This article, delivered as one of two keynote lectures at the International Standing Conference for the History of Education (ISCHE) in Milan in September 2022, offers an example of an autosociobiographical approach to the history of education, in which the life story of the author is entangled with the collective movement of a generation of…

This article revisits scholarship on the Toa Dobun Shoin, an innovative international business school operated by the Japanese in Shanghai from 1901 to 1945. After reviewing the school's history, we carefully examine the institution's course mix, language programming, product-studies focus, and research trips. We conclude that Japanese educators…

This article presents a state of the art of the history of education in Western and Southern Europe by 'cutting together-apart' (Barad) 'knotting-s' (Ingold), in terms of both discipline formation and historiography across and beyond countries in these regions. It (dis)entangles national and regional particularities in terms of approaches, themes…

Our present time is characterised by many contradictions and the aspect of uncertainty indicates a sense of our deep loss of values. Education is the traditional space, in which generations create meanings and adults prefigure the future. Despite the idea of liquid modernity, which dominates our existence, we are convinced that we inherit…

This article looks at how social movements in francophone Belgium shaped the institutional contours of adult education 'from below'. It focuses on the integral role played by progressive social movements in the creation of a regional state-based system of adult education in 1976, known as the "Service de l'Éducation Permanente" (SdEP).…

The optical lantern projector was first introduced as a teaching aid into schools all over the world at the turn of the twentieth century. Because slides were expensive, special slide lending services played an important role in supplying schools with images they could project. Existing studies on the use of this new medium in education have…

Establishing and implementing rules that would teach pupils to become citizens became a crucial technique for turning those spots on the map of Europe whose sovereignty had shifted after the First World War into lived social spaces. This article uses Arnold Van Gennep's notion that a shift in social status possesses a spatiality and temporality of…

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, at a time when administrations in various countries set up new school systems or considered reforming existing ones, world exhibitions offered the ideal opportunity for the transnational exchange of knowledge and ideas. This article demonstrates both the impact of ideological views and…

In the early 1880s, Belgian educators were confronted for the first time with calls for the use of the optical lantern in schools. Around the same time, new pedagogical theories gained ground, which argued in favour of visually aided, more experiential forms of teaching. By investigating the pedagogical discourse on the introduction and use of…

The Belgian Constitution holds an obligation for governmental schools to organise RE in the recognised religions and in non-confessional ethics for all children of school age. While neither the Flemish nor the French Community legislator can thus abandon RE altogether, both legislators have recently taken initiatives, moving beyond the opt-out…

In the sociology of education, opponents of deficit thinking would be seen as important change agents, potentially inspiring radical policy change aimed at reducing systemic discrimination of specific sociodemographic groups. That is, contestation of deficit thinking can in theory lead to its destruction. In this paper, we argue that contestation…

Currently, in Western society, five significant paradigm shifts can be distinguished affecting Dutch and Flemish gifted education: (a) an inclusive approach of education, (b) response to educational needs, (c) new perspectives on giftedness, (d) social constructivism, and (e) evidence-informed teaching. In this review article, the positioning of…

The aim of the present article is to provide an overview of the current state of affairs regarding foreign language education and bilingual education in the different parts of Belgium. In a brief historical contextualisation, we explain how language education in Belgium has been shaped by the country's political and economic history, which has led…

The public dimension of the body became paramount in the first half of the 20th century, when the image of the modern man, with his virile stereotypes, became a cliché, in strict connection with nation building first and totalitarian ideologies later. Yet, different cultural and educational trends advocated for life reform and liberation of the…

In the early nineteenth century, the ideas of reform pedagogues gave rise to a didactic turn towards the visual that criticised an exclusive textual mediation of knowledge through books and lectures. To raise educational effectualness, teachers came under increasing pressure to incorporate high-profile media technologies into their lessons. Yet,…