Historia y Memoria de la Educación

LGTBQ+ Histories of Education

2023-05-30T18:42:28+00:00

Introduction

A Search for our Queer Ancestors in Education: Ella Flagg Young

2022-12-12T19:04:53+00:00

Educators with non-normative sexualities and genders have long existed, but strikingly little historical research has been published that explores their experiences during the Progressive Era in the USA. This was a time when working in schools opened new professional and personal possibilities for a large population of mostly unmarried women. Conducting such research presents many challenges, though, including: 1) difficulties in locating documentation about aspects of educators' lives that they chose not to record, and 2) differences in language that may have been used then versus now to describe such persons. In this article, I describe some of these challenges that I have encountered as I have researched and written a biography of Ella Flagg Young, Chicago's school superintendent from 1909-1915. I argue that Young transgressed bounds of normative sexuality and gender for her time and furthermore, her stories are of continued relevance for people in schools who now identify as LGBTQ+

’We Didn’t Think It Would be Well Received’: The Gay Alliance of Students’ Legal Victory over Virginia Commonwealth University, 1974–1976

2022-10-12T17:14:51+00:00

In 1974, a group of college students attempted to undertake the simple act of registering an official student organization at Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU). In contrast to every other student group that had sought such status, the group, the Gay Alliance of Students (GAS), was denied registration. They were denied because the group was composed of LGBTQI+ students who wanted to promote the well-being and understanding of themselves and other LGBTQI+ individuals on campus. This article examines the founding, experience, and legal battles of GAS, an important organization in both the history of LGBTQI+ students and the history of LGBTQI+ rights more broadly. In response to its denial, GAS sued VCU in US federal district court, claiming violations of its fundamental rights under the US Constitution. After a split decision in its initial case, GAS appealed and won a resounding victory over VCU administrators and their attempts to deny LGBTQI+ students their rights. That victory was the first ever for an LGBTQI+ student organization at the federal appellate level and set a precedent for other LGBTQI+ students in five states. This article uses historical methods to situate these efforts in their institutional and local context, contribute to the nascent literature on LGBTQI+ student legal cases, and consider this key case that had implications beyond VCU and, indeed, beyond higher education.

Queer Teachers Negotiating Geographies of Safety in the 1990s

2023-02-20T10:04:02+00:00

This study demonstrates how three queer teachers in conservative spaces created geographies of safety during the 1990s. Each of the three teachers discussed initiated a geography of safety, and these histories are relevant to the ongoing negotiation that queer elementary and secondary educators today engage as they reconcile their moral authority as teachers with their gender(s) and sexualities.

First Hypotheses about the Emergence of ‘Sex’ Segregated Toilets in Primary Schools. Buenos Aires

2023-03-23T13:02:17+00:00

This article, based on a study of the introduction of toilets in primary schools in Buenos Aires, Argentina, is part of a line of research that locates the emergence of binary definitions of sex, gender and sexuality as we know them (associated with a set of behaviours, gestures, corporalities, and values), between the mid-nineteenth century and the early twentieth century.

There is consensus regarding the central role that primary schooling has played in regulating gender and sexuality along cis and heterosexual norms. As this study shows, school architecture was one of the technologies that worked in this sense.

At the end of the nineteenth century the practicality of «men» and «women» sharing educational spaces was widely discussed. However, the practice of marking toilets in primary schools according to «sex» had not yet become widespread. The aim of this article is to identify practices and discourses related to spatial «sex»» segregation regarding primary school toilets. We argue that the «sexual» segregation of toilets is part of a series of discourses and practices that have operated since the end of the nineteenth century, producing two hegemonic and excluding sex-gender figures: «man» and «woman».

Women’s Physical Exercise and Gymnastics in Uruguay: Bodies, Gender, and Sexualities in Physical Education Teacher Training in the 1950s

2023-03-17T09:49:33+00:00

In the 1950s, Uruguay had outstanding international recognition at an educational and cultural level and was called “the Switzerland of the Americas”. In this context, the Third Pan-American Congress of Physical Education was held in Montevideo. This article analyses three conferences on women's gymnastics presented at the Congress by prominent Uruguayans. Their writing reveals mainstream understandings of the female sex and the effects generated by physical exercises and various forms of moving over female bodies. Although these sources do not explicitly approach LGBTQ+ people, they condemn (either directly or indirectly) forms of being feminine and masculine that were linked to homosexuality. This paper studies the most recommended bodily practices, adaptations and prohibitions prescribed for women in the mid-twentieth century. These texts were not only published by the National Commission of Physical Education (CNEF), which regulated physical education and sport at the national level; they were also integrated into the curriculum for training physical education teachers in Uruguay during that decade. This study is framed by theoretical references of sex deconstruction, Judith Butler's critique of sex-gender binarism, and Michel Foucault's sexuality device. Finally, it shows how medical knowledge crossed the discourse of sexuality in the field of physical education and supported the justification of the prescriptions of exercises and movements. These recommendations and prohibitions for women were based on the heteronormative sexual matrix, invalidating the existence of LGBTQ+ identities in the realm of physical education and sport

From Chastity Education to the Inclusion of Sexual Minorities? Textbooks on Ethics (dôtoku) and Hygiene (hoken) in Contemporary Japan

2023-02-04T08:50:52+00:00

UNESCO recommends that textbooks should be used to help students dismiss stereotypes. By containing stories that give prominence to multiple gender categories (men, women, transgender, for example) and various sexual orientations, such as lesbian, gay, and bisexual, textbooks can show the prejudicial effect of the division of humankind into two sexes and the imposition of heterosexuality. However, even today, schoolbooks in many countries provide very little space for this topic. Japan is not an exception. Since the emergence of the modern school system in the nineteenth century, sexual education, especially topics related to sexual minorities, has been absent from schoolbooks. Due to the international and national gay rights movement and several legal changes regarding sex reassignment surgery, the situation started to change in the late 1990s. In this article we overview the changes in curriculum guidelines relating to sexualities from 1958 to 2017 and critically analyse the latest school textbooks (issued after 2017) on hygiene (grade 4) and on ethics (grade 7-8). We discuss whether sex education in Japan, which was called “chastity education” (junketsu kyōiku) until 1972 and has previously been dominated by heteronormative values, has indeed transformed into “progressive” education that embraces sexual diversities. Referencing official documents of the Ministry of Education, we will argue that the Ministry of Education is medicalizing sex change surgery and labelling transgender children as “children with special needs”, while still imposing existing heteronormative gender norms on other non-minority children.

They Want to Authorize Homosexuality! (Hetero)sex(ual) Education and Gender in Dispute. Argentina, 1991-1997

2023-02-27T21:08:33+00:00

As at other times in the recent history of education in Argentina, sex education created strong and tense conflicts between modernizing forces and conservative ones. In this article we are interested in concentrating on studying the tensions between these two forces, focusing on the disputes around the inclusion of sexuality and the gender perspective within teacher training and the national curriculum during the 1990s. For this we explore positions, initiatives, and conflicts that took place in the orbit of the Ministry of Culture and Education (MCyE). We first address the formation of a commission established in 1991 for the writing of materials on AIDS and “sexuality education”, made up of religious “specialists” with recognition in the field of sex education. Second, we focus on the inclusion of gender perspectives, driven by the Program for Equal Opportunities for Women (PRIOM, 1991-1995). In a third section, we focus on the context of curriculum reform (1994-1997), in which the PRIOM included the word “gender” in the initial versions of the Common Basic Contents (CBC) for Basic General Education (EGB) and the Polimodal levels. Subsequently, we reconstruct the criticisms of Catholic agents to the initial versions of the curricular change. Finally, we analyse the final versions of the curricular texts to indicate the hegemony of conservative discourses.

Interview with Juan Francisco Delgado Ruiz, former president of the Spanish Confederation of Fathers and Mothers (CEAPA)

2022-11-14T20:19:07+00:00

Since its foundation in 1979, the Confederación Española de Asociaciones de Padres de Alumnos (CEAPA) groups together the majority of parent associations of students from public schools in our country, thus becoming one of the most important organizations in the Spanish education. In this interview, we talked with Juan Francisco Delgado Ruiz, who was an important director of CEAPA for many years, about its birth and its evolution, as well as its influence on educational policy and its relationship with the secularization of our educational system. Also we talked about the previous experience of Juan Francisco Delgado Ruiz in the Socialist Party and his later experience in Europa Laica, organizations also related to the secularization and secularism of education.

Carmen Sanchidrián Blanco (Coord.). La modernización de la enseñanza tras la Ley General de Educación. Contextos y Experiencias. Valencia: Tirant Humanidades, 2022

2023-04-27T10:38:54+00:00

Review

Jesús Manso y Bianca Thoilliez (eds.). El profesorado en España: huellas de una historia de relaciones entre lo público y lo privado

2023-01-03T13:54:50+00:00

Review

Simonetta Polenghi, András Németh y Tomáš Kasper (eds.). Education and the body in Rurope (1900-1950). Movements, public health, pedagogical rules and cultural ideas

2023-03-07T14:28:25+00:00

Review

Sofia Montecchiani. Per una storia dell’assistenza ed educazione dell’infanzia abbandonata nelle Marche. Il brefotrofio di Osimo dal primo Ottocento al secondo dopoguerra

2023-01-11T15:13:57+00:00

Review

VV. AA. Mujeres imprescindibles. Educadoras en la vanguardia del siglo XX

2023-06-26T18:37:12+00:00

Review

Nick Mead (ed.). Moral and political values in teacher education over the time. International perspectives

2023-05-22T10:06:31+00:00

Review

Peronism, engineers and students. The conflict between the national workers' university and the engineering institutions in argentina (1955-1959)

2022-09-22T10:08:35+00:00

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the confrontation that occurred between the entire academic community of the Universidad Obrera Nacional (National workers’ University, UON) and the various institutions of the engineering profession during the so-called “struggle for autonomy and hierarchization of the National Technological University (UTN)”.This conflict began with the emergence of the self-styled “Liberating Revolution” (1955) in power and culminated with the passing of Law 14,855 (1959) that established the change of name, structure and operation of the UON. In this sense, the article will seek to trace the development of this conflict and the political positions of the different professional associations within its framework. By way of hypothesis, we maintain that the central factor in the failure to resolve the problem involving the UON during the military government that succeeded Peronism was the considerable pressure exerted by both blocs – professional associations and supporters of the “UTN” – which led to a “zero sum game” in which neither side could impose its position over the other. This conflict would finally find its outcome with the arrival of the Frondizi government, which included the “UTN” within its political agenda. Finally, it should be noted that this study will be carried out using different documentary sources not worked on until now, among which the press of the time and documentation from various institutions stand out.

Intercultural education in Spain

2022-06-04T08:28:17+00:00

Through educational legislation, this study analyses the evolution of the concept of respect for others’ cultures in the Spanish school from Franco’s regime to the decade of 1990. Content analysis served as our methodology in order to examine the educational laws developed from the Education General Law in 1970 to the General Organic Law of the Educational System (LOGSE) in 1990. In another level of analysis, the concepts related to the respect for others’ cultures and developed by the law were analyzed through secondary sources, presenting both analysis in a narrative way. The text shows how the ethnocentric and assimilationist framework during Franco’s regime was changing progressively to a more respectful model toward others’ cultures. LGE was a first step in the change of that mentality. With the arrival of democracy, the need for an intercultural education became explicit. This new approach will take shape with the LOGSE. However, teacher training was a handicap in order to develop the good intention of the law regarding intercultural education.

Education and citizenship in Alexis de Tocqueville

2022-10-05T15:34:14+00:00

Education, to Alexis de Tocqueville, constitutes a fundamental tool for counteracting the inherent risks of individualism in democratic societies. Given the loss of social connections, the objective of education is to forge strong civic identities and to encourage active participation in the social fabric.

Tocqueville considers essential for the maintenance of liberal democracy an education for freedom that cultivates the intellectual and moral capacities of men and women alike. At the same time, being a staunch advocate of a harsh sexual division of labor, he would have women locked within the narrow confines of the home.

At the same time, Tocqueville’s approach to education enables a perspective that goes beyond neoliberal interpretations of his thinking. On the one hand, equality does not appear as a threat to freedom, but, on the contrary, it helps to construct fair political and social organization that allows the free development of individuals while facilitating social solidarity and fostering material and intellectual progress. At the same time, the state plays a major role through its responsibility for defining and implementing an educational policy that contributes to forming a populace that is freer, more critical and less subject to inequalities.

Therefore, Tocqueville is not a standard liberal. He considers it necessary for the state to intervene in the educational, social and economic fields. The state must ensure solidarity with a view towards general interest and, at the same time, foster the protagonism of civil society. And all this, in and from a position of freedom.

Seeking Gramsci in the work of Brian Simon

2023-02-21T23:22:44+00:00

This article examines the results of research on the work and career of Brian Simon (1915-2002), one of the leading historians of English education. It shows the theoretical inspiration for comprehensive school in Soviet psychology and the original way of interpreting Marxism by Brian Simon, that is, anti-determinism, and conviction in education as a factor of change. In addition to the collection in four volumes of Studies in the History of Education, the autobiography, A life in education, and other books by the author, the survey was based on documents and unpublished writings found in the Brian Simon Archive at the Institute of Education/UCL. The conclusions are as follows: 1. The influence of Gramsci could be found in articles and reviews, as well as the courses Professor Simon was involved in from the 1970s onwards; 2. By defending educational reforms that favored the working class, Brian Simon adopted the Marxist view of Gramsci even before knowing the main translation of his work into English (1971); 3. Although a supporter of the Soviet Union, Brian Simon’s reformist protagonism suited Gramsci’s rejection of the Soviet road to socialism since, for him, this was not the appropriate path for “western” countries and for non-revolutionary periods. Finally, the article indicates perspectives of new studies on Marxist intellectuals from different countries whose common interest was Gramsci.

The Institutional Role in Vocational Training in The Basque Country: Something More Than Just Temporary Support

2022-10-17T10:30:06+00:00

The Vocational Training (VT) has been an educational model that during decades has not been evaluated by Spanish state. This lack of interest from the academic authorities was solved during Franco’s dictatorship by different agents (church, unions, companies, …) that contributed to the development. With the passing of Basque Country Autonomy Statute, and the creation of the Basque Government, that accepted the responsibility of the VT, the different agents still maintain their labour. In this article, taking into account the legislation, we are going to analyse how has been the support of the Basque institutions (government, council, local government) form 1979 until nowadays keeping in mind the history of the basque VT

School labors of memory in Argentina. Interpretations and questions about teaching history arised from Spain

2022-11-21T10:11:08+00:00

The broad and complex evolution shown by Argentinean schools dealing with recent history may serve as a reference point for the ongoing discussion about the didactics of the Spanish Civil War and the Franco Era, as well as of political violence in History, taking caution, of course, with certain ethical considerations. Here I propose a particular and introductory understanding of that case, based on the history of education's transnational approach and three contrasting aspects in relation to the Spanish one: the broad coverage; exchanges between past and present; and the forging of a certain consensus. By means of a diachronic and a synchronic review, including some general results of my own research- ethnographically oriented and carried out in the city of La Plata - we will notice that these labors of memory reveal (i) the interrelation between several temporalities and dimensions —cognitive, ethic, and political—, (ii) the intertwining with specific webs of relations —institutional and social—, (iii) the perseverance of school culture and the disciplinary code of teaching history, and (iv) the links with social struggles and power.

Active teaching and work. The Salvatella Publishing house and pedagogical renewal through the journal Avante. Spain, 1931-1960

2023-01-06T13:55:12+00:00

Este artículo se enmarca dentro de una investigación más amplia cuyo objetivo principal es analizar el concepto de trabajo que se transmite en la escuela española del primer franquismo, fundamentalmente a través de los textos escolares de lectura destinados a la enseñanza primaria. Una de las editoriales seleccionadas fue Salvatella, en cuyos manuales observamos que el concepto de trabajo aparecía estrechamente vinculado al principio de actividad y de educación para la vida, preceptos sobre los que existían diversas interpretaciones que abarcaban desde la simple actividad manual entendida como trabajo educativo, hasta la actividad intelectual vinculada a la vocación y a la preparación para el trabajo productivo.

Desde que comenzó su actividad en 1922, Salvatella ha dado vida a diversos proyectos, presentándose siempre como una editorial vinculada a la escuela activa. Una de estas realizaciones fue Avante, una revista orientada a los maestros que se editó en dos periodos diferenciados: el primero durante la República, entre 1931 y 1936 y el segundo durante la dictadura franquista, entre 1942 y 1960.

Si partimos de la hipótesis extendida de que el franquismo intentó silenciar todo aquello que sonase a renovación pedagógica, cabe plantearse las siguientes cuestiones: ¿cómo pudo continuar su actividad una editorial con una vinculación tan explícita con la escuela activa? ¿Cómo interpretaba el principio de actividad y de educación para la vida? ¿Cómo se relacionaban estos principios con el concepto de trabajo? Este artículo trata de estas y otras cuestiones relacionadas con la historia de la editorial y sus colaboradores entre 1931 y 1960.

Looming deprofessionalization: State interventions into the operation of professional institutions of secondary teacher training in Hungary in the early twenties

2023-02-22T18:59:42+00:00

In the paper, the transformation processes of secondary teacher training in Hungary are examined through the investigation of personal and conceptual changes related to two professional institutions, namely the Secondary Teacher Training Institution and the Secondary Teacher Examination Committee in Hungary in the early 1920s.

By employing the method of document analysis of archival sources, substantial amount of primary sources were involved in the research from various archives. Additionally, the secondary literature review is also used as a research method in contextualizing the findings of the analysis. As for the interpretation, notions related to the critical approach of professionalization theories are applied in the paper.

The study gives a brief overview of the development of professional institutions from the mid of the nineteenth century to 1919 in order to provide an insight into some of the main barriers of their development, which expected to be solved by the new regime in Hungary solidified after 1920. The appointment of new leadership in the teacher training institution, the influence on its curriculum, the forced interrogation of the political views of teacher candidates delegated to the teacher examination committee before the state examination and the determination of the reform of the teacher examination regulations all suggest that the state intention of reshaping the teacher training according to circumstances of the new political-social reality after the war resulted in a new relationship between the state and the professional institutions that could lead to deprofessionalization on the long term. This development could be regarded as an unprecedent phenomenon compared to the situation of professionals in other countries in the Central and Eastern European region.