How (un-)useful are images for understanding histories of education? : About teacher centeredness and new education in Dutch primary schools: 1920-1985 = Com són d'(in)útils les imatges per entendre les històries de l'educació? : L'ensenyament centrat en el mestre i l'Escola Nova als centres de primària holandesos: 1920-1985

Abstract

There is debate about the usefulness of images for telling histories of education. Images can support stories that are told by written documents, but can they be used as primary sources that tell us things that written or oral testimonies cannot? We think they can. We have performed an analysis on a few hundred images of pupils and teachers in classrooms of primary schools for supporting this point of view. We show that by switching between an inductive and a deductive approach, by carefully selecting and coding images, by using multiple correspondence analysis, and by constantly making comparisons between (groups of ) data, we can arrive at conclusions that cannot be drawn on the basis of written documents alone. One of these conclusions is that, in spite of a mechanism known as the grammar of schooling, the image of main stream of Dutch primary schools public/neutral and religious has slowly changed from a teacher centred to a child centred one in the period 1945-1985. New education schools in the Netherlands did not change their child centred image in these years. The image of main stream schooling in the 1980's is comparable with the image of new education in the 1950's. There has been a convergence towards a child centred image of the classroom, with individual tables placed in groups, a teacher that can be found on the same level of the pupils, and a general atmosphere of freedom and happiness. The conclusion that Larry Cuban draws for primary schools in the USA where a teacher centred approach remained dominant in the period 1890-1990, does not apply to the Netherlands.