Visualising the European space of education: Analytic borderland,transnational topologies and spaces of orientation

Abstract

Studies of europeanisation have made a significant contribution to knowledge about education and how it has respatialised since the turn of the 21st century. This line of inquiry initially historicised the 1990s as a means of researching the emerging European space of education, but then morphed into studies of governing through the field of comparative policy studies. The research on governing Europe made the space of education visible in particular ways, which raises questions about the space of experiencing Europe: specifically, about how education is seen by professionals and with what effects. This paper uses the concept of ‘space-time’ to investigate the respatialisation of education. We review three case studies that historicise the europeanisation of education to problematise the space of governing, conceptualise the space of experience at three scales and illustrate how these entangled transnational topologies, analytic borderlands and spaces of orientation re-made the space of visual education in the 1920s.

The idea of a ‘European space of education’ came into currency at the turn of the 21^st century, prompted by European policies that affirmed common principles across the education systems of European member states. The European Union had endorsed national system diversity and subsidiarity since the 1960s but, in 2000, the Lisbon European Council re-narrated that agenda as action on education with reference to a globalising knowledge-based economy. Prompted by this policy-driven recontextualisation of education, Nóvoa and Lawn (2002) embarked on a collaborative project called Fabricating Europe, which examined the emergence of ‘Europe’ as a supra-national space of governing and a European space of education.

But what is this ‘space’ of European education? Nóvoa and Lawn’s aim was to better understand the emerging educational space, which was no longer just corralled within nation-states. They problematised this ambiguous and fuzzy idea as an emerging ‘European space of education’. Investigating how this respatialisation was created ‘by transnational governance, networks, cultural and economic projects’ also troubled ‘the possibility of a European public space for education/public spaces interweaved with education’ (Nóvoa and Lawn, 2002: 1; emphasis added).

In this paper, we question the spatial vocabulary that has emerged alongside the europeanisation of education. We recognise that the study of European educational space has generated significant insights into the effects of governing in, on and through education. But we suggest too that this narrative about governing, which has become a field of comparative policy studies, rests on methodological choices that also limit accounts of education spaces and their respatialisation. In particular, we suggest that spaces of experience, as well as spaces of governing, and the spaces in-between, are significant in respatialising education.

We have three aims in this paper. First, we question narratives about europeanisation and the space of governing as a sufficient analysis of educational change since the 1990s. Second, we elaborate our critique by offering three concepts – ‘analytic borderland’, ‘transnational topology’ and ‘space of orientation’ – that help us understand europeanisation as an effect of experiencing ‘Europe’ at different scales. Finally, we show how entangled spaces, times, mobilities and scales recontextualise professional knowledge building that respatialises education.

We use three cross-national case studies, each of which historicises europeanisation, to develop our argument. We begin with Fabricating Europe and then consider professionals beyond Brussels in a study of disturbing work. We finish by examining visualisation and the art of politics through a study of the Visual Education Movement (VEM) that emerged with 1920s innovations in film and their effects on respatialising Europe.

Finally, a word on ‘we’. The narrator in this paper is a composite that emerged through a particular dialogue between two researchers who are, in one sense, outside Europe; we live and work in Australia. One of us is a Greek Australian who elaborated the concept of ‘visuality’ through her cross-national study of the VEM. She knows Europe as a collection of nation-states and through the deep time of family: a memorable grandfather whose limited literacy did not limit his learning. The other is an Anglo-Australian, born into a fading empire, who travelled to Australia and stayed. Her helicopter view is part empire, part science and part transnational knowledge building incubated through cross-national projects in and beyond Europe. She knows Europe and has glimpsed ‘Europe’ as effects of europeanisation.

We note these lived histories to explain the narrator as one who sees through multiple space-times and visual horizons. ‘Her’ experiences frame visuality and ‘her’ look orients knowledge building that makes and remakes concepts, methods and practices of education, which affect how we see, know and do education in respatialising times. As a result, the narrator sees the significance of different space-time horizons, space-time scales of social learning and how visualisations inflect europeanisation. Knowing Europe, we suggest, is about seeing and scaling the space of education and the effects of social embeddedness as active forces in respatialising education. These matters reopen longstanding questions about the role of education in social change; we flag their importance for those of us who still seek change because we hope for sustainable societies.

Europeanisation and the space of governing

Fabricating Europe (henceforth Fabricating) investigates the europeanisation of education by tracing the effects of mobile professionals engaged in policy-making through the space of governing education. This methodology makes the European space of education visible as an effect of knowledge building. The project was designed by Antonio Nóvoa, a Portugese comparative education scholar, and Martin Lawn, an Englishman steeped in historical sociology. Their collaboration historicised europeanisation by pinpointing the 1990s as a particular present and treating the idea of a ‘European space of education’ as an object of inquiry. Empirical research traced how professionals mobilised networks and knowledge building practices as they attempted to problem solve and steer social change. This professional knowledge work made the European space of education knowable and actionable in ways that referenced the space of governing.

The research shows how professional activities that relocate knowledge building to a supra-national scale distort national and subnational education routines and habits. That professional knowledge work produced a post-bureaucratic ‘education space’ (Maroy, 2012) where there was no privileged or sovereign authority (Rhodes, 1996). It unfolded through supra-national knowledge networks working with de-territorialised horizons, rather than the territorialised authority that had historically anchored education in nation-states (Robertson et al., 2002). The professionals grappled with instability, flux and increased awareness of risk through a ‘constant process of translation and mediation of policy discourses’, and as travelling ideas and meanings unfolded through ‘spiders webs of distributed policy making in multiple centres’ (Lawn and Lingard, 2002: 292). Being mobile, these professionals learned to do policy and to act on education as a distinct ‘policy magistracy’ (Lawn and Lingard, 2002). Their emergent practices of governing also steered policy and research (Ozga et al., 2006) and produced governing knowledge which was then applied through knowledge-based technologies, techniques and professionals, now working as technicians (Fenwick et al., 2014).

Fabricating shows that the supra-national space of governing both steers and rescales education with reference to ‘Europe’: a quasi-territorial entity (Lawn and Grek, 2012). But studies of policy effects show how this europeanisation of governing challenges professionals beyond Brussels. Worker-citizens and students encounter shifting topographies as existing landforms confront the emergent policies and technologies of supra-national ‘Europe’. All these actors relay travelling ideas, as well as the policy magistracy, and inflect education with the soft-power logics of learning and improvement (Lawn, 2006). But these practices of governing never fully reorder networks and agencies that make spaces of education (Arnesen et al., 2010). The entwining of ‘educational space’ as a space for education framed by a ‘public environment … has not disappeared’ even with the ‘logic of competition and improvement’ (Grimaldi and Barzano, 2014: 35). Network governance, like national government, confronts limits of governability (Ozga, 2008).

Historicising europeanisation in the 1990s offered Fabricating an opportunity to document respatialisation as the space of education shifted from a national to a supra-national scale. But the concern with policy professionals and concepts, methods and practices of governing tended to eclipse the idea of ‘space’. Fabricating offered ‘Europe’ as a spatial reference, but without a detailed consideration of space or scale as an active force. As Paechter (2004) suggests, spatial metaphors are powerful but mostly unacknowledged in education. In Fabricating, the term ‘space’ became a metaphorical gesture towards an area of education.

As the research trajectory shifted away from the historicising insight of Fabricating, research pivoted towards a political sociology of educational governing. Policy sociology (Dale, 1992) drew on comparative education, creating a novel field of comparative policy studies (Steiner-Khamsi, 2012). It reframed studies of policy borrowing and lending by using the globalising grammar of education policy movements to read transfer and translation (Dale and Robertson, 2012). Such research offers important insights into supra-national globalisation optics, patterns of policy attraction and policyscapes that all affect local policy contexts (Steiner-Khamsi and Waldow, 2012). It focuses on the space of education as a governing ‘context of contexts’; a ‘space’ of stories about education that privileges policy logics and interventions which presume ‘processes’, ‘outputs’ and ‘outcomes’ (Dale and Robertson, 2012).

These methodological choices prioritise ‘governing’ at the expense of ‘experiencing’ Europe. Yet early studies of europeanisation had traced travelling ideas to understand their effects on local places, which acknowledged travelling ideas as effects of governing, and also as inputs to learning (Alexiadou and Jones, 2001; Silova, 2002). Focusing on space and place recognised how europeanisation made a novel ‘topography’ by assembling a certain landscape of objects, relationships and effects. But europeanisation also opens the door to studies of ‘topology’: the way objects retain their spatial character but are re-formed, stretched and distorted in order to fit together (Mitchell and Kallio, 2017).

The concept of ‘topology’ prompts different questions. It focuses attention on the nature of spatial distortions (Sassen, 2007); the effects of intensified mobilities (Landri and Neumann, 2014), forms of transnationalism (Vertovec, 1999) and their consequences as space crumples and folds (Rizvi, 2011). These questions invite historicisation as a methodological strategy. It offers ways of understanding space and how spatial experiences disturb people’s habits of mind, practical routines and sense of place. Seeing a space-time as a particular present provides a way of researching topographies in motion and how topological effects disturb communicative contexts. This line of inquiry focuses attention on shifting horizons that disturb social embeddedness, and also reconfigure resources for learning.

Disturbing space-times of education

We use the concept of ‘space-time’ to historicise the processes that respatialise education. This methodological choice focuses our attention on the nexus between space and time. It pinpoints a particular present, making it possible to investigate how space, time, mobility and scale entangle knowledge building that makes uneven space-times of education (McLeod et al., 2018). For ‘space’, as Massey (2005: 9) argues, is the ‘sum of the stories so far’, which are scaled from the infinitely minute to global encounters. Space locates ‘multiplicity in the sense of contemporaneous plurality’, ‘co-existing heterogeneity’ and ‘distinct trajectories’; space is always under construction. ‘Without space, no multiplicity; without multiplicity, no space … Multiplicity and space as co-constitutive’ (Massey, 2005: 9). And if space and its multi-scaled stories are the warp of everyday life, time is the weft that secures stories, creates tempo and rhythms of time, which temporarily fix contexts (Cowan, 2018).

A space-time fixes a pivotal point. It is where ‘the simultaneity and interwoven complexity of the social, the historical and the spatial’ becomes visible and when ‘their inseparability and interdependence’ can appear fixed (Sojo, 1996: 3). A space-time is not defined by a linear arrow of history but is made, consciously and unconsciously, as people navigate topographies and topologies, rendering them knowable and actionable as visualised worlds. How people perceive, conceive and feel the nexus between space and time affects the making of space and scales. Seer’s use spatial and temporal frames selectively to orient what they see, know and do with reference to their embedded worlds: how they are known in the here and now, and through memory and imagining (Lefebvre, 1991).

The challenge in studies of europeanisation is to recognise the effects of respatialisation and mobility that also distort time and temporalities. This means recognising that human knowing and doing is haunted by pasts, inspired and fearful of futures, and smudged by shifting identities that overwrite knowledge building. The respatialising effects of europeanisation disturb places that were once mediated through national practices of governing and spaces of education that steered learning. But novel topographies and topologies yield learning in new ways, which hinge on communicative contexts now stretched by digitisation but also resistant to new proximities. Contexts unfold with the effects of ‘entanglement’ where:

… an ‘object’ of historical study (for example, a concept, discourse, or identity) is constituted at the meeting point or intercrossing among various historical contexts as opposed to its being considered in only one isolated discursive context. Entanglement may be considered to operate on at least three levels: multicultural entanglement (the intercrossing of synchronous cultures); transdiscursive entanglements (the intercrossing of theological, scientific or ethico-political debates, for example); and diachronic entanglement (the arguably inevitable way in which scholarly analysis interjects itself into, and alters, the past by the very process of attending to the first and second entanglements). (Burson, 2013: 3)

Historicisation creates a methodological opportunity to write and rewrite the ‘present as history’ (Mills, 1967: 146). This long tradition of comparative historical sociology (Kumar, 2015) is consistent with the lineage that informs Fabricating (Lawn, 1996; Lawn and Ozga, 1981; Ozga and Lawn, 1988). Research projects investigate particular space-times of education in order to grasp the effects of social embedding, and the disturbing effects of being dis-embedded, within specifically scaled social histories and sociologies of knowledge and power. As Fabricating showed, research that traces how knowledge and power flows through networks and cultures offer a way of understanding education as effects of governing and learning, which subsequently unfold as structures and cultures of education (Williams, 1976), define curriculum (Nespor, 1994) and orient place-based learning trajectories (Leander et al., 2010).

These methodological consequences of historicisation become visible in the second case study. It began as a study of occupational reordering, but became an investigation of europeanisation beyond Brussels and the respatialising space of governing. Conceived as a book project on ‘disturbing work’ (henceforth Disturbing), the research focused on human service professionals (nurses, teachers and social workers) in five countries and how they built knowledge as they worked and learned through workplaces that were subject to lifelong learning reforms (Seddon et al., 2010). The research design built on Fabricating, but looked at those who were subject to, rather than producers of, governing knowledge. The process of writing and editing chapters based on empirical case studies offered an opportunity to analyse professional–academic knowledge building as these professionals navigated the novel effects of governing. These empirical studies showed how space-times at different scales – ‘analytic borderlands’, ‘transnational topologies’ and ‘spaces of orientation’ – affected professionals’ socially embedded knowledge work, practices of learning and orientation to transforming politics.

Analytic borderland

The relation between governing and experiencing is often treated as a ‘borderline’ at which policy and practice collide. But Disturbing held that ‘line’ open, methodologically, in order to see how the relation between governing and learning was spatialised and to investigate the space in-between (Sassen, 2003). Chapter authors wrote about what happened in the ‘borderland’. Documenting how human service professionals’ experience of work and learning was recontextualised by discourses of ‘flexible capitalism’ (Sennett, 1998), we traced the discursive effects of these practices of governing into circuits of labour, where travelling ideas and knowledge building practices referenced lifelong learning policies. Each case study revealed the topography of work, industry, occupation and profession as landforms that were actively bordered and ordered by rules, resource allocations and patterns of recognition. Comparing cases showed how lifelong learning policies created ‘dilemma-driven workplaces’, where the analytic borderland between governing and experience was ‘disturbing work’.

‘Disturbing work’ objectifies the respatialising effects of flexible capitalism and lifelong learning reforms; it is an analytic borderland that accompanies the respatialisation and rescaling of ‘Europe’. Refusing to collapse the relation between governing and experience into a single borderline, the project identified a tangible space-time, where each chapter narrated a particular present that traced how professionals worked and learned through their experience. The analysis showed that professionals’ perceptions, conceptions and feelings were affected by their own knowledge work. They made their workplace knowable and actionable by referencing public discourses of lifelong learning, and also their embedded everyday commentaries about work and occupation, education and students, and the world at large. Like Fabricating, this project shows professionals translating and mediating communicative contexts that constitute public space, define the space of education and fix its educational character, which ‘yields learning’ (Hamilton, 1989).

Transnational topology

Reviewing draft chapters for Disturbing, the editors discovered that chapter authors had mostly narrated the analytic borderland which defined their workspace and workplace as grief stories. These stories portrayed human service professionals in topographies where the landscape of work was dominated by geoeconomic logics. The chapter authors offered geopolitical critiques by referencing historical national discourses, in which narratives captured professionals’ apparent subjection to europeanisation and conveyed their sense of professional and individual loss of valued work practices and dignity in work. While the editors recognised these grief stories, their own experiences of ‘disturbing work’, which included working in the Disturbing cross-national project, suggested that there were also topological ways of reading the analytic borderland between human service professionalism and lifelong learning reforms.

Travelling policies distort socially embedded routines and habits of mind. These respatialising effects produce unexpected topologies, where spatial properties of professionals’ work and learning are preserved but are also distorted, stretched, bent and crumpled as things are re-fitted together in novel ways (Clark and Yusoff, 2017). The draft chapters showed these novel entanglements respatialising workspaces and workplaces, but how professionals read their appearance, significance and meaning in the borderland depended on the way those distortions from the norm were interpreted. Where the draft chapters offered geoeconomic and geopolitical readings, which iterated between national and ‘European’ discourses, the editors experienced the Disturbing project as a space-time of transnational knowledge building.

A transnational space-time is experienced through colliding spatial and temporal horizons where both routes and roots became more overt. These visible entanglements in Disturbing meant that the editors had to navigate space-time collisions but could also access emergent transnational discourses where knowledge building encouraged other readings. These respatialising terms and conditions of work diffract professionals’ knowledge work, and also offer novel infrastructures for remembering and imagining (Saari, 2012). Dilemma-driven workplaces create knowledges that may deviate from antecedent contexts, concepts, methods, practices and norms (Mitchell and Kallio, 2017). The editors asked chapter authors to acknowledge their own experience of disturbing work as they revised their drafts. This editorial strategy focused each chapter on professionals’ workplace experience and how ‘disturbing work’ became ‘transforming politics’.

Space of orientation

Governing knowledge has unpredictable effects when professionals engage with topological distortions that accompany collisions between travelling policies and socio-spatially embedded working knowledges. Their responses show that ‘the spatial properties of society … have no fixed form, but rather are outlined by lived worlds organised through ongoing social relations, discourses and networks (Mitchell and Kallio, 2017: 1). The revised chapters documented how topologies disturbed professionals’ ways of seeing, knowing and doing their work, and also interrupted their social learning, which referenced habitual horizons and common-sense thinking. Transnational topologies dis-embedded socially embedded concepts, methods and practices in ways that made choices visible; inviting professionals to choose, consciously or unconsciously, their preferred strategies for action. Their choices hinged on how they saw their working life and how their visuality, their logic of seeing, was affected by memories, imaginings, emotions and opportunities.

These disturbing effects of dilemma-driven workplaces reveal another space-time: a ‘space of orientation’ that locates interpretation and frames, forms and filters meaning-making at an individual scale. It is where professionals reference their own particular social and cultural positionings and interpret their conflicted workplace and workspace by reading communicative contexts with reference to fixed or shifting horizons. These readings, and how they are resourced, ground professional choices about strategic action within transnational topologies. The revised chapters showed professionals choosing, for example, to either exit their workplace or push-back through irony based on a strategic assessment of the consequences for working life and the politics of work.

While chapters focused on individual choices, they also showed patterning of human service work by occupation, country and academic discipline. These patterns reveal the persistence of socially embedded habits of mind in disturbing workplaces. Some professionals made their dilemma-driven workplace knowable and actionable through established territories and border wars. But others saw borderlands through novel narratives; Recontextualising disturbing work as transforming politics enabled those professionals to claim space and say ‘we’.

From disturbing work to transforming politics

We identify these analytic borderlands, transnational topologies and spaces of orientation as space-times of knowledge building at different scales because they mediate governing and learning. The book chapters show how professional knowledge building contributes to disturbing work and to processes of interpretation that transform politics. These ways of seeing and interpreting are not just about space or effects of mobility: either being mobile or being flooded with mobile things. Professionals see, know and act in ways that are also inflected by time and temporalities, how they experience the nexus between space and time, feel routes and roots colliding, and resource their perceptions and conceptions with reference to specific space-time horizons.

Utopias, imagined futures, make visible the way time and temporalities unfold through particular relational space-times as ‘Europe’ respatialises. For example, Haug (2010) describes the effects of disturbing work on human service professionals by drawing out tensions between historical work practices and lifelong learning reforms. Using geosocial analysis to understand this analytic borderland, she identifies two problems. The first recognises that utopias were mobilised, historically, through nationally organised social movements: workers and women, who were motivated by conditions of work and care relations, and by people who struggled for public education and for democratic politics. Remembering this history prompts the question, ‘What is the utopia now?’ The second problem recognises that respatialising ‘Europe’ is dissolving those four social movements and asks, ‘Whose utopia?’

These problems and the questions they prompt can be treated cynically or by acknowledging history. As Haug (2010: 122) suggests, a utopia that sees hopes for change emerging only through nation-states overlooks the ‘hope of many others’ as they ‘strive towards dignity in life as a human aim’. A geosocial analysis offers ways of understanding space-time horizons and how they shift, which can feed geostrategic logics that may inform the ‘art of politics’. This art recognises the space of social relations and how space-time horizons resource and orient learning. These politics are:

… not about defining the ‘right’ goal and then implementing it; the art of politics is about building connections, about creating a space of orientation which can re-contextualise fragmented struggles. (Haug, 2010: 122)

Respatialising visual education

A case study of visual education in the 1920s allows us to illustrate our critique of europeanisation and to show how scalar space-times can extend our analysis of respatialising education. We focus on the analytic borderland that unfolded between the space of governing and the space of experiencing Europe as movies emerged and travelled across national borders. These changes produced transnational topologies that shifted how professionals saw education in their present. They struggled to create a future and used the past as a source of raw materials for actively remaking history (Abrams, 1982: 8). The idea of ‘visual education’ emerged through europeanisation as transnational networks occupied the space in-between period and lived cultures:

There is the lived culture of a particular time and place, only fully accessible to those living in that time and place. There is the recorded culture, of every kind, from art to the most everyday facts: the culture of a period. There is also, as the factor connecting lived culture and period cultures, the culture of the selective tradition. (Williams, 1976: 66)

We examine how the VEM developed alongside these transnational topologies by using ‘visuality’ as a way of seeing the nexus between education and industry (Barbousas, 2009). This methodological choice foregrounds forms of professionals’ reasoning premised on what the eye can see, which cannot always be communicated in words (Smith, 2001). Our approach foregrounds entangled discursive and cultural horizons and how they affect what is seen and not seen, where visualisations unfold as social learning that coheres networks and fixes patterns of professional knowing and doing. The analysis suggests how industry and education professionals divide on the basis of what they see and do not see. These visualisations that produce discontinuities and ruptures between social groups become particularly acute when professionals experience familiar-but-strange transnational topologies.

We suggest how spaces of orientation frame the art of politics that unfolds with the VEM by examining particular visual events that allow us to infer how professionals see and build knowledge on the basis of particular images. These images provide a frame of reference: a horizon where what is known contextualises, and therefore forms and filters, what is seen. These visual events provide the medium for professional work and locate interactions between viewer and viewed. Their effects hinge on the ‘look’, which frames and orients social learning. This look is

… not about merely seeing. It begins at a personal level with the look into someone else’s eyes to express friendship, solidarity, or love. That look must be mutual, each inventing the other, or it fails. As such, it is unrepresentable. The right to look claims autonomy, not individualism or voyeurism, but the claim to a political subjectivity and collectivity: ‘the right to look’. (Mirzoeff, 2011: 25).

We trace the respatialising effects of the ‘look’ using the Visual Education Journal, which was published between 1922 and 1929. Analysing specific space-times of visual education shows how filmic topologies disturb educators, and how logics of visuality fix industry and education meanings prior to words (Barbousas, 2010). Each of these space-times reference professionals’ experience but they are also tensioned by governing practices, which materialise a ‘gaze’ and may produce ‘spectacle’. The ‘gaze’ controls the order of things by normalising its objects relative to particular contexts (Foucault, 1980). Becoming subject to the gaze disconnects the image, the effect of visualisation, from the original context of social relations and concepts, methods and practices of knowing. This disconnection is ‘spectacle’, a seemingly autonomous world where image and life are unified as an abstract representation (e.g. ‘Europe’) which can recontextualise life itself. The spectacle, in this case the ‘space of education’, is not ‘a collection of images but a social relation among people mediated by images’ (Debord, 1967: 4).

Transnational topologies of film

Photographic technology developed in the early 1800s and produced the ‘image’ as an intentional object. It was used to draw the gaze of the viewer by mechanical means and also to showcase knowledge and artistic representations (Low, 1971; Jay, 1994). The quality of the image was enhanced by inventions that travelled. In the 1820s, Frenchmen Joseph Nicéphore Niépce and Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre invented clunky silver chloride images. British inventor Richard Lee Maddox strengthened the quality with the Gelatin Dry Plate in 1971 and developed moving images with the launch of photographic shutters as separate accessories (Low, 1971, 1984). Then American George Eastman introduced and commercialised celluloid film. With the foundation of the Eastman Kodak Company, the photographic image became an accessible, mainstream object of image reproduction (Saettler, 2004).

Images, still and moving, have effects on concepts, methods and practices of knowledge building because they redefine and reconstitute ways of ‘seeing’ and ‘looking’ at the world (Jay 1994). By the early 20th century, film had become spectacle because technological advances had created novel filmic spaces of orientation that were enthusiastically consumed on a large scale. The film industry developed particular selective traditions in different countries, but market relations encouraged networks: the growth of Hollywood, Eurozone films in Italy, France and Germany, and Anglophone films through England and Australia.

The film industry and film-based education developed particular practices of visual education. Film popularised most rapidly in the USA but soon spread to the world (Saettler, 2004). Industry and education ministries promoted the educational opportunities of the image, portrayed as an educative object that was different from entertainment. Accessible technologies made mechanised images seem natural, and even preferable. American inventor Thomas Edison ‘became one of the first producers of films for classroom use’ (Saettler, 2004: 25) and claimed the medium as an innovative ‘textbook’:

Books will soon be obsolete in the schools. Scholars will soon be instructed through the eye. It is possible to teach every branch of human knowledge with the motion picture. Our school system will be completely changed in ten years. (Edison, 1913)

As the consumption of film increased, industry gained access to public spaces for spectatorship. By the late 1800s producers, distributors and manufacturers saw opportunities to market film as an educational artefact through the public space of the school. American film distributor George Kleine published the Catalogue of Educational Motion Pictures, listing over 1000 films (Saettler, 2004). Access to such catalogues depended on support from school boards, which encouraged rental opportunities, allocated funds and appointed personnel (Baker, 1924; Barns, 1924). By 1924 the Board of Education in New York City had appointed a Director of Visual Education to encourage the use of film in curriculum development. The plan was to fit ‘schools, ten a time, with cinema installations’. By February 1924, 36 schools were ‘handling two or more filmed subjects each week’, with four hundred films available (The Times, 1924: 7).

While Europe incubated the development of the moving image, the US fuelled mass production and popularised film. This economic geography increased the export of films and accelerated film making in Europe and Britain. Travelling films seemed exotic, further popularising expectations of the image as an object of knowledge that was already reshaping social, political and educational discourses (Jay, 1994). The effect of moving images produced transnational topologies that stretched and distorted the relation between educational and entertainment films, how they were governed by education ministries and board committees which endorsed the production and purchase of films.

The moving image as analytic borderland

The term ‘visual’ became an analytic borderland as the moving image divided established ways of understanding innovations in visual technology. ‘Visual’ described the mechanised artefact, but was also considered an object of knowledge in its own right. The term entered educational parlance from the discourse of cinema, which was reordering social attitudes towards the moving image as a communication, entertainment and social tool of engagement (Low, 1971). But advocacy for the visual was also appearing in fields and disciplines outside education, and encouraged a view of learning that relied on vision. ‘Commercial and industrial establishments appeal to the eye of the public, and by means of pictorial representations tell the people what they have to offer’ (Rathman, 1925). Critical of educators’ reliance on the written word, a small core of education enthusiasts affirmed the visual in modern educational practice (Hoban, 1935: 22).

The emergence of film and photographic images in education coincided with progressive philosophies of education, which collided with institutional practices of general education that regulated the use of still and moving images. The authenticity of the child defined this fracture line (Selleck, 1968). For example, the British New Education Movement (NEM) affirmed educational practice that would ‘watch and help the growth of the child’s abilities and not impose strict learning regimes’ (Selleck, 1968: 171). Committed to education on a scientific basis, the movement was a broad church that authorised the child as the agent of education. But the effects of film disturbed these understandings. The use of film in classrooms troubled the subjectifying effects of the gaze that had been institutionalised in national systems of schooling. Film was spectacle that disrupted language, knowledge, patterns of audience engagement and orientations to the moral good, despite the effects of censorship laws (Low, 1971, 1984). It meant that ‘machines in the classroom’ had to be ‘sold to educators and parents’ before the ‘educational film’ could be realised (De Vaney, 1998: 72).

The VEM emerged in the early 1920s and mobilised the ‘visual’ as a discourse that expanded the architecture of the classroom. It used the spectacle of film and wider support for the consumption of films to reach beyond curriculum constraints and assemble knowledge in new ways:

The film was bursting its theatrical bonds and the documentary movement was only one part of a seething mass of activity outside the commercial feature studios, one effort among many to use film as a genuine form of communication not confined to the set pattern of the picture show. (Low, 1984: 2)

The Movement formed as companies established relationships with education ministries. For example, the British and Dominions Film Corporation produced the first talking film in the late 1920s, which was endorsed by Kinemas Limited, a South African exhibiting organisation that purchased its films. Movies, such as Cochran’s Talk-ie Revue; Rookery Nook, Splinters 1914; Blue Lagoon and Mountains of Mourne, created a space for sharing historical social science subject matter. They oriented understandings of events by offering knowledges that addressed ethical and moral conundrums (Sipley, 1928). Kinemas Limited sanctioned the visual by producing films that politicised filmic engagements with knowledge (Shufeldt, 1924; Sigman, 1933; Sipley, 1928; Ashley 1932).

The VEM’s exploration of images and learning also unfolded through research. Frank N. Freeman’s dissertation at the University of Chicago was based on a collaborative experiment concerning the validity of the motion picture in the classroom and funded by Eastman Kodak. His Visual Education: A Comparative Study of Motion Pictures and Other Methods of Instruction (Freeman, 1924) examined the possibilities and effectiveness of visual artefacts in education. He used ‘visual education’ to distinguish visual instruction in education from other forms of instruction and learning. The research encouraged worldwide discussions about visual technologies, the hopes they inspired and the constraints they faced in the educational space (Freeman and Woods, 1929). Freeman’s studies helped to normalise visual education by representing:

… a grouping of educational materials or devices and an organised department of instruction which is based, not upon subject-matter, but upon a method of learning. This method has as its essential feature the fact that it belongs to one of the senses. (Freeman, 1924: 4)

The interface between the VEM and education interests were organised through Visual Education Committees which included education officials, parent and community representatives, school leaders and government representatives. They developed where film technologies were having greatest impact. The VEM in Europe emerged through specific national networks with different concerns (Gilbert, 1924). The British VEM differentiated educational and entertainment films. Italian and, to a lesser degree, Spanish film industries embraced education networks by reducing this differentiation. The German and British VEMs endorsed censorship that steered children’s learning through visual images towards moral issues (Low, 1971).

Shifting spaces of orientation

The Imperial Education Conference (1924) in London focused debates about the moving image as an object of learning. The conference was supported by the VEM, attracting education theorists, practitioners and policy makers across Europe. Symposia and presentations addressed moral issues connected with the moving image, the image as a learning tool and ways of redesigning education policy and curricula to reflect the new changing world of technology. Advocates of ‘visualising the curriculum’ promised a solution to instructional, cognitive and technological issues in education (Gow, 1927; Freeman, 1924).

The VEM’s advocacy helped to institutionalise the moving image in education by formalising knowledge building through academic and professional networks. The Visual Education Journal, published by the VEM, provides a window into this art of politics. We trace these effects on the respatialisation of education through the 1922, 1924 and 1929 volumes, which show educators reclaiming the ‘look’ and educational space of orientation.

Progressive visual education

The 1922 issue of the Visual Education Journal celebrated the moving image as an innovation, newly available to educators. The energy of this first issue reflected the VEM’s idealised and abstracted gaze, for which the spectacle of progress and technology offered exhilarating new ways of thinking about knowledge and spaces for learning (Gow, 1927; Sigman, 1933). The progressive claims positioned films as offering new ways of seeing the world and technological innovations decontextualised screen representations. The visual offered novel ways of thinking about knowledge and produced emergent vocabularies for understanding educational knowledge and learning experiences (Freeman, 1924).

These debates about the moving image portrayed film as a democratisation of education; its use in classrooms would open up educational opportunities for all. The image provided access to the world even when learners were unable to read words. The visual offered a route to meaning through experience that was authorised by film, whereas schooling restricted access to knowledge by privileging words. This project democratised knowledge by presenting images that allowed learners to use the visual directly. These visual stimuli would develop learners’ ways of thinking and allow them to grasp how knowledge was implicated in choices and decisions, with effects that both governed and enabled their action (Marchant, 1925).

Teachers were recognised as learners within this filmic space of orientation. Advertisements littering the pages of the journal encouraged teachers to access professional development opportunities in the film industry. Educator networks encountered debates that were tensioned between industry and education imperatives. They confronted different occupational logics, grappled with multidisciplinary understandings and addressed questions of social relevance. The celebration of ‘new knowledge’ through the journal positioned educators as innovators and provoked some to rethink their current practices. (Freeman and Woods, 1929).

This first issue of the journal set out bold statements about learning experiences where new technologies offered ways of ‘knowing your world differently’. This learning agenda, advocated outside the established space of education, consolidated the borderland between industry and education networks. As these ideas travelled through the journal, in-between concepts, methods and practices of visual education filtered into the established space of education. These effects disturbed the gaze of national education systems and those networks, knowledges and relationships that had historically fixed education discourse and dominated learning (Emery, 1927).

Accountable visual education

By 1924, excitement with the moving image was waning and a more structural approach became apparent. The journal focused on ways of using images in the classroom. The debate shifted from imaginative possibilities of seeing through images towards technical administrative concerns about delivery systems and technologies that enabled the use of images in classrooms (Emery, 1927). The aesthetic of innovation as a way of seeing was replaced by an architecture of knowledge that visualised the image but privileged words.

These institutionalised curriculum knowledges and education discourses meant that operational issues and accountabilities invaded the image as spectacle. The discourse of visual education became instrumental; a means to realise particular learning ends. These discussions flooded the visual with concerns about appropriate images and how images supported learning. Organisations such as the National Council of Public Morals in the USA advocated censorship where images were secondary to the written word. The image lost ground as a new knowledge form because the visuality of knowledge was reframed as language formation: where ‘pictures speak’ a universal language across the community.

Accountable visual education intensified debates about the filmic space that distinguished between educational and entertainment films. This division resonated in northern more than in southern European narratives of visual education. Moral and political debates about visuality became curriculum questions about the ethics and censorship of educational films. The use of moving images in schools were encaged by curriculum specifications that fixed boundaries and constrained pedagogies. But these discursive shifts also affirmed the authority of national visual education networks. The Italian and Spanish VEMs endorsed film for education and entertainment by privileging the experience of self over the logics of language. England and the USA emphasised word-based learning over knowledge through experience, subordinating images to classroom technologies.

Technicist visual education

The final 1929 issue of the Visual Education Journal portrayed the image as a visual aide, easy to use in the classroom. Earlier excitement that had linked image to innovation and progress became a wordless aesthetic: reverence for the image; seeing without voice. Curriculum constraints and operational practicalities obscured the VEM’s art of politics. The educational possibilities of visuality were corralled into educational films to supplement curricula; these films were endorsed by ministries that governed the gaze of education (Freeman and Woods, 1929).

These moves objectified the image. It was fixed in a paradigm and rendered manageable and defensible relative to educational accountabilities and resource demands. No longer a knowledge object, the image became a prop to the ‘real knowledge’ of reading and writing words. It was not movies but the whirring projector and ‘educational film’ that aided instruction. Images became knowable through linguistic representations, not through the image itself. Experience anchored an aesthetic that looked away from the image as a space-time where social relations could be interrogated directly.

Professional work and learning

The 1929 Visual Education Journal makes the respatialisation of education visible by slipping discursively from ‘visual education’ to ‘visual instruction’. This shift took seven years. In 1922 ‘visual education’ was synonymous with innovation and progress premised on democratising projects. By 1929 ‘visual instruction’ referenced nation-building and national distinctiveness. That image celebrated historical national education practices; iconography that oriented learners towards national traditions. As europeanisation slid swiftly through 1920s reparations, then depression, the image silently became ‘visual object’, assistant to the written word. Teachers delivered the image and endorsed the gaze. They authorised national meanings and re-territorialised Europe ready for war (Emery, 1927, Freeman and Woods, 1929).

This respatialisation turned educators away from the use of images in learning because visual education came up against teacher’s workplaces and their concepts, methods and practices of teaching. The VEM acknowledged how the visual disrupted education and invited teachers into collaborative problem solving, mobilizing their knowledge to address those constraints. But as Meredith (1946: 27) observes, the world of teaching was divided into ‘the enthusiasts that advocate the power and efficiency of these new visual methods’ and the teacher’s ‘apprehension for the teacher’s own future’. He notes:

… teachers are discovering, with some dismay, that to a greater or lesser extent the new visual media are usurping functions hitherto regarded as belonging to the teachers. They find themselves no longer teaching, in the traditional sense of the word, but presenting what can only be described as ‘prefabricated lessons’. (Meredith, 1946: 27)

The VEM momentum decreased with the last journal issue publication in 1929. In 1930, the Visual Education Journal was absorbed by the British Film Industry and renamed Screen. This event rescued the image from the clutches of professional educators and repositioned imagery as a spatial infrastructure in which imagining organised knowledge building through entertainment rather than education. It was the space of industry that affirmed the image as knowledge object, while the space of education endorsed literacy as professional manager of the image (Noxon, 1930). Respatialisation of the moving image through entertainment supports imagining, but assumes that users can make sense of images in socially and politically responsible ways.

By 1940, the ‘visual’ in education was redefined as ‘perceptual aides to learning’ (Kinder, 1942: 336). ‘Visual education’ referred to objects and artefacts rather than conceptual considerations related to knowledge building in teaching and learning (Low, 1984). No longer a domain of knowledge, the visual was reduced to a support role in a technological world. The VEM was never represented in curriculum theory, but its advocacy informed cottage industry organisations such as the British and US Societies for Visual Education. These regional institutions supported the VEM symbolically, but without affecting curriculum theory or education discipline structures (Saettler, 2004).

Despite limited institutionalisation, visual education continues to disrupt the gaze of education by authorising a right to learn that also endorses the right to look. The space of education orients learners towards what can be looked at, by whom and with what authority, which means that schooling builds the learner’s capacities for translating images into responsible ways of knowing, doing and being human. These trajectories mean that the right to learn secures and also resources each learner’s look; it enables social learning through forms of visuality, which may be compliant but which can also be critical.

Spatialising education as right to learn and right to look

This paper has used research on europeanisation to extend the spatial lexicon of education initially identified through Fabricating Europe. That project’s methodological orientation historicised a present, the space of education in the 1990s, and also opened up novel political sociologies of governing. Both lines of inquiry have proven generative. However, there is scope for further research that explores ‘space’ as concept and active force in social change rather than as metaphor, considers the effects of time and temporalities, and investigates the multiplicity and effects of space-times at different scales.

Tracing this line of inquiry through three case studies of europeanisation reveals the value of historicisation as a methodological strategy and how it differs from sociologies of governing. Our moves in this paper (through critique, conceptualisation and application) suggest that scaling space-times offers a way of writing a present as history, which can look beyond the space of governing and reveal social forces that remake education outside the dictates of policy, curriculum, evaluation and accountability. This kind of analysis reveals the significance of professional knowledge building in education and how categories of professional knowledge collide in ways that materialise educational concepts, methods and practices, where collisions produce reform and resistance. These issues have implications for the design of professional education in education and all other professional fields.

Finally, the case study of visual education suggests that comparative historical sociologies can provide a useful perspective in complex times. Such research offers breadth of vision by revealing how the nexus between social history and educational studies might be seen through a variety of disciplinary and professional lenses. As the case study shows, the diversity of these knowledge-network trajectories provides a picture of education that does not just presume ‘processes’, ‘outputs’ and ‘outcomes’, but foregrounds the range and diversity of social learning that unfolds through every space-time and at every scale. As the 1920s show, the flow-on effects of social learning are geoeconomic and geopolitical because the right to learn also affirms a particular right to look. How teachers work and learn affects big issues like peace and war. And for these reasons, we underline the continuing importance of comparative historical sociologies of education alongside other disciplined studies of education. For as Raymond Williams said long ago,

If we are to discuss education adequately, we must examine, in historical and analytic terms, [the] organic relation [between organisation and content/education and society], for to be conscious of a choice made is to be conscious of further and alternative choices available, and at a time when changes, under a multitude of pressures, will in any case occur, this degree of consciousness is vital. (Williams 1976: 145–146)