Abstract/Notes: In this article we attempt to explain how Spanish schoolteachers built their knowledge around Progressive Education and just how they assimilated these new teaching practices, a process we conceptualise as “appropriating the New”. Our source consists of the 287 files presented by state schoolteachers from all of Spain as part of their candidacy in the competitive exams held in 1932 for the position of school headteacher. These files, which contain the professional history of each of these teachers, elaborated by him or herself, allow us to analyse the discourses and practices developed and used in their classrooms. Drawing on these teachers’ accounts we have designed a typology with five different levels of appropriation of the ideas and practices of Progressive Education. These five categories are: 1.- Recognising the New; 2.- Understanding the New; 3.- Bonding with the New; 4.- Applying the New; 5.- Internalising the New. These levels, which represent the gradual implication of this sample of schoolteachers with the ideas of Progressive Education, bear witness to how their identification with these concepts led to a transformation of their teaching practices. We will then use this typology to study the appropriation of one of the best-known progressive ideas, i.e. self-government, which under the Second Republic of Spain in the 1930s acquired a particular political relevance.
Abstract/Notes: In the period 1919–1933 the experimental and community schools in Hamburg tried to put into practice a new model of schooling without a set curriculum that was based on providing a considerable amount of freedom for pupils and teachers. These experiences were introduced in the Netherlands by way of magazines published by the New Education Fellowship (NEF) or Dutch journals edited by educationalists and university professors. The Hamburg schools were also visited by Christian Anarchist teachers who were connected with new schools in the Netherlands and who already had experimented with new ways of life in small communities. In this article we describe their experiences in Hamburg. Their observation reports would not trigger a growing interest in a social community type of schooling; in general Dutch teachers, even the socialist ones, did not change their preference for the traditional classroom system of education. More individualistic methods from Montessori and Parkhurst (Dalton Plan), supported by university professors and inspectors of education, were considered to have more potential for changing the classroom system from within.
Abstract/Notes: This article analyses photography as a tool for reinforcing textual discourses in the written press and supporting the popularisation of certain methods and practices in the illustrated press and magazines. The photographs will not be analysed as educational documents or testimony to educational activities but rather in an effort to explore the attempts to illustrate a message graphically so as to influence public opinion and change society’s perception of schools’ role and the functions of education. The way in which the Maria Montessori method was graphically disseminated in Spanish illustrated magazines between 1911 and 1931 is the focus of this paper.
Abstract/Notes: This article considers the possibility that one of the defining characteristics of the New Education, as it related to children in their early years, was its epistemological break with rationalist forms of knowledge and its embrace of empiricism and positivism. It considers, briefly, social theories that identify a similar process at a societal level before examining some of the polemics directed against theories of education based on rational forms of knowledge and, in particular, Froebel’s system. This theme is then pursued through a detailed consideration of the child study movement in England and its promotion of an empiricist project concerned with the production of knowledge about the child which drew upon the emergent fields of physiology, educational psychology, education and statistics. It is argued that child study helped to create the conditions for these sciences to distinguish themselves from the older philosophical currents from which they emerged. Consideration is then paid to how these transformations reacted on child study and on the Froebel movement. The article concludes that a break did indeed occur in the ways in which education was legitimised and that through the arrival of a new empirically based, scientific approach it became more closely aligned to reforming impulses. Nevertheless, the old philosophical, metaphysical foundations were not vanquished as in a violent rupture but were articulated in a new dialectical synthesis.
