ISCHE 45 – Natal, Brazil.

“(De)coloniality and Diversity in the Histories of Education”

ISCHE, the Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Norte, the Instituto Federal do Rio Grande do Norte, and the Brazilian Society of the History of Education would like to invite scholars to submit their contributions and to participate with their research in the 2024 edition of the International Standing Conference for the History of Education, taking place on 18-21 August 2024 at the campus of the Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Norte in Natal, Brazil. The in-person conference is followed by an online event on Sept 5-6.

Keynote speakers

Zandra Pedraza – Universidad de los Andes, Colombia

Zandra Pedraza is a Colombian anthropologist and Full Professor at the Universidad de los Andes in Bogotá. Her research interests focus on historical and pedagogical anthropology and the relationships among body, education, and modern subjectivities. She has studied biopolitics, childhood, and emotional education in Colombia and Latin America. She is currently doing research on emotional relationships and education between children and adults and on the teaching and learning of writing as a bodily activity.

In a Minor Key: Education for the Postcolonial Order in Latin America
The shaping of republican societies in Latin America was tied to the introduction and development of school education. The insertion and deployment of the school institution were at the core of the political and cultural transformations during the second part of the 19th century. The debates and innovations around the meaning, form, and scope of school education were not limited then, as they are not today, to the school itself. The dominant character of the social order brought about by the school also includes minor tonalities that have sought to harmonize various educational processes, as necessary as schooling, for social relations, new subjectivities, family forms, and citizenship practices to take root. In the context of internal coloniality proper to these decades, women’s education, corporal education, and sentimental education illustrate several of the ambiguities and tensions intrinsic to the new social order. These examples recognize the minor tones in which ideas, practices, and experiences are propagated in tandem with the deployment of the school institution and, in general, teach some particularities of modernity in Latin America.

Pierre Guidi – Université Paris Cité, France

Pierre Guidi is a researcher at the Ceped (Université Paris Cité, IRD). His current research focus is on the history of women’s education and activism in Ethiopia. He is the author of the book Educating the Nation in Ethiopia, 1941-1991, Addis Ababa: AdéBooks, 2024. Guidi also co-edited (with Ellen Vea Rosnes and Jean-Luc Martineau) the book History through Narratives of Education in Africa, (Leiden: Brill, 2024) and (with Jean-Luc Martineau and Florence Wenzek) L’école en mutation. Politiques et dynamiques scolaires en Afrique (années 1940-1980) (Toulouse: Presses universitaires du Midi, 2024). He has been teaching the history of colonial education at Université Paris Cité and Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne for the past 10 years.

Addressing ambiguity: African educators confronted with colonization (1880s-1950s)
In the 1880s, Edward Blyden, director of Liberia College, elaborated an educational curriculum to struggle against the colonial epistemology which denied black people the ability to be subjects of knowledge. In the 1920-30s, on the shores of Lake Victoria, Africans educated in mission schools produced a rich corpus of literature in local languages to create an autonomous intellectual space for themselves, and to struggle over intellectual authority against the colonizers. In the 1940-50s, in Ethiopia, Senedu Gebru, a women educationalist, thought about a balanced Ethiopian and European education as a tool to equip girl students to be first-class citizens in the name of Ethiopian independence.

I will draw on these examples to demonstrate how African educationalists who wanted to challenge colonial power relations maneuvered strategically and, at times, ambiguously to claim a specific educational place. I will further argue that to address the question of ambiguity – that of the actors of the past and our own in the present – is critical for historians of education in the postcolonial world.

Adriana Maria Paulo da Silva – Federal University of Pernambuco, Brazil

Adriana Maria Paulo da Silva has a degree (BA and BSc) in History from Universidade Federal Fluminense (1994), a Master’s in Education from Universidade Federal Fluminense (1999) and a PhD in History from Universidade Federal de Pernambuco (2006). She is currently an Associate Professor at the Federal University of Pernambuco (UFPE), and a professor at the Postgraduate Programme in Education and the Profhistory program at UFPE. She leads the History of Education and Educability Practices in the Ibero-American World Research Group (GHEPEMI). She was coordinator and vice-coordinator of WG 02 (History of Education) of the National Association of Postgraduate Studies and Research in Education (ANPEd) between 2018 and 2021. She is a member of the Human Research Ethics Committee at UFPE. She is a member of the Humanities and Social Sciences Body and an ad hoc member of the National Research Ethics Committee (CONEP). She coordinates the teaching training program for undergraduate degrees at UFPE. She has experience in researching the History of Education, with an emphasis on the 19th century and the History of the Brazilian Empire, and in teaching History for basic education. Her main areas of research and teaching include the social History of education, the social History of teaching labor, historiography, oral History, and history teaching. She has been involved in research ethics since 2006.

ISCHE 45 website

The conference will receive submissions through six thematic strands and four Standing Working Groups (SWG)

Thematic strands (A-Strands):

1. (De)colonizing processes in educational history: agents, policies, reforms and resistance.
2. Diversity and intersectionality in educational history: e.g. race, class, gender, indigeneity, ethnic and linguistic minorities, disabilities or sexual, religious and political diversity and disagreement.
3. Tools and practices of diversity and (de)colonization: school cultures, teaching technologies, and educational strategies.
4. Diversity and (de)coloniality of educational histories in schools, museums and beyond: spaces and institutions.
5. The quest for diversity and (de)colonization in educational historiography: methods, archives and sources.
6. Diversity and (de)coloniality in teaching educational history: Which narratives of the past? Which pedagogies?

Participating Standing Working Groups (B-Strands):

1. Public Histories of Education
2. Notre tout puissant Empire du milieu: histories of secondary education
3. History of Knowledge in the History of Education
4. Observatory for the History of Education

Conference dates: 18-21 August 2024, in person, Natal, Brazil and 5-6 September 2024, online
Conference venue: Campus UFRN, Natal. Brazil
Conference webpage: www.ische45.com

Please click below to download the full CfP in one of ISCHE’s conference languages:
CfP- Englisch  CfP – French  CfP – German  CfP – Portuguese  CfP – Spanish

Please click below to download the call for papers of the participating SWGs:
CfP – Public Histories of Education
CfP – Notre tout puissant Empire du milieu: histories of secondary education
CfP – History of Knowledge in the History of Education
CfP – Observatory for the History of Education

Submissions are to be made via the ISCHE 45 submission system at: www.conftool.org/ische45

Registrations are to be made via the ISCHE conference system at:
www.conftool.org/ische45

• ISCHE membership needs to be active before the registration process to obtain a reduced conference fee
• Early Bird rate ends on 20 May 2024
• All conference fees can be found on the conference webpage: www.ische45.com/registration.html