This paper reflects on the role a specific genre of educational books -teacher’s handbooks- plays in mediating educational knowledge. Derived from a transnational research project about the ways in which Pestalozzi’s intuitive teaching practices from the early 19^th century were transformed into a school subject called “object lessons” by the last third of that century, I will focus on a particular stage of that transformation: the circulation of Norman A. Calkins’ Object lessons (1861) in Latin America. Pestalozzi was invoked as the main reference for the modernization of pedagogy in late nineteenth century Latin America. This has led historians of education to discuss the “reception of Pestalozzi’s pedagogy” as part of the consolidation of Latin American mass school systems (Ruiz Berrio, 1997). However, considering the ways in which print culture affects the mediation of any kind of knowledge, I can claim, following James Secord’s view of science as a form of communication (Secord, 2004), that educators, policy makers and schoolteachers did not read “Pestalozzi’s pedagogy”; what they read were the debates that took place after what Pestalozzi published, what others published about what they saw in Pestalozzi’s schools, and what others elaborated upon those first-hand accounts. Based upon this premise, I will trace the ways in which the knowledge about intuitive teaching was mediated by one of the most influential works that circulated in Latin America claiming to design a new teaching method for the ideas on observation of objects put forward by Pestalozzi – namely, Norman A. Calkins’ Primary Object Lessons for a Graduated Course of Development (1861). This book, addressed to teachers and parents, claimed to be an elaboration upon one of the first operationalizations of Pestalozzi’s methods – Elizabeth Mayo’s Lessons on Objects (1830), and was subject to different translations published in different Latin American countries: Argentina (1870-71), Colombia (1872), Uruguay (1872), United States (1879), Mexico (1880), and Brasil (1881). In my analysis of the circulation of these works I will pay attention at 2 aspects: 1) the ways in which the insertion of these handbooks in an asymmetric, post-colonial international publishing market affected the mediation of educational knowledge; 2) the constraints of the particular genre of teacher’s handbooks, adapted for local educational traditions, political conjunctures and educational expectations, in the mediation of educational knowledge. My general argument will be that these processes of mediation need to be integrated into the history of pedagogy.

As in 1979 the revolution led by the Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional (FSLN) overthrew the Somoza regime in Nicaragua, the change of power ignited a process of social and political transformation that went well beyond the usual transfer of political power. Sandinista leaders struggled to establish a Socialist polity of new type, associated, but not fully identified with Soviet socialism. Sandinistas were adamantly anti-imperialist, and their mistrust of all imperial powers could also be extended to the Soviet Union. In this context, one alternative for constructing a Socialist polity without Soviet interference and, simultaneously, not being so directly trapped in the Cold War dynamics (Yordanov 2020), was to establish a cooperation with the German Democratic Republic in the field of education. Shortly after the Sandinistas seized power, the GDR offered a consistent technical cooperation to the young revolutionary regime. The scope of this cooperation was wide and included virtually all levels and variations of the education system, from kindergarten to the universities and from didactic problems to politico-ideological ones (for Sandinista policies, see Arnove 1994). Only in recent years, this cooperation has come under scholarly scrutiny (Ferreira dos Santos & Holthaus 2020; Caruso & Kliche 2023). In this contribution, I will analyse whether the different positions these two countries occupied in the space of “red globalization” – core/periphery, consolidated and nascent socialism – led to different preferences about the educational knowledge needed for the construction of socialism. Did their representations of relevant knowledge diverge or converge? Did eventual differences focus on types of knowledge or the styles of knowing about education and schooling? How were eventual differences been negotiated in the context of international educational cooperation? This contribution relies on official archival documents, mostly (but not exclusively) from German archives including the records of the Socialist Unity Party of Germany (Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands, SED), the ministry of education, the foreign office, and other agencies such as solidarity committees and the Ernst Thälmann Pioneer Organisation. Complementary, interviews and materials from Nicaragua are also under consideration. The focus of the contribution relies in the different conceptions of orthodox Marxist-Leninist knowledge about education and schooling and how the Sandinistas did not really fit into this tradition of educational knowledge due to their roots in alternative movements and the church communities related to the Liberation Theology. Not only some fields of knowledge – such as indoctrination and planning – were controversial, but also different styles of reasoning – teleological, utopian. In this sense, the presentation focuses on questions of circulation, confrontation and accommodation of knowledge Östling et al., 2018) and knowledge cultures within the shared references about a Socialist education.