Conference Agenda

In the 20th century, international organizations held responsible for the right to education: thenceforth, a set of legal instruments laid the foundations for a global governance in education. What about a nomadic and trans-border people? The case of the Roma is relevant for studying such a phenomenon: although some States have timidly approached this topic, aware of the necessity to innovate educational initiatives, this debate remained on the margins of concern. However, the Roma had organized themselves repeatedly since the 1930s to invest the international organizations in order to demand a right to education adapted to their conditions. It was only from 1962 that the Communauté Internationale Tziagne (CIT) and the Gypsy Council (1966) managed to create themselves and inaugurate the International Roma Congress (1971). It was then that the CIT became, by modification of its international statutes, the International Romani Union (IRU), and obtained, over the years, formal recognition within various international institutions including the UN (1979): nomadic education was among their very first demands. However, the reception of these ideas by the international organizations required a consensual approach to develop innovative solutions as a response lying between the needs of the Roma people and the needs of national governments to hold control over them. What were the educational demands to guarantee this right, and how did these educational innovations allow the Roma people to legitimize themselves as a transnational state? How do these educational ideas circulate between states and international organizations seized by the Roma movements, and engaged national governments to reform their educational provisions? This research, anchored in transnational and social history, is developed based on crossing manuscript sources (Robert Dawson, Grattam Puxon, Thomas Acton collections), institutional archives (BIE, UNESCO, Council of Europe, Ecumenical Council of Churches, National Archives-Bureau des libertés, National Gypsy Education Council) and oral testimonies (J-P. Liégeois, involved in the Council of Europe regarding educational provision for Roma children; Grattan Puxon, activist, founder of the Gypsy council; Vanko Rouda, founder and first president of the Comité International Tzigane). This communication aims to further problematize how these approaches and negotiations between a “stateless” people, national governments and intergovernmental organizations, contribute to the decolonization of the right to education and its application, as well as the precepts of global governance in education, which primarily aimed at serving national governments.

The idea of decolonisation/decoloniality has found fertile ground in South African higher education, where it has been vigorously taken up, developed and debated.(Ndlovu‐Gatsheni 2015; Ndlovu-Gatsheni 2020; Mbembe 2021; Jansen 2019; Ndlovu 2014) There is a significant literature on the trajectory and features of the ‘student-focused decolonisation movement’ of 2015-7 in South Africa.(Elliott-Cooper 2017, 332; Naidoo 2016; Gillespie and Naidoo 2019) There is also a significant literature on decolonisation of the university. Although the history of Africanisation and decolonisation of the subject of school history has been extensively reviewed, (see for example S. Ndlovu et al. 2018; M. Ndlovu 2018) decoloniality has largely remained a project within and about knowledge in higher education rather than about schooling.(Maggott 2023) And while its activist and intellectual base is narrower than that of earlier social movements in education during the height of the anti-apartheid period, it has been as influential, reaching out and beyond the silo of education, to become a cross-disciplinary endeavour. This paper returns to the concerns of the advocates of peoples’ education involved in the educational branch of the anti-apartheid movement, the National Education Coordinating Committee (1985-1995). The paper will first examine the conceptualisations of what liberation of education entailed and then consider whether it could be argued they have been realised or not within the frames of contemporary decolonisation concerns and conceptualisations. It will argue that the peoples’ education advocates’ understanding of liberation in education revolved around political economy but that the nature of knowledge was also key to this understanding; that is, change in the nature of the state and economic relationships of inequality were as important as the nature of knowledge and were seen as critical to the achievement of equality and liberation in education. (Mashamba 1991; 1990(Molobi and Conference on United States Initiatives for the Education and Training of South Africans and Namibians 1986; George and Molobi 1986)) The paper will then go on to examine change in the political economy and education curriculum in the last thirty years in the light of the analysis of what was considered necessary for liberation in education provided by the promoters of peoples’ education. This is particularly pertinent given that it is thirty years since the achievement of democracy in South Africa. It thus also hopes to cast light on the broader question of decolonisation of education in South Africa since the formal ending of apartheid in the light of the historical goals for national liberation. The paper will examine changes in the nature of the economy, the nature of the state, and reflect on continuities and discontinuities in educational equality and curriculum taking into account the emergence of new priorities, debates and issues concerned with knowledge. It will draw on a range of primary and secondary sources.

This study discusses the agents, policies, reforms, resistance, and politics involved in decolonising processes in Nigeria's educational history. Africa, and indeed Nigeria, had its share in the colonisation by the European nations through Western education. The curriculum focused on de-emancipating Nigerian indigenous education, culture, history, and social life. The involvement of the colonial government through education ordinances of 1882, 1887, 1916 and 1926 entrenched further the colonisation of education until there were agitations for education that were relevant to the needs of society, even from outside Nigeria, spearheaded by the Phelps Stokes Commission in 1920 (Abdulrahman, 2023). The agitations eventually led to granting "political independence to Nigeria on October 1, 1960, followed by decolonisation, especially of education, because the colonisation agenda was propagated effectively more through education. Therefore, decolonisation, as a necessity, must focus more on educational history. The decolonisation of educational history in Nigeria represents a critical aspect of the broader movement to reclaim indigenous knowledge systems, challenge colonial legacies, and promote cultural autonomy. Through a comprehensive review of historical literature, policy documents, and scholarly analyses, this study will shed light on the multifaceted nature of decolonising processes in the educational history of Nigeria. Furthermore, the study examines the institutional policies and reforms implemented to decolonise the Nigerian educational system, such as the National Policy on Education, including local languages, revising history curricula, and promoting culturally relevant teaching materials and political dimensions. Considering what is going on in the review of curricula contents in the education sector, especially in higher education, where educational history is not given space, and in the contextual framework of Khislavski's (2023) submission that "forgetting history is a social phenomenon that contradicts the ideal of a living commemorative culture" (p.1), there may be a need for the establishment of a "Library of Mistakes" (Williams, 2024, p. 1), in Nigeria to remind the nation the importance of educational history and avoid fatal errors in the future. This historical paper will use secondary and primary sources to gather relevant information. It will delve into the roles of international influences and various agents driving the decolonisation of educational history by advocating for curriculum reforms, language policies, and pedagogical approaches that reflect indigenous epistemologies and histories. Ultimately, this paper contributes to the ongoing discourse on decolonisation and education while highlighting the potential implications for educational equity, cultural revitalisation, and national development.

In the late 1830s, the Swedish missionary society (SMS) founded its first boarding schools for Sami children and adolescents in small villages in the northern Swedish inland. The impulses came from British Methodists, who had helped to initiate the Stockholm based society in 1835, as well as aided the startup of schooling in the Swedish colony of Saint-Barthélemy in the West Indies. The establishment of schools became the start of more than eighty years of engagement in Sami-related education from the SMS. With support and supervision of the Swedish Evangelical-Lutheran state church, the bishops of the diocese of Härnösand and local priests the society kept in operation between five and ten schools up until the so-called Nomadic school reform in 1913. Due to this reform, the SMS schools were shut down or subsumed under the expanding new state-governed school system exclusively directed at Sami children from nomadic reindeer herding families. This presentation focuses on SMS long-term engagement in Sami schooling, from the startup of the schools in the 1830s to their closure in the second decade of the twentieth century. This is done by focusing three analytical dimensions, each including specific research questions. i) The first dimension relates to institutional organisation and ideological principles of the missionary schools. What educational ideals shaped the schooling, how was it organised and how did this change during the examined period? What was its relation to the church, the state and the expanding elementary school system, and why were the schools discharged? ii) The second dimension aims to capture the pedagogical practice of missionary schooling. What does the sources tell us about the everyday life and educational orientation of the missionary schools? What views on teaching and the fostering of children are expressed in them? How did the pedagogical practice change in relation to organisational changes? iii) The third dimension revolves around the mission as a mediator of knowledge about the Sami to the public. What were defined as the mission's main problems in terms of education, and how was the Sami represented in relation to this? By this examination, the paper aims to contribute to a better understanding of how these missionary schools operated on a day-to-day basis and of their overall educational ideals, and thus in a broader sense add knowledge to the history of missionary education as well as to (settler) colonial and Indigenous schooling.