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The purpose of this article is to introduce the themed section of History of Education Review on “The History of Knowledge and the History of Education”, comprising four empirical articles that together seek to bring the history of education into fuller dialogue with the approaches and methods of the nascent field of the history of knowledge.

This introductory article provides a broad overview of the history of knowledge for the benefit of historians of education, introduces the four themed section articles that follow, and draws out some of their overarching themes and concepts.

The history of knowledge concept of “arenas of knowledge” emerges as generative across the themed section. Authors also engage with problems of the legitimacy of knowledges, and with pedagogy as practice. In addition, focusing on colonial and postcolonial contexts raises reflexive questions about history of knowledge approaches that have so far largely been developed in European and North American scholarship.

The history of education has not previously been strongly represented among the fields that have gone into the formation of the history of knowledge as a synthetic, interdisciplinary approach to historical studies. Nor have historians of education much engaged with its distinguishing concepts and methodologies. The themed section also extends the history of knowledge itself through its strong focus on colonial and postcolonial histories.

This paper was originally presented as a keynote presentation to the annual conference of the ANZHES whose theme was “knowledge skills and expertise”. The purpose of this paper is to reflect on history as a field of study in the context of changing conditions and new debates about knowledge in the twenty-first century.

The paper reviews three important lines of sociological argument about changed conditions for knowledge: the case to “bring knowledge back in” to school curriculum; the contention that knowledge in universities is moving from “mode 1” to “mode 2” forms; and arguments about testing and audit culture effects on the practices of universities and schools. It then draws on interviews with historians and history teachers to show how they think about the form of their field, its value, and the impact of the changing conditions signalled in those arguments.

The paper argues that some features of the discipline which have been important to history continue to be apparent but are under challenge in the conditions of education institutions today and that there is a disjunction between teachers’ views of the value of history and those evident in the public political arena.

The paper draws on a major Australia Research Council funded study of “knowledge building across schooling and higher education” which focusses on issues of disciplinarity and the fields of physics and history.

The paper is intended as a new reflection on the field of value to those working as historians.

This article considers the impact of competing knowledge structures in teaching Australian Indigenous history to undergraduate university students and the possibilities of collaborative teaching in this space.

The authors, one Aboriginal and one non-Aboriginal, draw on a history of collaborative teaching that stretches over more than a decade, bringing together conceptual reflective work and empirical data from a 5-year project working with Australian university students in an introductory-level Aboriginal history subject.

It argues that teaching this subject area in ways which are culturally safe for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander staff and students, and which resist knowledge structures associated with colonial ways of conveying history, is not only about content but also about building learning spaces that encourage students to decolonise their relationships with Australian history.

This article considers collaborative approaches to knowledge transmission in the university history classroom as an act of decolonising knowledge spaces rather than as a model of reconciliation.

The attempt to recover the international origins of social and political thought is motivated by the unsatisfactory fragmentation of modern knowledge – by its failure to account for the intimate connections between theory and history in general and its international dimension in particular – and seeks to overcome these divides. This article provides an analysis of the theory/history divide and its role for the fragmentation of modern knowledge. Theoretically, it shows, this divide is rooted in, and reproduced by, the epistemic foundations of modern knowledge. Historically, the modern episteme arises from a crisis of imperial politics in the 18th century. This analysis suggests that theory, history, and the international are products rather than origins of modern social and political thought. These historical origins thus do not provide the basis for more integrated forms of knowledge. They do, however, reveal how the fragmentation of knowledge itself simultaneously serves and obscures the imperialist dimension of modern politics.

The purpose of this article is to investigate attempts to safeguard classical humanism in secondary schools by appealing to a cultural-historical link with Antiquity, voiced in the face of educational reforms in Sweden between 1865 and 1971.

By focusing on the content of the pedagogical journal Pedagogisk Tidskrift, the article highlights a number of examples of how an ancient historical lineage was evoked and how historical knowledge was mobilized and contested in various ways.

The article argues that the enduring negotiation over the educational need to maintain a strong link with the ancient past was strained due to increasing scholarly specialization and thus entangled in competing views on reform and what was deemed “traditional” or “modern”.

From a larger perspective, the conflict over the role of Antiquity in Swedish secondary schools reveals a trajectory for the history of education as part of and later apart from a general history of the humanities. Classical history originally served as a common past from which Swedish culture and education developed, but later lost this integrating function within the burgeoning discipline of Pedagogy. The findings demonstrate the value of bringing the newly (re)formed history of humanities and history of education closer together.

This chapter outlines some of the challenges in assessing teachers’ subject-matter knowledge. After reviewing traditional ways of mapping a domain, such as job analysis and “wisdom of practice,” the author alights on the two constructs, depth and breadth, that have come to define how teachers’ subject-matter knowledge is conceptualized. He argues that these two constructs constitute an impoverished vocabulary that misrepresents the complexity of the subject-matter knowledge teachers most need for effective instruction. He proposes an expanded set of constructs – differentiation and elaboration, qualification, integration, generativity, and epistemological knowledge – that better approximate the complexity of a subject-matter domain and serve as a better guide for creating an assessment system.

This chapter demonstrates how the University of Waikato in New Zealand adapted a global standard (the Library of Congress Classification) for local use by inscribing topics related to and about Māori history and people.

The findings are the result of using library catalogs and classifications as primary historical documents.

The University of Waikato’s classification simultaneously uses and implicitly critiques a universal system written from a U.S. vantage point. It seems to acknowledge the benefits and necessities of using a globally recognized standard, as well as a need to inscribe local, anticolonial perspectives into that system.

The research relies on historical documents, and some aspects related to purpose and attribution are difficult to ascertain.

The local adaptation of the Library of Congress Classification may serve as a model for other local adaptations.

This may bring new dimensions to thinking about colonialism and anticolonialism in knowledge organization systems. It contributes to ongoing conversations regarding indigenous knowledge organization practices.

Although scholars have examined Māori subject headings, research on local shelf classifications in New Zealand have not been objects of study in the context of global and local knowledge organization. This chapter brings an important classification to light.

The purpose of this paper is to understand the emergence of digital reformatting as a technique for preserving information within the cultural heritage preservation community by reviewing historical trends in modern preservation research.

This paper analyzes secondary sources, reviews and historical texts to identify trends in the intellectual and technological histories of preservation research, beginning with the first applications of the scientific method to combating book decay in the early nineteenth to the emergence of digitization techniques in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.

This paper identifies five major historical periods in the development of preservation knowledge: the early experimental era; era of microfilm experimentation; era of professionalization; era of digital library research; and the era of digital reformatting and mass digitization; and identifies three major trends in its development: empirical inquiry, standardization and centralization.

Findings reflect broad trends in the field of preservation, primarily in a United States context and are limited to the modern era of preservation research.

This paper's broad historical overview provides a reference for preservation professionals and students in library science or archives programs. Identifying historical trends enables practitioners to critically examine their own preservation techniques and make better decisions when adopting and using new preservation technologies.

This paper provides a unique perspective on the history of preservation knowledge that synthesizes existing historical research in order to identify periods and trends that enable a clearer understanding of digital reformatting in its historical emergence.

IN last month's Library World attention is drawn to the subject of literary history and its teaching by Mr. Sayers, who points out some weak points in the syllabus and examination scheme of the Library Association. His remarks recall the fact that this subject has always been a difficult and rather inflammable one to tackle, because wrapped up in it is that other exciting question of Language, which must be taken in connection with Literature when considered as a teaching subject. We understand that the Literary History syllabus of the L.A. is merely a compromise, which arose out of a tangle caused by the language difficulty. The draft scheme for the teaching of Literary History which was first submitted, provided for a very strict limitation of the subject to the great authors of all nations, according to a list which had been prepared. This scheme proposed to get over the language difficulty by allowing for all purposes the use of text‐books and translations in English, because it was felt to be utterly ridiculous to expect students to be equipped with first‐hand knowledge of Homer, Dante, Hafiz, Confucius, the Vedas, Moliére, Cervantes, Schiller, Virgil, Tolstoy, and other great authors. This proposal, which would have limited the requirements of the examination to a biographical and critical knowledge of about 300 or 400 of the greatest authors of all times, was rejected, and in its place was adopted the compromise to which Mr. Sayers and many others object. This compromise on the face of it, limits the examination to English Literature only, but, when more closely scanned, it will be found also to demand a most extraordinary knowledge of all kinds of foreign authors, in a form which has not yet been systematically recorded. Apart from this, the dimensions of an unlimited survey of English Literature are enormous, because there is no attempt at definition. All that can be gathered from the actual Examination Papers is that the examiners have largely confined themselves to the purely critical side of the subject. But students are not told that modern technical and scientific literature is excluded, nor is any indication given which will show that it is the “literature of power,” and not of “knowledge,” in which candidates are expected to be proficient. Now, it is perfectly well known to every reader that not 1 per cent. of the books published is literature at all. The output of printed matter all over the world consists mostly of Lamb's “books which are not books”—text‐books, ephemera, rubbish in general, and other nondescript essays in typographical art—which have no real place in a Literary History Syllabus. It was to get over this anomaly, and equip students with the knowledge mostly required in libraries—an acquaintance with “books which are not books”—that the original draft scheme for the Literary History syllabus imposed a limitation which should prove effective in confining the examination to pure literature, and relegating the literature of knowledge to the sections devoted to Bibliography and Book Selection. In the present Syllabus, as revised, this distribution actually takes place, but with an extraordinary degree of overlapping which makes it necessary for a candidate to pass thrice in Literary History! He must first pass in Section I. Literary History, which demands among many other things a “knowledge of the editions and forms in which the works of the authors have been published.” Good. No limitation here, and any examiner would, accordingly, be perfectly fair and within his rights in asking for bibliographical details of Cocker's Arithmetic or Buchan's Domestic Medicine. Again, in Section II., Elements of Practical Bibliography, we have a demand for knowledge of book selection, the best books and periodicals, and courses of reading. Here, once more, no limitation, and again an examiner could ask when the first edition in English of the “Arabian Nights” was published,or what is the best edition of Cædmon or the Koran. Finally, in Section V., Library History and Organization, the same requirements are set forth, without any limitation, and candidates are evidently expected to possess a full knowledge of all literature before they can obtain a certificate. All this is very confusing and absurd, and gives point to every complaint which has been uttered against this part of the scheme of examinations. After all, a dilletante, gossipy, pseudo‐critical acquaintance with literary history is of very‐little practical value, compared with exact bibliographical knowledge concerning great authors and their works. For this reason we think the Association should carefully revise its Syllabus, and adopt a better‐proportioned and more equitable distribution of the subject. Section I. certainly requires strict limitation within reasonable bounds, and it ought to be confined to a working knowledge of the chief authors of the world according to a carefully prepared list of names. This should demand knowledge of biographical and critical facts, plus enough of bibliographical detail regarding titles to satisfy an examiner. Failing this, a list of authors, periods, or subjects selected for study and examination should be issued every year before the examination; but a fixed limitation to begin with would, we think, be better.

By using the UNISIST models this paper argues for the necessity of domain analysis in order to qualify scientific information seeking. The models allow better understanding of communication processes in a scientific domain and they embrace the point that domains are always both unstable over time, and changeable, according to the specific perspective. This understanding is even more important today as numerous digitally generated information tools as well as collaborative and interdisciplinary research are blurring the domain borders. Nevertheless, researchers navigate “intuitively” in “their” specific domains, and UNISIST helps understanding this navigation. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

The UNISIST models are tentatively applied to the domain of art history at three stages, respectively two modern, partially overlapping domains, as well as an outline of an art historical domain anno c1820. The juxtapositions are discussed against the backdrop of, among others, poststructuralist concepts such as “power” and “anti-essentialism”

The juxtapositions affirm the point already surfacing in the different versions of the UNISIST model, that is, structures of communication change over time as well as according to the agents that are charting them. As such, power in a Foucauldian sense is unavoidable in outlining a domain.

The UNISIST models are applied to the domain of art history and the article discusses the instability of a scientific domain as well as, at the same time, the significance of framing a domain; an implication which is often neglected in scientific information seeking.