Martin Lawn

This book focuses on the International Examinations Inquiry (IEI), an international, well-funded scientific project that operated in the 1930s, attracting key world figures in educational research, and which undertook significant exchanges of data. Originally involving the USA, Scotland, England, France, Germany and Switzerland, the IEI grew to include Norway, Sweden and Finland. Funded by Carnegie money, these researchers included major comparative educationalists, New Education Fellowship academics, statisticians and educational psychologists. They met at a significant time in the emergence of international scientific work in educational research between the USA and Europe; they were a midway stage between earlier individual contacts by well-travelled researchers, usually towards North America, and the development of joint research projects, sustained over time. The focus of the IEI was on methods of examining pupils for the coming expansion of secondary education, but their key problems were to do with establishing standardized methods of measurement, international scholarly communication and comparative understandings of national diversity. The IEI researchers acted to support national achievements and strategies within the borders of the nation and internationally, to exchange methods and results. In retrospect, they appear to be visible in their knowledge communities and national education histories but invisible in their internationalism.

The Work of the International Examination Inquiry, its Researchers, Methods and Influence

An Atlantic Crossing?

Ian Grosvenor

This is a book with an interest in the materiality of schooling. It is focused on objects in schooling, which, taken individually and together, constitute the sites of schooling. It does not assume a fixed dichotomy between objects and people, in other words, that there is a life of imagination and action, and there are collections of inanimate objects. Nor does it assume that the technologies and objects of schooling, chained together by routines and action, should remain invisible from inquiry into schools as sites of learning and work. Instead, by drawing attention to the materiality of schooling, that is, the ways that objects are given meaning, how they are used, and how they are linked into heterogeneous active networks, in which people, objects and routines are closely connected, it is hoped that a richer historical account can be created about the ways that schools work.

design, technology, objects, routines

Materialities of Schooling

Len Barton

This book reappraises the British and American experience in curriculum studies, the curious way in which it has been dominated by certain ideas and introduces the reader to alternative ways of perceiving, defining and approaching its problems. It provides a radical critique of the whole area, presenting both Marxist and phenomenological perspectives on the current dilemmas that teachers face. The book argues that in order to understand the problems teachers face in coping with the curriculum, we must look at the situation from the point of view of the individual rather than prescribing a norm for all teachers. The dynamic relationship between the individual and the collective and the teacher and the state is one of the fundamental issues in solving the present problems in curriculum studies. The book focuses on this central problem and suggests a variety of ways in which new solutions may be found.

Rethinking Curriculum Studies

Kate Rousmaniere

The Social History of the Classroom

Silences & Images

António Nóvoa

M. Lawn

Fabricating Europe has within it a core idea, a crucial but imprecise idea, that of a European educational space, which transnational governance, networks and cultural and economic projects are creating now. Yet, the perceptible creation of this contemporary space of European policy making and networking has not been a subject of study. It appears offstage in studies of national systems in which national and professional identity; political organization; policy formation and public/private markets are all viewed as contained within the borders of the state. Fabricating Europe is concerned with the new possibilities to be discerned and imagined in the European public and institutional spaces and discourses in education and the lack of impetus within the broad area of educational studies to meet the task of creating analyses and responses.

The Formation of an Education Space

Fabricating Europe

The growth of education systems and the construction of the state have always been connected. The processes of governing education systems always utilized data through a range of administrative records, pupil testing, efficiency surveys and international projects. By the late twentieth century, quantitative data had gained enormous influence in education systems through the work of the OECD, the European Commission and national system agencies. The creation and flow of data has become a powerful governing tool in education. Comparison between pupils, costs, regions and states has grown ever more important. The visualization of this data, and its range of techniques, has changed over time, especially in its movement from an expert to a public act. Data began to be explained to a widening audience to shape its behaviours and its institutions. The use of data in education systems and the procedures by which the data are constructed has not been a major part of the study of education, nor of the histories of education systems. This volume of contributions, drawn from different times and spaces in education, will be a useful contribution to comparative historical studies.

Martin Lawn

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