International Standing Working Group on Educational Media in Comparative Perspective within the International Standing Conference for the History of Education (ISCHE) Utrecht University, 26 – 29 August 2009

Deadline: 20 January 2009

Conveners: Eckhardt Fuchs (Georg Eckert Institute for International Textbook Research/University of Mannheim), Ian Grosvenor (University of Birmingham), and Daniel Lindmark (Umeå University)

The Standing Working Group on Educational Media in Comparative Perspective aims at investigating the history of learning and teaching media. The term “educational media” is used in a wide sense including not only material that is used in schools and other educational institutions but also all kind of media that, on the one hand, help children and young people to acquire knowledge and to appropriate their environment. On the other hand, it also addresses media that are produced to facilitate the teaching process – institutionally, public, and privately – for professional and lay educators. The SWG will discuss the history of different types of educational media, such as educational cinema, youth literature, textbooks and other teaching and learning material in school, exhibitions, theme parks, toys, comics and the Internet. The SWG intends to address these different types of educational media in a series of meetings scheduled for the next years. The goal is not just to examine the pedagogical aspects of educational media but also to draw attention to the social and cultural functions of these material artefacts in different historical contexts and in comparative perspective. The topic for the meeting in Utrecht in 2008 will be “Exhibitions and Museums as Means of Learning”. We invite contributions dealing with exhibitions, fairs, and museums as educational media for instruction. Since the overall conference theme of ISCHE 2009 is “Educating the People, the History of Popular Education”, proposals on the role of these media for popular education are particularly welcome. Your proposal should include an abstract of the presentation (about 500 words in English) and a short CV of no more than two pages, including a list of relevant publications. The deadline for submissions is 31 January 2009. The chosen applicants will be notified by 28 February 2009.

Proposals should be submitted (preferably by email) to: