To Örebro University

On one hand, the Swedish governing discourse on equity in the context of digitizing education portrays modernization, progress and democracy as a foundation in the equity work. On the other hand, in the context of digitized tests, equity is rather framed within a neoliberal logic while related to all individuals’ possibilities of choosing a ‘good life’, and to compete on equal terms. Not all disadvantaged groups are the target, though. It is mainly boys who are supposed be given better grades, and, in addition, students with disabilities who are supposed to (as far as possible) be able to have the opportunity to show their knowledge during the test. Language or socioeconomically diverse settings are not mentioned with regard to digitized national tests.

In order to analyze shifting forms of educational governing we focus on the tools of government action. We direct our interest to different phases of the educational political process – that is policy making, mediation, realization and evaluation – and the instruments used within them. At the end of the 20th century we witnessed a shift in governing from so called centralization to decentralization.

Through examples from studies on different forms of instruments – such as the politics of naming, freedom of choice, differentiation, quality reports and different kinds of assessment tools – we describe and analyze the conditions of educational politics and governing in Sweden.

KNOWLEDGE ASSESSMENTS IN EDUCATION AS STEERING AND COMMUNICATION MEDIA.

In Swedish educational research, tests, exams, grades and evaluations are often regarded as different kinds of phenomena. In line with international research we discuss them in terms of ”assessment in education”. Our interest is directed towards what unites rather than divides these phenomena, and in this article we focus on how assessment produces information on students’ performance that can be used in the governance of education. Using historical examples we argue for a view of knowledge assessment as part of the curriculum. The argument is advanced with reference to Basil Bernstein’s concept message system and Jürgen Habermas’s theory of steering and communication media

Science and Technology Studies (STS) has been surprisingly slow to become widely known and deployed in the field of education. Yet STS has a rich array of concepts and analytical methods to offer to studies of: knowledge practices and epistemic cultures; the interrelationship between states and knowledge; regulatory practices, governance and institutions; and classrooms, pedagogy, teaching and learning. Most importantly, it provides a fresh perspective on how power operates in ordering societies, disciplining actors and promoting ideas and practices. In this paper, we provide an introduction to STS and elaborate what it offers education scholars. Using examples from the emerging body of STS work in the field of education, and in particular from the papers in this special issue, we argue that STS is not only useful, but an exciting and generative form of critique - one that is especially suited to investigating contemporary issues in education policies and practices.

This book covers the construction of international education research community in the 1950s-1990s, and the growth of its ‘disembedded’ laboratory i.e. networks, spaces, materiality, travelling, translations. The book follows a sociology of science theoretical framework in order to examine the research-archive of the Swedish internationally renowned educational scholar Torsten Husén (1916-2009). The archive reveals the shifting and heterogenous transnational networks that contribute to the development of social science research beyond fixed time and space dimensions, and that extends social science beyond individual ideas, researchers, environments, institutions and universities. These are practices that create, mobilise, sustain and challenge relations between actors in innovations, knowledge creation and various social activities. In other words, the archive represents the socio-material manifestation not only of the intellectual trajectory of a key education actor but the growing organisation of a whole scientific field at the time. 

Within the field of history of education, there is a growing interest in the movement of influential actors and texts that have crossed national borders. One of the main driving forces for influence, knowledge, and innovation is comparison, a tool used within the governing of education in diverse ways and with different intensities, over time, to shape education systems. This article looks beyond dichotomies such as the national versus the European or the global, in order to focus on those governing spaces and practices that lie in between bounded, predetermined, and preconceived entities and education organisations. Our locus of enquiry is education actors and their practices as they use comparison to make governing happen. The article examines the case of Swedish education (its policy actors, governing elites, and education practitioners) to examine this relation between comparison, governing, and the transnational.

This study reports on a large-scale implementation of Assessment for Learning (AfL) in a Swedish municipality. The implementation was founded on two principles: (1) teaching should be informed by educational research; (2) to be successful teachers’ professional development needs to be based in everyday classroom practice. From these principles, AfL was chosen as a strand of educa- tional research to inform teaching and ‘Teacher Learning Communities’ were chosen as a vehicle for professional development and for implementing AfL practices. Findings indicate that the project has been successful in bringing about a change in how teachers talk about teaching and learning and in changing teachers’ pedagogical practice towards AfL. Findings also suggest that AfL prac- tices are mostly teacher-centred, which means that the teachers still take most of the responsibility for the assessment. This leads to high workload for the teach- ers and may also hinder students from taking responsibility for their learning. 

Whereas early 19th century international comparisons were mainly found in travelling accounts, the second half of the 19th century offered new ways of comparison through international exhibitions (Dittrich 2010). The international World’s fairs were among the “few genuinely international cultural institutions” of their time (ibid., 17). When opening the first World’s fair exhibition in London in 1851, Prince Albert of the United Kingdom declared the importance of education, but it was in London in 1862 that education first got its own department at a World’s fair (Giberti 2002, Werner 2008, Ekström 2010, Lundahl & Lawn 2014). From the start, the international exhibitions contributed to make comparisons between states, based around identity and production, increasingly transparent and organized. Together they constituted a new mode of production in education, parallel to that of schooling.

Investigating the history of comparative education implies a transnational perspective on history. A transnational perspective on history pays interest to contacts between communities, polities and societies and their exchanges, interactions, integrations and de-coupling. We also need to look at the trends, patterns, organisations, individuals that exist between and within our different historical entities (Saunier 2013) – the ones mainly representative for being transnational.

This paper is about the people “allowed” to become transnational in the sense of learning and sharing at the international scenery constituted by the World’s fair. More specifically it is about the parliamentary debates in Sweden were it was decided how much Sweden could afford to pay for participating with own exhibits at ten major World’s fairs (1851 – 1904), and how much Sweden was prepared to fund “learning journeys” to these fairs.

The analyses of the parliamentary debates show that becoming international was not an obvious thing – who was supposed to go and what interest would it gain? Even pedagogical issues were raised: is it possible to learn something from just studying it at an exhibition? How much can we say about Sweden without claiming too much, and what if we “loose” compared to other countries? These are questions about representations in international comparison and about who should have access to it. We can easily find them in the history of international comparisons, but they are just as important today.

This paper is part of a four-paper panel called: The Rise of Comparative Governance in Education - exhibitions, trade, sun trips and the visual

References

Dittrich, K (2010), Experts Going Transnational: Education at World Exhibitions during the Second Half of the Nineteenth Century. University of Portsmouth.

Giberti, B. (2002) Designing the Centennial. A History of the 1876 International Exhibition in Philadelphia. Kentucky: The University Press of Kentucky

Gorur, R. (2011) ANT on the PISA Trail: Following the statistical pursuit of certainty, Educational Philosophy and Theory, 43:sup1, 76-93, DOI: 10.1111/ j.1469-5812.2009.00612.x

Ekström, A. (2010) Viljan att se – viljan att synas: Medieumgänge och publik kultur runt 1900 [The will to appear, the will to see: media relations and public culture around 1900]. Stockholm: Carlssons förlag, 2010.

Lundahl, C. & Lawn, M. (2014): The Swedish Schoolhouse: a Case study in Transnational influences in Education at the 1870s World's fairs. Peadagica Historicahttp://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/.VCJSN0u0zJw.

Saunier, P-Y (2013). Transnational history. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Werner, J. (2008) Medelvägens estetik. Sverigebilder i USA [Middle way aesthetics. Pictures of Sweden in USA] Hedemora: Gidlunds.   

FRÅN INLEDNINGEN:

Det senaste decenniet har pedagogisk forskning och skolutveckling allt mer kommit att handla om värdet av bedömning för elevers och studenters kunskapsutveckling i skola och högskola. Jag vill därför ta tillfället i akt och diskutera hur nya praktiker kring bedömning kan ta sig uttryck och då särskilt med fokus på feedback, eller återkoppling. Jag utgår från centrala artiklar om feedback i skolan men använder också exempel från högre utbildning, då en hel del utmaningar nog kan sägas vara generella för all utbildning. Jag ger också några exempel på hur jag själv arbetat med bedömning och feedback i mina egna kurser. Efter en introduktion av centrala begrepp och det aktuella forskningsläget behandlar jag i tur och ordning hur vi kan tänka om vad det är som ska bedömas och ges återkoppling på, när vi kan och bör ge återkoppling i lärandeprocessen samt hur denna återkoppling kan utformas. 

I denna text beskrivs hur debatten, eller diskursiva kampen om utbildningspolitiken, kom till uttryck i tidskriften Krut (Kritisk utbildningstidskrift) särskilt vad gäller betygsfrågan, eller som den då benämndes: betygskampen. Varför engagerade sig Krut i betygskampen och vad ledde det till?, hur såg den kamp, eller motmakt, ut som bedrevs och vad fick den inte fram? samt, hur kan vi mer övergripande förstå diskursiv kamp, dess möjligheter och begränsningar?

Fokus ligger på de första åren efter tidskriftens tillblivelse till några år in på 1980-talet när betygskampen ebbar ut något.

The International Encyclopaedia of Education, IEE (edited by Husén and Postlethwaite 1985) had as its ambition to be the first true international encyclopaedia of education. This meant breaking with the ethnocentrism, they thought had characterized earlier educational encyclopaedias, as well as reaching out to educational systems in the Third World.

Through a closer reading of IEE it is possible to explore issues related to the construction of canonical texts. The purpose of this paper is to provide an understanding of the re/production encyclopaedic knowledge of international education. Issues of representativeness in what is displayed as internationally valid knowledge and knowledge of international education, will be discussed. I will use IEE articles as well as archive material consisting of meeting protocols and editorial correspondence from the Torsten Husén personal archive in The National Archives, Sweden.

Research about re/production of knowledge is often interested in the (micro) processes that shape scientific knowledge (e.g. Latour & Woolgar 1979/1986, Woolgar 1988, Knorr Cetina 1999, Ringer 2000,). What kinds of processes, decisions, problems, relations leads to the specific entries in an encyclopaedia? If we add to this an international dimension these questions relate to the new historiographies in education and the ways in which knowledge is produced on national and international levels (e.g. Schriewer & Martínez 2004, Lawn & Grosvenor 2005, Lawn and Grek 2012, Landahl & Lundahl 2013).

Encyclopaedias often claim to be collections of facts. Typically we perceive facts as ‘unconstructed by anyone’ (Latour & Woolgar 1979/1986). But producing an encyclopaedia is not a straightforward and simple editorial process. Sections, headings, topics and the structure of the thematic articles are constantly changed based on new insights and on circumstances not possible to control for.

In this paper I will focus on the 160 country reports in IEE. I will investigate the author guidelines and how these articles were structured. I will look at differences and similarities between them (using NVivo analysis) and also investigate what countries did not get an entrance, and what might have been the reason for that.

Expected results: Editing IEE was not only about collecting pre-existing truths and facts about international education systems; it was also about constructing the image of such a collection. This image might be quite representative as a whole, but will be disputable in detail; the specific writers involved and other editorial circumstances characterize it.

This article concerns a special kind of educational knowledge which is neither practical nor academic or political – but all at the same time. The particular knowledge that is investigated is a co-produced knowledge about students and their performances in school during the 1940s. This knowledge was produced and spread by new social and discursive fields developed to both reflecting and making possible a new school organisation. It is argued that this knowledge while foremost supporting the Swedish reform towards a comprehensive school system in the 1940s, had looping effects on academic theories and on educational practice.

FRÅN INLEDNINGEN:

På västra sidan av Central park i New York vid 79 gatan, inte alls lång ifrån det berömda minnesmärket över John Lennon, står sedan 1877 ett svenskt skolhus som benämns The Swedish Cottage. Skolhuset byggdes ursprungligen av svenskt trä och av svenska hantverkare till världsutställningen i Filadelfia 1876. Hur kom det sig att Sverige gjorde denna i jämförelse ganska kraftfulla ansträngning att ställa ut ett helt skolhus? Var skolhuset representativt, eller vad annars kan det sägas ha representerat? Vad hade skolhuset för effekt på besökarna på världsutställningen, och hade den svenska ansträngningen i USA någon återverkanseffekt hemma i Sverige? Jag ska försöka ge svar på dessa frågor utifrån arkivmaterial, officiella handlingar från världsutställningarna och med hjälp av tidingsartiklar.

Ethnography of historical texts as a way of understanding scientific knowledge production.  How does a fact become a fact? This question puzzled the Polish-Jewish microbiologist Ludwik Fleck (1896–1961) who in the 1930s developed the first system of the historical philosophy and sociology of science. In Fleck’s footprint followed Kuhn, Knorr Cetina, Latour, Woolgar and others who from different angles contributed to what todays is acknowledge as Science and technology studies (STS), where questions concerning knowledge production and disseminations are discussed (see further Serder & Lundahl 2021). Even if the forerunners such as Fleck and Kuhn made use of history it is not that common today within the tradition of STS to have a historical perspective. In this paper ethnography of historical texts (Nimmo 2011) is used to make an observable laboratory for knowledge production out of the rich archive of the educational scholar Torsten Husén (1916-2009), and then in particular the part of the archive concerning the editing of the International Encyclopaedia of Education (1984, 1995). Encyclopedias often claim to be collections of facts. Facts are usually perceived as naturally given or 'unconstructed by anyone' (Latour & Woolgar 1979). The International Encyclopaedia of Education in particular claimed to be geographically and culturally non-biased – i.e. not ethnocentric. But producing an encyclopaedia is not an independent and objective editorial process. Describing how an encyclopaedia comes into being can clearly be seen as an investigation of a very specific social knowledge practice, that is biased and circumstantial while at the same time claiming to be objective and permanent (Primus & Lundahl 2020). The chapter builds on an analysis of over 4000 pages of correspondence concerning the management and editorial process for the two editions of IEE. It will be described how this data illuminates different processes of editing and publishing knowledge: e.g. administrative and management matters, social aspects (friendship, trusts/distrust in authors, resolving conflicts), content and dissemination matters. 

References 

Latour, B., & Woolgar, S. (1979). Laboratory life: The construction of scientific facts. Princeton University Press.

Nimmo, R. (2011). Actor-network theory and methodology: Social research in a more-than-human world. Methodological Innovations Online, 6(3), 108-119.

Primus, F., & Lundahl, C. (2020). The peripherals at the core of androcentric knowledge production: an analysis of the managing editor’s knowledge work in The International Encyclopedia of Education (1985). Paedagogica Historica, 1-17.

Lundahl, C. & Serder, M (2021). Vetenskapsstudier (STS) och aktör-nätverksteori (ANT). Jober, A. & Serder, M. (2021). Vetenskapliga teorier för lärare. Stockholm: Natur och kultur

Whereas early 19th century international comparisons were mainly found in travelling accounts, the second half of the 19th century offered new ways of comparison through international exhibitions (Dittrich, 2010). The international World’s fairs were among the “few genuinely international cultural institutions” of their time (ibid., 17). 

During the late 20th century Sweden participated with exhibitions at the World’s fairs, roughly, every third year, where industry and art products were put on display, but also products and information from the education system. How come Sweden started to participate at these early international comparisons? What arguments were used, what critical points were raised and what experiences grew out from this? 

Investigating the mediating role that the World’s fairs had on educational ideas and technologies implies a transnational perspective on history. Transnational history is about contacts among communities, polities and societies and their exchanges, interactions, integrations and de-coupling. Having a transnational perspective on history means acknowledging and assessing foreign contributions to design, taste, strategies, politics and future hopes (Saunier, 2013). We also need to acknowledge the emotions involved when it comes to internationalization.

In the case of education, the power of the World’s fair exhibitions has been related to the notion of accountability (Sobe & Boven, 2014) and to aesthetic normativity (Lundahl, 2016). In this paper governing with exhibitions is elaborated as an ‘appeal to emotion’ or argumentum ad passions. Appeals to emotions are about the manipulation of the recipient's emotions in order to win an argument, especially in the absence of factual evidence. This can include appeal to consequences, to fear, to flattery, to pity, to ridicule, to spite, to wishful thinking etc (Nico Frijda, Antony Manstead and Sasha Bem, 2000; Kimball, 2004). 

This paper is about the arguments used in when Sweden started to participate at the World’s fairs. More specifically it is about the parliamentary debates in Sweden where it was decided how much Sweden could afford to pay for participating with own exhibits at ten major World’s fairs (1851 – 1904), and the arguments used. The paper will show that the winning arguments were more often about nationalism than about international gains. Further, if rational ‘cost benefit’ arguments would have won, Sweden would most probably not have participated, rather, emotional arguments – often related to patriotism – tended to nullify every other kind of argument, allowing for participation. 

The paper highlights the importance to take into account appeal to emotions as a way of governing that sometimes actually can be more, or at least as, successful as commonly recognized governing strategies such as ‘governing by numbers’. 

References 

Dittrich, Klaus (2010), Experts Going Transnational: Education at World Exhibitions during the Second Half of the Nineteenth Century. University of Portsmouth.

Kimball, Robert H. “A Plea for Pity.” Philosophy and Rhetoric. Vol. 37, Issue 4. (2004): 301–316. Print.

Lundahl, C. (2016). Swedish Education Exhibitions and Aesthetic Governing at World's Fairs in the Late Nineteenth Century. Nordic Journal of Educational History3, no. 2 (2016): 3–30.

Frijda, Nico H., Antony SR Manstead, and Sacha Bem. "The influence of emotions on beliefs." Emotions and beliefs: How feelings influence thoughts (2000): 1-9.

Saunier, P-Y (2013). Transnational history. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Noah W. Sobe and David T. Boven, ”Nineteenth-century World’s Fairs as accountability systems: Scopic Systems, Audit Practices and Educational Data,” Education Policy Analysis Archives, 22no. 118 (2014)

The field of educational science displays some specific features that are closely intertwined with temporal and spatial contexts, historical and educational knowledge, the need for reform, and scientific self-reflection. This paper investigates the impact of various contextual factors on the history of educational science in Sweden, covering the period from the 1910s to the 2020s. In the early 20th century, the first education professors primarily came from backgrounds in psychology and philosophy. Their scholarly work focused on exploring the historical evolution of educational thought, delving into influential figures such as Descartes, Rousseau, The Jesuits, and various teaching and learning practices. This early historical discourse played a key role in legitimising education as a structured domain of knowledge with a rich tradition.

Another notable aspect of historiography in education arose concurrently with the comprehensive school reforms of the mid-20th century. The story that enveloped these reforms, particularly in the 1970s and 1980s, was closely tied to the idea of ‘social engineering’ in education. This branch of historiography aimed to corroborate the reforms and the ever-growing nexus between educational science and policy. Over the subsequent decades, there was a rising interest in education within the History faculty, with a focus on micro and social aspects. However, there was little attention paid to the role and development of educational science. Currently, there is a new approach to the history of educational science that can be seen, encompassing its knowledge production from both a global, transnational perspective and a social constructivist viewpoint and thus introducing a self-reflection both in educational science and historiography. 

This paper is built upon an inaugural speech I gave at Örebro University on 1 October 2014. I start by positioning the disciplinary subject ‘Pedagogik’ within the larger field of ‘Utbildningsvetenskap’ [educational research] and I claim that ‘Pedagogik’ can serve the purpose of being an especially reflexive discipline within the field of ‘Utbildningsvetenskap’ based on its tradition and strength in the fields of knowledge production, knowledge dissemination and learning. Thereafter, I position myself in the discipline of education as a curricular theorist with a particular interest in the retrospective sociology of knowledge. My research emphasizes the processes and the context of knowledge production as well as the correspondence between actors, places and networks. I give three examples from my own research to illustrate the complexities of the production, visualisation and use of knowledge: the transnational flows of ideas at the world fairs; the production and editorial work of the International Encyclopaedia of Education; and the use of international comparisons of assessment systems in local politics. I conclude by stressing that a reflexive ‘Pedagogik’ has important politics of its own when it is used to scrutinise the structures and conditions that build up everyday discourses in and about education.

Between 1946 and 1956 the Swedish Psychological and Pedagogical Institute organised eleven summer courses for the purpose of training teachers in intelligence testing. Approximately 600 primary school teachers from all over Sweden participated. The courses were held with help from representatives from the Universities, especially from the discipline of Psychology and pedagogy. The aim was to make these teachers the first gatekeeper instance that met and directed the youngest pupils (age 7) to ordinary classes or into special classes. The paper investigates the course leaders and the participants of these courses as well as the content taught. One finding is that the teachers practiced their testing skills for a couple of weeks on pupils from unprivileged social groups sent to summer camps by the state. Not only did the government give the children a summer holiday in the Stockholm archipelago at the “Island of Children”, they also returned home with their intelligence measured. The paper also discusses how these courses were ‘training camps’ for the younger generation of educational scholars having to teach these courses. It is also argued that researches and teachers were part of a larger change in the politics of IQ, simplifying the processes of intelligence measurement in order to screen the complete population of children, not just those who could be assumed to have learning disabilities – thus making the IQ-testing a public familiarity as well as the stratification the children that often followed from it.

The paper makes use of STS tools and consepts. STS theories make visible the work that is required to make certain understandings of fact-making, truths and rationalities stick as common sense or scientific beliefs (Sismondo 2010). The questions of interest to STS are pragmatic and profoundly practical and they help us investigate how certain knowledge has come to be regarded as knowledge in the first place, and the consequences thereof (Latour 1987). The paper draws on archive studies in the archive of the Swedish Psychological and Pedagogical Institute and relates specific findings to a more general analyses of the history of assessment (Kamin 1974; Danziger 1990; Porter 1996).

Between 1946 and 1956, the Swedish Psychological and Pedagogical Institute (SPPI) organised several summer courses for the purpose of training teachers in intelligence testing. The aim of the courses was to make these teachers the first gatekeepers who would meet and direct the youngest pupils into ordinary classes or into special classes. This paper investigates the course leaders and the participants in these courses, as well as the content taught. It is argued that these testing courses are examples of a shift in assessment in education from trusting teachers’ ‘judgements’ of pupils’ skills and abilities to externally standardising the ‘measure’ of these merits. It is also argued that researchers and teachers were part of a larger change in the politics of IQ. SPPI’s role within this process was that of a new and modern institution serving society: making IQ testing a public familiarity and the stratification of children that often followed from it.

For many historians of education, the emergence of a modern education system after the mid-nineteenth century was a national and regional process, neatly and carefully closed off within the borders of the nation. However, these accounts have often disregarded the effects of the flows of cross-border ideas and technologies, such as international comparisons, lesson-drawing, policy diffusion and travel, as well as local adaptations and translations of education policy originating elsewhere. The purpose of this paper is to shed light on the relations between Swedish education and the international scene when it comes to policy and practice formation. The field of study is the international World´s Fairs of 1862–1904. Looking at what Sweden displayed, and understanding how visitors perceived it, the paper raises questions concerning how exhibitions like these worked as mediators of educational ideals. The focus will be on the dissemination of aesthetic ideals, and the paper will show that the World’s Fairs were platforms for an aesthetic normativity that had governing effects locally as well as globally.

In this paper, I offer a new perspective on the intended and unintended effects of international large-scale assessments like PISA, and investigate the image of PISA as an aesthetic artefact. Using Jacques Rancière’s diptych The Aesthetics of Politics and The Politics of Aesthetics, I analyse more than 4,000 digital images retrieved from systematic Google searches in 12 different countries. The results show clear differences between low- and high-performing countries concerning the images selected to present PISA results. There is clearly a ‘pictorial discourse’ that works in tandem with the dominant educational policies. I argue that this kind of ‘aesthetic governing’ involves the possibility of touching people in other, and maybe even more profound ways, compared to rational arguments.

This paper concerns how expectations on public education are framed in policy discourse, and especially its pictorial representation of OECD’s PISA scores. Respectively 400 images in eight high scoring countries and eight low-performing countries are compared. Some clear differences appear. Strikingly PISA is mainly represented by statistical graphs. But we can also see that there is a tendency towards more pictures of children in PISA-successful countries. In low-performing there are instead a lot of pictures of concerned adults. One country, Sweden, that for long severed from a so-called PISA shock is then further analysed and the origin, as well as the reproduction of these images are traced. The overall purpose of the article is to contribute a new perspective on how representations of education can be gathered and analysed, by focusing on the politics of graphical representations of PISA scores. It is argued the there is an aesthetical dimension in the politics of PISA that frames our picture of education; that shows us what is important and what we should look at. There is also a political dimension in the aesthetics of PISA representations that moves our senses and emotions concerning education – i.e. how to feel about it.  

In the short story “The Library of Babel” Lois Jorge Borges distinguishes between different ways of perceiving issues of interpretation: the “purifiers” try to destroy every book that is meaningless while the “inquisitors” seek the canonical Book of books that reveals the meaning of all the others; it “is the formula and perfect compendium of all the rest” (Borges 1941/1962). This perfect compendium is something that has not only attracted the mythological librarian, The Man of Books, as described by Borges, but also to a high degree people of today (Keller 2011).

There are obvious gains of publishing a handbook or an encyclopedia from a market perspective, but what are the gains from a research perspective? Who will undertake such a work, what would be the scholarly motives of the editors working on it, how is that work carried out and what mechanisms shape the content of it? By investigating the archives of one of the most ambitious Encyclopedias of education, The International Encyclopedia of Education, IEE 1985 (cf. Phillips et al 1986), I will explore issues related to the construction of canonical texts. The main purpose of the paper is to provide an understanding of the re/production of canonical knowledge of education. In the paper I will investigate these topics with help from an archive material consisting of meeting protocols and editorial correspondence from the Torsten Husén archive in Stockholm National Archives. Husén was the Editor in Chief for the IEE together with Postlethwaite (Husén, T. & Postlethwaite 1985).

There exist of course several guidelines on how to edit encyclopedias (e.g. Aschmore 1962, Sillis 1969, Beede 2001, Edwards 2012), but it is difficult to find research about the actual work of editing such books. Most of what can be found is biographical notes.

Investigating the becoming of an encyclopedia can probably best be resembled to the work carried out within the Sociology of knowledge and/or History of knowledge. These shall not be considered as coherent research disciplines but for this paper some traits from them are particularly relevant. One basic assumption is that knowledge (in an encyclopedia) is human knowledge – it is produced under social and historical circumstances and reflects society and particular needs (Charle, Schriewer and Wagner 2004, Schriewer, J. & Martínez 2004, Wagner and Wittrock 1991).

If we accept encyclopedic knowledge as a reflection of certain needs and developed within certain systems, we can expect the encyclopedia to be part of also a larger educational socio-political context. To put it differently, it is not only “truth criteria” (or the preservation/development of knowledge) that can be expected as reasons to produce an encyclopedia. Encyclopedias can be treated as we treat other kinds of historical knowledge. We have knowledge practices that develop and change over time, but that always are preoccupied by gathering, analysing, disseminate and employ knowledge. We accumulate, refine and dived knowledge; we loose knowledge or reject knowledge. Knowledge is geographical, sociological and chronological (cf. Burke 2012). In other words we can expect editors of an encyclopedia to struggle with geographical and periodical frames as well as issues of deciding on relevance and limitations of content (and of authors).

The main questions answered in the paper are: What kinds of processes, decisions, problems and relations can we find behind an encyclopedia, including the idea of making it at the first place? If and how does these circumstantial conditions in the re/production of knowledge to the IEE effect the structure of it and the final content?

Method

The research method used in this project is basic historical reading; trying to take as much cross references as possible within the archive material itself and from e.g. reviews of the IEE from 1985 and 1986 and autobiographies from editorial members. In this way it is possible to validate interpretations and claims. Contemporary biographical notes on the editing of handbooks or encyclopedias have some perspectives that are helpful when looking into detail of the editorial work. Some recurrent issues that are dealt with in these notes, that helped structure my own material are: Which considerations provided the necessary strong motivation, given that considerable time investment over an extended period of time could be anticipated? Related to that, what opportunities or contributions could be associated with the creation of such a work? Who was the intended/implied readership? What considerations guided decisions regarding topic and author selection? What particular opportunities, what editorial constraints characterized the project, and how were they addressed? (e.g. Byrnes 2011, Ross and Chanty 2009). In total the Torsten Husén archive builds up to 38 running meters of which about three foot (eight volumes) are IEE material. The documents in these volumes are either chronologically ordered or alphabetically. I have briefly looked at approximately 3000 – 4000 documents. The actual manuscripts and how they developed from editorial comments are not available in this archive, only the comments. The paper is a first attempt to find some researchable themes among all these documents. I have limited the query to the early formative phase of IEE. The paper is structured along three major themes: Deciding on purposes and target groups; Producing and indexing the content; Dealing with contingences and interruptions.

Expected Outcomes

Why take on such a time consuming and demanding project as that of editing an Encyclopedia? A common answer in biographical notes has to do with the opportunity of putting your subject that you worked on for such a long time (editors tend to be prominent) on the map (cf. Chapelle 2011). Husén clearly wanted to illustrate the potential of comparative and international education. It also seems as he believed that by doing this, he could really help the Third world to develop, and then not as many earlier encyclopedias had, from a particular ethnocentric perspective but from the global perspective of a united educational research community. IEE filled a need at the end of the cold war in creating a sense of objectivity and coherence in an increasingly diversified discipline, in a less divided world. IEE is clearly an example of the globalisation of scientific knowledge, but making it was not based on theory or on a well-defined methodology per se. It was an explorative and circumstantial endeavour. There is none, and can never exist any, Book of books – at least not in the field of education. An encyclopedia, even if ten volumes thick, is quickly out-dated. Editing an encyclopedia is not only about collecting pre-existing truths and facts about what for example educational research and studies are all about, it is also about constructing the image of such a collection – presented as an index. This image might be quite representative at large, but will be disputable in detail; it is characterized by the specific writers involved. IEE contracted some 500 authors out of 25000 researches in education 1982 (preface 1982). To the layman though, an index with 45000 entries, as it had, will give an impression that the reader had in its hand, the Books of books.

References

Ashmore, H. S. (1962).Editing the Universal Encyclopedia. American Behavioural Scientist 1962;6 (15), p. 15-18 Beede B.R. (2001). Editing a specialized encyclopedia. Journal of Scholarly Publishing, 2001;33(1), p. 1–10. Borges, L. J. (1941/1962). The Library of Babel. Extract: http://jubal.westnet.com/hyperdiscordia/library_of_babel.html Burke, P. (2012). A Social History of Knowledge. Volume II. From the Encyclopédie to Wikipedia. Cambridge: Polity Press. Byrnes, H. (2011) Perspectives. The Modern Language Journal 95 (2011), p. 628-629. Chapelle, C A. (2011) Why Would Anyone Want to Edit an Encyclopedia? The Modern Language Journal 95 (2011), p. 632-633. Charle, C., Schriewer, J. & Wagner, P. eds. (2004). Transnational Intellectual Net¬works: Forms of Academic Knowledge and the Search for Cultural Identities. Frankfurt/New York: Campus. Edwards, L. (2012). Editing Academic Books in the Humanities and Social Sciences: Maximizing Impact for Effort. Journal of Scholarly Publishing, 2012;44 (1), p. 61-74. Husén, T. & Postlethwaite, T.N. (ed.) (1985). The international encyclopedia of education: research and studies. Oxford: Pergamon. Keller, (2011). The Symbiosis Between Publisher and Librarian. The Modern Language Journal 95 (2011), p. 631-632. Phillips, D., Mallinson, V., Wilson, K., Gruber, K-H., and Backhouse, J. K. (1986). The International Encyclopedia of Education. Oxford Review of Education, 1986;12 (1), p. 77-93. Ross, J. I. & Shanty, F. (2009). Editing Encyclopedias for Fun and Aggravation. Publishing Research Quarterly, 25 (3), p. 159-169. Schriewer, J. & Martínez, C. (2004). Constructions of Internationality in Education. In: The Global Politics of Educational Borrowing and Lending, ed. Steiner-Khamsi, G. New York & London: Teachers College Press, Columbia University, pp. 29-53. Sills, D. L. (1969). Editing a Scientific Encyclopedia. Science 1969 (14), p. 1169-1175. Wagner, P. & Wittrock, B. (1991). States, Institutions, and Discourses: A Comparative Perspective on the Structuration of the Social Sciences. In P. Wagner, B. Wittrock & R. Whitley. Discourses on Society. The Shaping of the Social Science Disciplines. Dordrecht, Boston, London: Kluwer Academinc Publishers.