Paedagogica Historica,

Vol. 41, Nos. 4&5, August 2005, pp. 489–494

INTRODUCTION

Containing the School Child:

Architectures and Pedagogies1
Catherine Burke
Taylor and
Paedagogica
10.1080/00309230500165635
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Stichting
2005
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Paedagogica
(print)/1477-674X
Francis
Historica
2005LtdHistorica
(online)

The origins of the European Educational Research Association (EERA) Conference

symposium that has generated this collection of papers can be traced back to the twen-
tieth ‘International Standing Conference of the History of Education’ (ISCHE), held
in August 1998 in Kortrijk (Courtrai), Belgium. That conference was organized
around the theme ‘The Challenge of the Visual in the History of Education’. A special
issue of this journal, edited by Marc Depaepe and Bregt Henkens, followed which
included critical discussion of architecture, iconology, and various ways of visualizing
educational contexts.2 A certain kind of courage was required to take up the challenge
of the visual in the history of education, which held the potential for opening up new
vistas for the research imagination. In meeting that challenge, new networks arose, one
of which, the (EERA) History of Education Network, has since used the impetus of
attention to the visual to broaden and enrich the agenda for historians of education.3
A focus on the visual has opened up hitherto lost, overlooked or forgotten elements
of educational history generating a new framework for the exploration of experience
in school spaces.4
The theme of this special issue, ‘Containing the School Child: Architectures and
Pedagogies’, reflects a contemporary and growing interdisciplinary and international
interest in matters of space and place in educational contexts. Rather than being

1
I am grateful to the City of Sheffield Libraries, Local Studies section for permission to reproduce
images from their extensive photographic collection in this issue. I am particularly indebted for
support, encouragement and insight, to the convenors and participants in the History of Education
Network of the European Educational Research Association Conference, for hosting the seminar
that presented the papers collected in this journal issue.
2
Depaepe, Marc and Bregt Henkens, eds. “The Challenge of the Visual in the History of
Education.” Paedagogica Historica XXXVI, no. 1 (2000), special issue.
3
See “Network 17”, annual reports 1999; 2000; 2001; 2002; 2003. Available from: http://
www.eera.ac.uk; INTERNET.
4
See for example, Grosvenor, Ian, Martin Lawn, and Kate Rousmaniere, eds. Silences and Images.
A Social History of the Classroom. New York: Peter Lang, 1999.

ISSN 0030-9230 (print)/ISSN 1477-674X (online)/05/040489–06

© 2005 Stichting Paedagogica Historica
DOI: 10.1080/00309230500165635
490 C. Burke

viewed as a neutral or passive ‘container’, if recognized at all, the school building, its
various rooms and spaces, the walls, windows, doors and furniture together with
outdoor ‘nooks and crannies’, gardens and open spaces are considered here to be
active in shaping the experience of school and the understanding of education. Links
between pedagogy and the design of interior spaces, in terms of dimension, aesthetics
and function, have long been recognized by architects and designers of schools.5 Over
time there have been attempts to research and prove a causal relationship between
certain material and aesthetic conditions and the quality of learning measured
through educational achievement and outcome. In this collection, the focus is rather
on the wider contextual experience of school than merely the learning process and
pedagogy is understood broadly in the sense of adult–child interaction within a site
designed for teaching and learning and also in the sense of how that interaction is
subject to prevailing contemporary discourse outside the school environment. The
key issue arising from the perspective offered here is that the material context of the
school, including the elements of design in the built environment and the objects
which it contains, have drawn both adults and children into differently framed but
intimate, creative and imaginative relationship with them.

Education, Networks and Remembered Lives

Autobiographical strands are woven through the articles in this issue. De Coninck
Smith, having herself recently completed a period of time teaching and researching at
the University of Berkeley, traces a similar journey taken by a fellow educationist at
an earlier period. Burke’s exploration of the history of the architecture and pedagogy
surrounding and containing the preparation, service and consumption of the school
meal begins with a personal journey into her own memories of school days. Staiger
reviews the significance of colour, emblem and sign within contested spaces of the
contemporary US high school. In so doing, she reflects that the significance attached
to such emblematic projections of the school was unknown in her own experience as
a schoolchild within the political climate of post-Second World War West Germany.
Grosvenor and de Coninck Smith take a personal journey through the archives,
retracing and recovering the life stories of individuals drawn together, for a time, to a
common purpose.
The importance of individuals in the history of education is well documented but
less often made a focal point are the purposeful relationships constructed between and
among individuals. Networks are clusters or constellations of individuals, often drawn
together around attraction to an idea, sometimes coupled with an event, and more
often than not concerned with bringing about wider awareness of an issue or actual
change in practice. In this issue, de Coninck Smith traces one woman’s journey from
Denmark to the USA in 1946 – a journey that mirrors her own recent experience.

5
See for example, E. R. Robson. School Architecture: Being Practical Remarks on the Planning,
Designing, Building and Furnishing of School-houses. London: J. Murray, 1877; F. Clay. Modern School
Buildings. London: B. T. Batsford, 1902.
 Paedagogica Historica 491

From this initial impulse, she meticulously unpicks the personal interactions around
the construction of an early years centre for the study of children, during the late
1950s, in Berkeley. Like Grosvenor, who locates the start of his research journey with
a ‘manila envelope’, de Coninck Smith exhumes the complex various elements, and
patches together a story that arises from a particularly rich but hitherto unexplored
archive. For de Coninck Smith, the design and construction of a building for the
purpose of observing and studying children is at issue; for Grosvenor, it is the assem-
bling and arrangement of educational objects and materials for an exhibition model-
ling the ideal elementary school classroom. In following the trail from the initial traces
of communication left behind, Grosvenor tells a story of a network that came together
around the idea of making an exhibition during the late 1930s in London. His account
shows how the nature and design of the material objects of schooling were thought of
by the key players in creating the exhibition. Never mere objects, these items were to
be recognized as generating a pedagogical force in and of themselves, especially
through quality of design and in their precise application and situation within the
school and classroom. Contemporary cross-disciplinary networks of individuals have
helped in the reconstruction of the stories presented here, which demonstrate in differ-
ent ways the significance of the interdisciplinary public forum drawing together
around a common purpose across national boundaries. In both accounts, critical rela-
tionships between leading architects and pedagogues are explored; in one case around
the question of how best the built environment might be designed to facilitate the
study of child behaviour, in the other around the question of how best to facilitate the
delivery of design education and the education of the school child as future consumer.

Training the Eye to ‘See’

A concern to ‘train the eye’ in ‘the art of seeing’ was a major part of the project that
culminated in the Exhibition of Materials for Use in Elementary Schools (1937) as
explained by Grosvenor. For the historian of education, refining the art of seeing and
locating the significance of the visual culture of schooling can, as already suggested,
generate new research agendas and develop innovative methodologies. Attention to a
detailed examination of the material culture of schooling has helped to formulate new
insights into the development of pupil or teacher experience within educational
contexts over time. Historians are of course always concerned with the traces left
behind by the subjects of their interest. But such traces are found not only in the formal
and informal written record, or only in photographs and film, but are also inscribed
in the material world of the school and school environment. The activity of living,
learning, playing, surviving, resisting and helping to shape school is visible, for those
with an eye to see it, in the very fabric of the interior and exterior. Marc Armitage,
with a keen eye, exposes the invisible, unnoticed or found unremarkable in what
constitutes the school playground or yard. This traditionally neglected area of the
history of the modern school is found to be a rich source from which to explore the
social history of the schoolchild. The contemporary adult eye, he claims, has generally
lost or forgotten the ability to see the significance of the material enclosure of the
492 C. Burke

outdoor play environment in quite the way children see it. His piece exposes how, over
time, changes in school building design have caused the outer shell of the school to
alter shape, thus challenging and acting upon children’s ‘natural’ ways of playing.
Armitage uncovers testimony from several generations of children at play that brings
to life the material world of the playground and shows it to be visually alert and contin-
ually manipulable by children in their impulse to play.

Contested Sites
Walls, canteens, corridors, desks and doors do not only act as containers of the school
child; they act also as spaces for resistance and sites of contested desires. As such
these material locations and objects can be viewed as material sites of struggle or
places where power is wielded. Dents and dints in items of school infrastructure are
in this collection brought into sharp focus and are thereby revealed as traces of resis-
tance or deviance (Staiger) or signs of children having left their mark in responding
to and interacting with the material landscape (Armitage). The project of school
meals provision and prevailing ideas structuring the design of the conditions for the
consumption of food and drink within the school are exposed here by Burke as at
once a symbol of educational progress, a significant part of the learning process, a
potential site of conflict and an important site of discipline and control. The school
meal and its consumption was a site of contested power. Here begins the process of
uncovering, mainly in the English educational setting, the complex historical relation-
ship between ideas held about nutrition, impulses towards social engineering, and
questions of aesthetics and design in the context of the school dining hall or lunch
room. The view or significance of the edible landscape is revealed as differently
regarded by children and adults within school and thus sites of consumption were
invested with contested and divergent desires. Matters of education of the child as
consumer and the ‘training of the eye’ emerge once again here as of concern to
networks of individuals with a common interest; in this case, the 1951 UNESCO
Congress.
Seeing the familiar as unknown and the everyday as problematic is part of the
process of uncovering the overlooked and hitherto forgotten contexts of education.
An examination of the visual culture of the school involves bringing into focus,
perhaps for the first time, the significance of detailed characteristics of schooling such
as the intricate, regulated and ritualized choreography of the body; the design and
siting of the built environment; the purposeful arrangement of objects in the class-
room; the shape of interior and exterior spaces; and the varieties of the purposes of
the environment as imagined differently by children, teachers and parents and others.
As this present collection of articles demonstrates, consideration of the visual detail
of school has afforded an important shift of focus for research. In effect, the classroom
has moved outside the frame of vision and the significance of other more obscure and
overlooked spaces has become central to the discussion.
Ways of seeing school are consistent themes. The importance of the arrangement
and design of the material objects of schooling as perceived by the network of artists,
 Paedagogica Historica 493

educationists, architects and designers in making the 1937 exhibition is explored. The
aesthetic of the material culture of schooling is a theme taken up by the UNESCO
International Conference on Public Education (1951), as Burke shows. The attention
to detail by those concerned with the importance of aesthetics and design in educating
the child as consumer draws attention away from the well-trodden and surveyed
aspects of schooling to the more obscure and overlooked. The ‘training of the eye’ of
the schoolchild was a project requiring attention to the material culture of the school
and an appreciation that art education was a matter that transcended the classroom
and the formal lesson. It was to be embedded into the very fabric of the school and,
through this perspective, the walls, furnishings, equipment and ‘all the paraphernalia
of school’ was considered by some as alert and acting on the child contained therein.

Inverse Panopticon
The panopticon as understood by Michel Foucault in his analysis of institutions of
discipline and control is a two-way visualization device. The notion of the panopticon
is adapted and reconstituted by Staiger, who has explored how two frames of visual-
ization are exposed in an examination of wall-based ‘graffiti’ in the US high school.
Inscribing on school surfaces, the ‘taggers’ of the contemporary school can be seen to
engage with the past in disregarding the authority of the school as symbolically repre-
sented in school colours and symbols. At the same time, however, such ‘taggers’
communicate with themselves and construct their own schooled identity. The binary
channels of seeing and surveillance represented by the panopticon is a trope adopted
by de Coninck Smith with reference to the struggle of interests between those being
seen (the children) and those observing (the students) in the Child Study Centre she
explores. Just as the panopticon was both theory and material object, the struggle
pursued in Berkeley in the late 1950s was over the design and construction of part of
the building: a one-way viewing device, taking the form of a window. The contrasted
purposes of the adult and child intentions within pedagogical environments are visu-
ally exposed as diametrically opposed. Here we find, once again, a material site of
resistance and contestation; a theme similarly taken up by Armitage, Staiger and
Burke in this collection.
The visual culture of school is made up in large part of symbols, signs, metaphor
and myth – what Staiger terms ‘the symbolic arsenal’ of the school. Colours and
emblems have been as pervasive in many school environments, particularly in the
USA and the UK, as the lingering odour of the school meal. As technologies of power,
colours and emblems are visually present, inscribed in objects, clothing and buildings.
However, Goodman explores a metaphorical visual discourse in language used to
communicate with potential consumers within the private and independent school
market. Her article focuses on the described interior and exterior landscapes of girls’
schools as projected by the schools themselves via the School Year Book, published
between 1906 and 1995. Using visual inflections that have been designed to connect
with and amplify a subliminal knowledge of ‘good’ environments drawn from roman-
tic art and literature, such entries reveal the significance of internally imagined spaces
494 C. Burke

of schooling and education. Apparent only as descriptors of school environments,

Goodman’s application of a theoretical structure to this hitherto overlooked source
material exposes new ways of seeing this rich discourse.
Finally, one case study of a school designed by architect Hans Scharoun is featured
by Kemnitz, who examines the concept of the school as mirror of the developing
child. Scharoun’s building illuminates the understanding of the school architecture as
pedagogy. There are similarities with the organic architecture of Anthroposophy
found in Steiner and Waldorf schools, which recognize the impact of colour, shape
and design on the developing child and associated pedagogy. In this case it is the
architect who purports to ‘know’ the ecological needs of the developing child in the
educational context. This ‘knowledge’ of the child is assumed rather than developed
through allowing the voice or view of the child to participate in such design. Such an
approach contrasts with more recent trends towards inclusion and participative
design strategies, which allow for some element of the child’s imagined design of
learning environments to influence new build. Architectures and pedagogies have
clearly been intimately connected in the history of education but the material land-
scape of school has been regarded rather as a backdrop for the essential human inter-
action with the curriculum in the learning process. The articles brought together for
this issue are indicative of a change of focus that is afforded by attention to the visual
in the history of education, a shift which continues to provide new ways of seeing
school.