Preliminary Programme

Similar to other countries, 19th century Romania has seen an interest in public education; this prompted attention to the space in which education took place and where the student had to spend much of the day. In a context marked by the social-political project of nation building, children’s health has become a political stake, and contributed to the development of school hygiene and the structuring of a model of school building based on sanitary principles. The educational theories of the time have influenced the way in which the new school space was thought, and have conveyed the idea of the building as a tool for education. The transnational dimension has contributed to the internalization of school buildings models, of knowledge and ideas, and modes of action. There can be found many similarities with Western European and American space, regardless of the social-economic and cultural differences of Romania.
The aim of this research is to analyse how spatiality informed children’s learning. For this I will analyse the school architecture in terms of social norms and practices transmitted or associated with physical space. I will explore two ways which construct and transmit this dimension: the social norms invested in this new space, and the social values and rules derived from the structure of space (e.g. a place shaped by social relationships, o range of values). Not least, I will follow how the children use this space - succeeding or failing to comply with these social rules, and how space is transformed by their usage.
Using the concept of space as „a social and discursive construction” (Gutman in Fass 2013), I will analyse the subject drawing on social and cultural history. The research is informed by archival collection, pedagogical and health texts and visual material (schools` plans and photographs).
An analysis of school buildings offers insights into the relationship between a specific material culture and social interaction, and also provides a better perspective on history of childhood and education. (Show less)

Located at the Elbow [Albuen], a strip of land at the western tip of the bay of Nakskov in southern Denmark, a tiny school opened in January 1940. It closed in 1946.
The paper investigates the many conflicts between the local population of fishermen and pilots, dating back to the 1880’s, about the educational arrangement, which eventually lead to the construction of the school building. At the center stands the female teacher Miss Elna Gunnersen, who taught the children between 1903 and 1936. Her teaching took place in a room, in a house belonging to her brother. Her conflicts with him, the parents and the authorities reflect shifting notions of school space and its equipment. Memoirs from the children, living at the Elbow tell us about the connectedness between geography, child labor and education were connected.
The overall purpose is to move history of architecture for children into the field of vernacular architecture, and to connect a social and cultural approach to children’s spaces with histories of childhood and education, and garnish it with a dash of the history of emotions. (Show less)

Based on research in the provincial archives of British Columbia (BC), Canada’s most western province, this historical project investigates an overlooked and under-researched vector of school exclusion for children and youth that deserves closer scholarly scrutiny: the impact of living in remote and isolated rural locations on the meaning and experience of getting an education in the past. My focus is a collection of hundreds of letters exchanged between White settler families and the then named BC Department of Education’s Elementary Correspondence School (ECS) in the years from 1930 to approximately 1960. Beginning in 1929, the ECS sent correspondence schooling materials free of charge to families who wrote to the Department of Education indicating that they lived more than five miles from the nearest public school in rural locations often marked by isolation and a harsh physical environment.
How have families, parents as well as children, negotiated their rural setting and the desire to secure formal schooling? My preliminary forays into the archival materials of the ECS suggest that formal schooling was deeply compromised for rural families not only by a remote and rugged rural environment, but by economic priorities promoted by the state that kept many rural children working instead of concentrating on schooling. Despite powerful rhetoric promoting the importance of children’s formal schooling on the part of educational professionals and other social leaders, a rhetoric that continues to characterize children’s rights discourse even today, this goal was often entirely compromised in practice.
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During the 1960s police “invasions” of schools drew dramatic opposition from students protesting the state’s long and disciplinary reach. This paper concerns the practice of police presence in schools and aims to historicize the entrance of local North American police forces into schools prior to and during the 1960s. In particular it focuses on the Montreal Police Department which designed a model program of ‘policier-educateurs’ that was picked up around the globe. The paper asks questions about the nature of that quiet invasion and the purpose of this kind of regulatory innovation against which students eventually organized. (Show less)