Educational Research: The Importance and Effects of Institutional Spaces

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-viii

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2. Exploring a Multitude of Spaces in Education and Educational Research

   • Paul Smeyers, Marc Depaepe

   Pages 1-10

3. American Democracy and Harold D. Lasswell: Institutional Spaces of ‘Failure’ and ‘Success’, Present and Past

   • Lynda Stone

   Pages 11-29

4. The Power of the Parochial in Shaping the American System of Higher Education

   • David F. Labaree

   Pages 31-46

5. Crossing the Atlantic to Gain Knowledge in the Field of Psycho-Pedagogy: The 1922 Mission of Ovide Decroly and Raymond Buyse to the USA and the Travel Diary of the Latter

   • Marc Depaepe, Lieven D’hulst, Frank Simon

   Pages 47-60

6. The Emergence of Institutional Educational Spaces for Young Children: In Pursuit of More Controllability of Education and Development as Part of the Long-Term Growth of Educational Space in History

   • Pauline R. Schreuder, Jeroen J. H. Dekker

   Pages 61-77

7. A Different Training, a Different Practice: Infant Care in Belgium in the Interwar Years in the City and in the Countryside

   • Pieter Dhondt

   Pages 79-93

8. Disability, Rehabilitation and the Great War: Making Space for Silence in the History of Education

   • Pieter Verstraete

   Pages 95-113

9. Interpretation: The Space of Text

   • Richard Smith

   Pages 115-126

10. Exploring Educational Research as a Multilayered Discursive Space

    • Stijn Mus

    Pages 127-133

11. The Spaces of Mathematics: Dynamic Encounters Between Local and Universal

    • Karen François, Kathleen Coessens, Jean Paul Van Bendegem

    Pages 135-152

12. The Classroom Space: A Problem or a Mystery?

    • Ian Munday

    Pages 153-166

13. Spaces and Places in the Virtual University

    • Nicholas C. Burbules

    Pages 167-176

14. Material Contexts and Creation of Meaning in Virtual Places: Web 2.0 as a Space of Educational Research

    • Lynn Fendler, Karin Priem

    Pages 177-191

15. From Entrepreneurialism to Innovation: Research, Critique, and the Innovation Union

    • Naomi Hodgson

    Pages 193-209

16. Back Matter

    Pages 211-221

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This collection of fresh analyses aims to map the links between educational theory and research, and the geographical and physical spaces in which teaching is practiced and discussed. The authors combine historical and philosophical perspectives in examining the differing institutional loci of education research, and also assess the potential and the limitations of each. The contributors trace the effects of ‘space’ on educational practice in the classroom, in the broader institutions, and in the academic discipline of education—doing so for a range of international contexts. 

The chapters address various topics relating to the physical and geographical environment. How, for example, does geographical space shape researchers’ mental frameworks? How did the learning environments in which young children are taught today evolve? To what extent did parochialism shape America’s higher education system? How can our understanding of classroom practice be enhanced by concepts of space? The book acknowledges that texts themselves, as well as the research ‘arena’, are ‘spaces’ too, and notes the fascinating debate on the concept of space in the field of mathematics education. Indeed, as more and more students move online, the book analyses the rising importance of virtual spaces such as Web 2.0, which have major educational implications for researchers and students joining the innovative ‘virtual’ universities of the future.

This publication, as well as the ones that are mentioned in the preliminary pages of this work, were realized by the Research Community (FWO Vlaanderen / Research Foundation Flanders, Belgium) Philosophy and History of the Discipline of Education: Faces and Spaces of Educational Research.

• Academic discipline of education
• American system of higher education
• Classroom practice
• Classroom research
• Classroom space
• Concept of space
• Educational space
• Harold Lasswell
• Institutional failure
• Institutional spaces
• Learning spaces
• Meanings of 'space'
• Researchers' mental structures
• Shaping of educational research
• Spaces of educational research
• Understanding classroom practice
• Virtual university

Institutional spaces and places: what we do in them and what they do to us? Paul Smeyers, Marc Depaepe and Edwin Keiner have assembled a rich and varied collection, in which leading historians and philosophers of education bring much-needed critical attention to these matters. Covering the local and the universal, the concrete and the virtual, the metaphorical and the metaphysical, these essays challenge received assumptions and press questions of policy and practice in such a way as to chart new possibilities for educational research.

Paul Standish, Institute of Education, London, United Kingdom

If we consider that both 'education' and 'research' have become crucial myths in modern societies, the role and significance of 'educational research' cannot be underestimated. Smeyers, Depaepe and Keiner present a collection of essays that illuminate the sometimes subtle effects of institutional spaces on the practices and meanings of educational research. The wide rangeof practices and contexts addressed in this volume as well the analytical depth of the contributions makes this volume a major reference for all scholars interested in the critical dissection of 'educational research' as a scholarly practice.

Marcelo Caruso, Humboldt Universität zu Berlin, Institut für Erziehungswissenschaften, Berlin, Germany

• Faculty of Psychol. & Educational Sci, Ghent University, Ghent, Belgium

  Paul Smeyers

• Campus Kortrijk, Subfaculteit Psychologie en Pedagogische, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Kortrijk, Belgium

  Marc Depaepe

• Erziehungswissenschaftliche Fakultät, Univ. Erlangen-Nürnberg, Nürnberg, Germany

  Edwin Keiner

Policies and ethics