Reimagining Teaching in Early 20th Century Experimental Schools

Alessandra Arce Hai, Helen May, Kristen Nawrotzki, Larry Prochner, Yordanka Valkanova

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9783030509637
• eBook ISBN:
  9783030509644
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Comparative Education

This book considers the diffusion and transfer of educational ideas through local and transcontinental networks within and across five socio-political spaces. The authors examine the social, political, and historical preconditions for the transfer of "new education" theory and practices in each period, place, and school, along with the networks of ideas and experts that supported this. The authors use historical methods to examine the schools and to pursue the story of the circulation of new ideas in education. In particular, chapters investigate how educational ideas develop within contexts, travel across boundaries, and are adapted in new contexts.

© The Author(s) 2020

A. A. Hai et al.Reimagining Teaching in Early 20th Century Experimental SchoolsGlobal Histories of Educationhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-50964-4_1

Begin Abstract

1. New Education: An Experimental Era

Alessandra Arce Hai¹, Helen May², Kristen Nawrotzki³, Larry Prochner⁴ and Yordanka Valkanova⁵

(1)

Universidade Federal de São Carlos, São Carlos, São Paulo, Brazil

(2)

College of Education, University of Otago, Wellington, New Zealand

(3)

Pädagogische Hochschule Heidelberg, Heidelberg, Germany

(4)

University of Alberta, Edmonton, AB, Canada

(5)

Canterbury Christ Church University, Canterbury, Kent, UK

Larry Prochner

Email: [email protected]

End Abstract

In the early twentieth century, social reformers in many parts of the Western world, particularly psychologists and educational reformers, hoped to achieve better societies by guiding children’s socialisation according to new principles based on science and an optimistic view of the possibility of social change. The term progressive is often used to describe this educational movement, which came to dominate twentieth-century Western pedagogical policy and practice. While “progressive” has often been used as a synonym for “new,” the precise meaning of the term when applied to education has varied widely across cultural, political, and even individual institutional contexts.¹ Our colleague, the late Kevin Brehony, likened progressivism to the notion of enlightenment in earlier centuries and viewed it as an unstable, amorphous concept.² For this reason, we, the authors of this book, also prefer the less-freighted term new. In describing the “new education” of the early twentieth century, educational historians William Boyd and Wyatt Rawson explain that it held the personality of the child and human betterment as central concerns, with an overall aim of bringing about “a New Era.”³ The ideas and practices of new education included both a reformist attitude and an interest in experimental curriculum and pedagogy. This book explores the ideas of new education, including the networks and knowledge transfer that allowed them to travel, by tracing how the ideas were manifested in five experimental schools that reflected them to different degrees. In “the century of the child”,⁴ much pedagogical attention was paid to reimagining the “new child” of the “new era”; focus on the “new teacher” was less explicit, although the role of a new teacher was assumed, for example, in child-centred pedagogy.⁵ The schools we highlight illustrate how teachers practised—and were thought of—in new ways.⁶

Using both within-case analysis⁷ of individual schools and transnational analysis, we consider how educational ideas developed within contexts, travelled across boundaries, and were adapted in new contexts. A network approach⁸ allows us to consider relationships across cases, identifying historical actors and the formal and informal relationships among them. Our aim is to understand the structure and context of the network(s) by examining connections, circulations, relations, and resulting formations⁹ of, for example, teaching identities, pedagogies, materials, and curricula. Our specific focus on how teaching and learning meanings were pedagogised, or ascribed to materials, relationships, or settings,¹⁰ provides insights into the transfer of educational ideas through a close study of practice in historical classrooms.

Ideas about teaching and learning in the international movement for education reform included some common elements: teacher professionalism and autonomy, learning based on students’ interests and participation, active learning, protection of local languages, and education that promoted both social justice and students’ active participation in determining social and political change.¹¹ These components took on unique characteristics in each of the schools we explore in this book, reflecting the particular social locations of the teachers, students, place, and time, as well as the theorists who were most influential in each school, such as Friedrich Froebel, John Dewey, or Sigmund or Anna Freud. Of the theorists associated with new education, Dewey is clearly the most prominent. His international influence informed the work of subsequent education theorists and researchers,¹² and the second chapter of this book is devoted to his University of Chicago laboratory school.

While others have explored the international movement of new education through these lenses,¹³ our work stands apart due to its primary focus on teachers. It is unique as well in its range of international settings and, in several of the case studies, in its attention to intersections between psychoanalysis and progressive education. Alan Lester’s review of the concepts of circuits and networks between Britain and its colonies serves as a useful frame for our study, allowing us to consider the settings as multiple projects appearing as bridgeheads that took shape through connections with a set of new education ideas. Thus, we examine the circuits among the settings, including the layering of newly constructed networks onto existing ones.¹⁴

Two main questions guided our study: How were the child and the teacher reimagined, and how were adults’ role in relation to children, childhood, and education reimagined in different contexts? Through the course of our research, we expected to learn about teachers’ development, identity, beliefs, and practices as they underwent their training and put progressive pedagogies to work in their classrooms. Many of the teachers in the schools had prior teacher training, including as kindergarten teachers, and the literature on the history of kindergarten and nursery school teacher education was relevant for our study, particularly research documenting its transnational history.¹⁵ The schools we studied, which were mainly private institutions serving children of the elite, and with staff recruited for their compatibility with new education ideas, differed from public schools in almost every way, yet they offer a window onto how teachers brought new education ideas into their practical work with children.

New education ideas shaping our exemplar school experiments emerged amidst a backdrop of turbulent political and economic times, manifested in diverse ways across the geographies of the respective school settings. With underlying discontents and causes seeded in earlier times, the slaughter of the First World War (1914–1918) hastened revolutions and new political movements: fascist, socialist, and Marxist, yielding both dictatorship and democracy, including resistance to both. The 1930s worldwide economic depression also fuelled political discontent, including a range of political solutions towards recovery. The new education movement stretching across the turbulence of the times crossed these political borders and differences, offering education pathways as solutions to support and/or undermine new political systems and reform existing structures. New education ideals, for example, underpinned both Dewey’s child of democracy in the USA and experiments towards creating the new Soviet citizen in Russia, while in Vienna, Anna Freud’s school was a small haven amidst the rise of Austrofascism. The focus of our study is on education pathways rather than political ones, but the respective school experiments also reveal the interplay of new education ideas and practice amidst new political times.

Our Conceptual Framework

A transnational perspective allows us to examine the networks that enabled ideas of new education to travel, to adapt, to be translated, and to become, along with their authors, “indigenous foreigners” in the manner described by Thomas Popkewitz, in which ideas were “brought into new contexts in which the ‘foreignness’ of the ideas are seen as indigenous or ahistorical and ‘natural’ to that situation in which they are positioned”.¹⁶ Popkewitz used the concept to highlight the role played by a “hero” discourse, such as the one surrounding Dewey’s ideas, in bringing global reforms into relation with discourses representing the values of a society.¹⁷ A “travelling library” of concepts—in this case, whether Dewey’s or Froebel’s or Freud’s—are added to or reinscribed by local teachers a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. New Education: An Experimental Era
• 2. The Dewey School, USA
• 3. Caetano de Campos Kindergarten, Brazil
• 4. The Experimental Stations and Psychoanalytic Laboratory, Soviet Russia
• 5. The Malting House School, England
• 6. The Hietzing School, Austria
• 7. Transcontinental Reflections
• Back Matter