Sjaak Braster

This book is about the classroom, the most important meeting place for teachers and pupils in an education building. Our knowledge, however, about what happens inside this space is limited. In many respects the classroom is still the black box of the educational system. To open up this box, this volume brings together scholars from the disciplines of Art, Architecture, History, Pedagogy and Sociology. They present a wide variety of new perspectives, methodologies and sources for studying classrooms. The book examines images and representations of classrooms (photographs, paintings and pictures on school walls), writings and documents inside the classroom (school exercise books, teachers' log books and observer reports), memories and personal experiences of classrooms (egodocuments from teachers and pupils, and oral history interviews), the space and design of classrooms (architecture, school murals and the transformation of space), and material objects in the classroom (school furniture, primers for reading and school wall charts). The essays are illustrated with a unique collection of more than fifty photographs of classrooms in Europe.

A Cultural History of the Classroom

The Black Box of Schooling

Ian Grosvenor

Frank Simon

Popular Education is a concept with many meanings. With the rise of national systems of education at the beginning of the nineteenth-century, it was related to the socially inclusive concept of citizenship coined by privileged members with vested interests in the urban society that could only be achieved by educating the common people, or in other words, the uncontrollable masses that had nothing to lose. In the twentieth-century, Popular Education became another word for initiatives taken by religious and socialist groups for educating working-class adults, and women. However, in the course of the twentieth-century, the meaning of the term shifted towards empowerment and the education of the oppressed. This book explores the several ways in which Popular Education has been theoretically and empirically defined, in several regions of the world, over the last three centuries. It is the result of work by scholars from Europe and the Americas during the 31st session of the International Standing Conference on the History of Education (ISCHE) that was organised at Utrecht University, the Netherlands in August 2009. This book was originally published as a special issue of Paedagogica Historica.

Sjaak Braster

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