Finding traces, researching silences, analysing materiality: notes from the United Kingdom

Abstract

A subversive shift into interdisciplinary or thematic work in the history of education,

which produced studies in the materiality of schooling, was produced over time either through the influences of postmodernity, disciplinary innovation [in geography, for example], specialist studies [museum studies] or inspirational serendipity. The material turn, which has never been a major part of UK historiography of education, is an attempt to explore the material context of the school and the ways that objects are given meaning within it, how they are used, and how they are linked into heterogeneous active networks, in which people, objects and routines are closely connected. A new focus on the work of teachers over time, their resources, and the way that buildings were reconfigured by changing demands on instruction and work, developed from an interrogation of material contexts. This has, for instance, led to a recognition of relative school poverty and its influence on teaching and the curriculum, and in particular in the long life of technologies. Other developments in the visual, spatial, sensory and the emotional history of education have enabled new insights into the materiality of schooling. The material turn in the history of education in the UK appears to be a contained area of scholarship, neither dominant or influential, but an area of work which shows itself to be capable of constant innovation.

Key words: traces, networks, objects, technologies, interdisciplinarity.