michel Manson, Jouets de toujours de l’Antiquité à la Révolution (Paris: Fayard, 2001); Carroll W. Pursell, From Playgrounds to PlayStation: the Interaction of Technology and Play (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015); Christopher P. Barton and Kyle Somervill, eds., Historical Racialized Toys in the United States (New York: Routledge, 2016); Megan Brandow-Faller, ed., Childhood by Design: Toys and the Material Culture of Childhood, 1700-Present (New York: Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 2018); Patricia Anne Simpson, The Play World. Toys, Texts, and the Transatlantic German Childhood (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2020); Christoph Kühberger, ed., Mit Geschichte spielen: zur materiellen Kultur von Spielzeug und Spielen als Darstellung der Vergangenheit (Bielefeld: transcript, 2021); Molly Rosner, Playing with History. American Identities and Children’s Consumer Culture (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2021); and Jens Andersen, The LEGO Story: How a Little Toy Sparked the World’s Imagination (New York: Mariner Books, 2022).

⁷³ Jackson Lears, Fable of Abundance: A Cultural History of Advertising in America (New York: Basic Books, 1994); Susana Sosenski, “El niño consumidor: una construcción publicitaria de mediados de siglo XX”, in Ciudadanos inesperados. Espacios de formación de la ciudadanía ayer y hoy, ed. Ariadna Acevedo and Paula López Caballero (México: Departamento de Investigaciones Educativas, Cinvestav/El Colegio de México, 2012): 191–222; Susana Sosenski, “La comercialización de la paternidad en la prensa mexicana (1930–1960)”, Estudios de Historia Moderna y Contemporánea de México, no. 48 (2014): 69–111; Susana Sosenski, “Santa Claus contra los Reyes Magos: influencias trasnacionales en el consumo infantil en México (1950–1960)”, Cuicuilco XXI, no. 60 (2014): 261–82; Susana Sosenski and Ricardo López León, “La construcción visual de la felicidad y la convivencia familiar en México: los anuncios publicitarios en la prensa gráfica (1930–1970)”, Secuencia. Revista de Historia y Ciencias Sociales 92 (2015): 194–225; and Susana Sosenski, “El olor del aliento en la publicidad de la prensa mexicana (1920–1950)”, in De olfato. Aproximaciones a los olores en la historia de México, ed. Élodie Dupey García and Guadalupe Pinzón Ríos (México: Fondo de Cultura Económica/Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Instituto de Investigaciones Históricas/Centro de Estudios Mexicanos y Centroamericanos, 2020): 289–386.