Conference Agenda

School archives are a highly varied reality and difficult to fit into a single framework. Some are kept in schools, others in municipal archives or other local government offices, much documentation has been dispersed and much has suffered the damage of time and poor preservation. School archives are given the status of cultural heritage by law and as such must be preserved and managed according to specific regulations, leaving, however, the burden of observance to each institution, although the financial reality of schools does not allow for full compliance. The awareness of the school administration of the irregularities in the management of the historical archives generates a certain distrust of outside researchers who are often denied access, effectively tying up important historical sources. In the schools of Rome, a census of archives was started in the early 2000s with a special focus on upper secondary schools. For economic and practical reasons, however, the condition of the school archives of elementary school was neglected, remaining to this day not fully known, lacking an organic census and, unfortunately, lacking the resources to maintain the archives properly. Often the management is left to the goodwill of school staff who "tidy up" without the necessary professional expertise.In addition, it is not uncommon to find that the obligation to preserve the documentation is not fulfilled. Recently to solve these problems, schools have organized networks, especially historical upper secondary schools. In this context, therefore, the importance of elementary schools, which constitute our main research interest remains neglected. During a period of study, we came across a school archive rich in sources for not only local but also national history. Thanks to these sources, two workshops with school children were also offered. The aim of this presentation is to provide an example of the kind of documentation and historical sources that can be found in elementary school archives.The exactitude required, for many years, in the compilation of certain documents such as, for example, class registers, allows for very accurate reconstructions not only of class composition and teaching approaches but also of daily activities complemented by the teachers' reflections.The school Umberto I in Rome was one of the seven schools to host special classes for Jewish children, excluded because of the anti-Semitic laws from 1938 to 1943 and only admitted to some public schools in separate settings, of which the archives offer valuable evidence. It was also attended for a year by Enzo Camerino, one of the very few survivors of deportation to the death camps, by the son of a victim of the Ardeatine Caves and the son of the Afghan king in exile in Rome. Alongside exceptional war-related events, the pattern of dropping out, the history of special education, the history of didactics, and everyday school practices such as teacher-pupil or teacher-family relations can be reconstructed.

Looking at Europe's past, the scholar Gurminder Bhambra acknowledges its deep imperial and colonial features, not always explicitly and consciously stated, especially in rhetoric public discourses and in the hopeful stories on the origin of European identity and the European integration process (Bhambra, 2022). However, traces of this imperial and colonial past and of the European colonial project can be found: according to Bhambra, they are actually integral to and constitutive of the European Union itself (Ibidem). Resting on the above premises, this paper looks at the European Schools by asking the following question: which traces of the aforementioned colonial past and these "long-standing histories" might be detected in the European Schools System and how? The European Schools constitute a particular education system officially born in 1957 for very practical reasons, to meet the educational needs of children of European Coal and Steel Community’s officials. In these Schools, the value of cultural diversity and of an education aimed at cultivating awareness and respect towards "the Other" has been stressed quite often since their foundation, even though previous research has shown some weak points, such as their being more the expression of an elite in its making (Finaldi-Baratieri, 2000) or a lack in terms of critical reflection and pedagogy (Leaton Gray et al. 2018). Moreover, even though the impact of the European Schools might have been controversial, they contributed, no matter how marginally, to the definition of an intercultural model of education (Van Houtte, 1960) and to vehiculate the idea of a mixed European identity built on a common cultural heritage and exchange based on tolerance and openness. The question is whether and how it is possible to grasp a more complex image of this idea of identity and diversity in this transnational institution and in the education provided, an idea that also embraces and contains traces of the colonial past and that looks beyond the pure Eurocentric perspective. Approaching the scattered archives and sources with methodological pluralism (McCulloch & William Richardson, 2000) and through a transnational perspective (Fuchs & Roldán Vera, 2019) the analysis carried out focuses on a speech given by Albert Van Houtte - one of the figures who significantly contributed to the structural organization of the first European School - in 1963; on the image of a geographical map that appeared blurry in one of the ES commemorative brochures; on an article published in the ES Pedagogical Bulletins in 1980 and on the biographical events of one of the Deputy Head and teacher of the Ecole Européenne Bruxelles I. As a result, different threads emerge and are picked up, lightly undermining an apparently univocal and dominant narrative of the European Schools and the educational and diversity model they propose while taking a first step towards "decolonising the mind" (wa Thiong'o, 1986), a step necessary "to understand Europe postcolonially" (Van Weyenberg, 2019).

This paper traces the travelling of a picture book series for children designated for the object lesson method from Switzerland (1874/5) to Portugal where it was adapted in 1904/5 (Staub, 1904/5, 1923 [1874/5]). Along this case study, I delineate how the travelling of this series and its particular images was possible, considering not only reform approaches in education but also the imperial condition of these two European nation-states as relevant cultural and epistemological grids. Taking up the picture book series as a technology of schooling (Lawn & Grosvenor, 2005; see also Foucault, 1988), enables me to understand how the images and the object lesson method through which they were activated, produced a certain subject and in what ways this subject can be considered an imperial subject. By integrating a historiographic approach in the spirit of ‘entangled history’ (Sobe, 2013) with postcolonial and decolonial scholarship, I am invested in the question of how technologies of schooling such as the picture book series and its particular visual discursive formations (Rose, 2016) fabricated not only the colonial ‘Other’ but also constituted the imperial citizen “at home”(Hall, 2002). I pay particular attention to images and imaginaries of ‘nature’ that were not only reproduced in the pictures but also fuelled educational reform approaches and sensory educational methods such as the object lesson during the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries. Images were crucial elements in the production of the idea of modern-colonial ‘nature’ (Quijano, 2007), as visualizing procedures were key within natural history and in anthropology during the 19^th century in Europe (Daston & Galison, 2007; Mirzoeff, 2011; Pratt, 1992). The picture book series contains, amongst others, botanical and zoological illustrations, romantic landscape pictures as well as anthropological images of non-European peoples. The key concern of my work is to understand how these images as technologies of schooling did not only reproduce symbolic violences but also produced an imperial subject. Given that the picture book series travelled from Switzerland to Portugal with about 30 years of delay, I pay attention to how the imperial/colonial moment of the cultural and epistemological frameworks made the travel of the series and its images possible (Popkewitz, 2005). While the accompanying texts of the images were translated from German to Portuguese, the images remained almost entirely unaltered and therefore were imbricated in shaping a visual discursive field that crossed national boundaries. This in turn makes studying the visual culture within the transnational history of education (Dussel, 2013; Dussel & Priem, 2017; Lawn & Grosvenor, 2005; Rogers, 2019; Sobe, 2013), or as I suggest, “across Empires”, a worthwhile undertaking. Reform approaches have been of extensive interest in research on the transnational history of education, yet the imperial condition that underpinned those philosophies, methods and materials have been discussed insufficiently. I suggest that to move towards more socially just educational theories and practices, the historiography of education profits from visual culture studies across Empires as they allow a deepened understanding of the continuous colonialities inscribed into educational theory and its materials.