Reading primers are among the educational media that are of particular significance in times of emphatic political change. 70 years after the end of World War II the development, design, content and use of reading primers in European countries in 1945 will be addressed, from a comparative perspective, in a workshop scheduled for November 13-14, 2015 in Braunschweig (Germany).
The workshop is jointly organised by the Georg Eckert Institute for International Textbook Research (GEI), the Research Library for the History of Education (BBF) at the German Institute for International Educational Research (Berlin) and the Reading Primers Special Interest Group (RP-SIG) of the “International Society for Historical and Systematic Research on Textbooks and Educational Media e.V.”
The organisers wish to draw together scholarship from various countries to represent a truly European range of approaches and findings in an underdeveloped field of inquiry.
Submissions – in English or German – may address one or more of the following aspects:
- actors: authors, illustrators, publishers, political authorities, teachers and learners, including specific target groups such as linguistic minorities or pupils with special needs
- content: examples might be the repercussions of war, reconstruction after war, politics, childhood, gender roles, ideas of national belonging, etc.
- educational aspects (elements of pedagogy): for instance, approaches to teaching and learning; approaches to tasks and evaluation, etc.
- materiality and design: for example possible restrictions related to the supply of paper; “old” and “new” designs, etc.
- processes: from development, production and dissemination to the use of primers, including economic, social and political conditions surrounding these issues.
In addition to sessions with paper presentations a special session will give room for a panel discussion that will address both comparative aspects of the workshop theme and general issues of researching the history of primers in a comparative perspective.
The full Call for Papers can be downloaded here.
Deadline for title & abstract submission (c. 400 words): April 26, 2015. Authors of successful proposals will be notified by: May 24, 2015. Deadline for first draft submission: October 11, 2015.
Please send your proposals to Simona Szakacs.
Book History and Print Culture Network 