Conference Agenda

Histories of education have traditionally focused on macro-structures, drawing criticism for overlooking educational realities (Westberg, 2021). Since the 1980s, however, attention has shifted to the micro level with the ‘new’ cultural history of education (Depaepe, 2017), emphasising processes of meaning-making and how education is experienced and contested in schools (Cunningham & Gardner, 2004). Parallel to this shift, historians of education have cautiously adopted the concept of school culture, to explore how schools resist or accommodate reforms (Meda & Vinao, 2017). Studies have also shown how teachers have contested, negotiated, or resisted regulations and curricula imposed by state authorities (Rousmanière, 2019). Cuban (2009: 6) describes this as the “policy-to-practice paradox,” where educational policy is never implemented exactly as designed.

However, a similar phenomenon occurs between research and practice. As with policy implementation, the contestation or even rejection of scientific knowledge in schools has persisted over time. Paradoxically, educational sciences thus produce knowledge meant to support teachers, yet this very knowledge is often not taken up by them. Implementation depends less on scientific rigor and more on the social process of dissemination (Levin, 2013). For many teachers, authentic practical experiences, either their own or those of colleagues, remain central to professional decision-making (e.g., Vinao Frago, 2001; Little, 2007; Kelchtermans, 2009). The adoption of scientific knowledge involves an active process of individual and collective meaning-making embedded in the school’s sociocultural context.

Historians of education have long examined the gap between educational research and practice, often as a lens to interpret the relative failure of school reforms. Viñao Frago (2001), for example, traces the emergence of the divide between theoretical-scientific knowledge and empirical-practical knowledge in the early nineteenth century. This process developed gradually, with a few exceptions, and by the twentieth century had consolidated into two distinct knowledge systems. According to Depaepe (2002), the growing division and specialisation within the scientific field not only fostered competition and disciplinary boundaries, contributing to increasing fragmentation and complexity, but also generated a drive to legitimise research in relation to practice as a defence of university-produced knowledge.

Through the divergence into two separate knowledge systems, university-based educational researchers have, since the mid-20th century, invested in disseminating their findings to the field of practice. However, the design of this process has been determined by positivist ideas that were dominant at the time. These ideas assume that science produces objective, universally applicable knowledge, which can then be adopted and applied by practitioners (Bulterman, 2023). This way of thinking presupposed a linear, top-down transmission of scientific knowledge and views teachers merely as implementers. Although reactions to this perspective emerged in the 1970s and 1980s, for example through the teacher research movement, this original, positivist-oriented approach has continued to influence researchers. The rise of the idea of evidence-based education in the 1990s further reinforced the one-way and hierarchical trajectory of the dissemination process (Biesta, 2010).

Little is known about how teachers, individually or collectively, give meaning to the research-practice gap or their positioning as mere implementers. This conference paper argues that the gap is more than a temporary technical-organisational mismatch between two knowledge systems as it is often portrayed. As the two systems have different symbolic power, it constitutes a complex and diffuse phenomenon, underpinned by an epistemic hierarchy between theoretical-scientific knowledge and empirical-practical knowledge, which may have had profound effects on teachers and their professional self-image and self-understanding. The main aim, therefore, is to gain insight into the historical and cultural dimensions of the research-practice gap. This paper represents a first step within this aim, providing insight into teachers’ perspectives of this historical divergence, which continues to shape educational practice today.

Teacher education is beset by contemporary challenges and debates which often have historical roots and connections. The OECD and UNESCO testify to significant global problems in recruitment and retention of teachers, coinciding with a period of enhanced political interest in education, surveillance and measurement of teaching – commonly related to neoliberalism and the global education reform movement (GERM) (Håkansson Lindqvist and Gidlund 2025; Sahlberg 2012). A pervasive historical narrative has emerged in which a system of ‘public’ education has been actively undermined in favour of an eclectic range of semi-private and autonomous providers operating via quasi markets (Furlong 2012; Beauchamp et al 2016; Groves & Robinson 2024).

This paper is based upon work on a history of teacher preparation in England. It will historicise contemporary developments and explore historical contradictions and tensions over the contested nature of teacher education and attempt to nuance the narrative of a public system that has come under severe strain from the depredations of neoliberalism. Knowledge and practices about teaching has been legitimated and delegitimated in changing historical moments, across both public and private activity. It thus engages with debates over the past and present. It also engages with spatial histories and varying historical boundaries. The ideas and practices legitimated within its borders often extended out, obviously to Wales and other ‘home nations’ as well as receiving ideas from them. In addition, from the outset of formal teacher education, colonialisation, decolonialisation and transnationalism have been significant aspects of the history of teachers.

Teacher education has long been a key aspect of educationalization in which teachers became the focus for utopian hopes of social improvement (Depaepe 2012) – a cultural revolution in the minds and morals of the working class (Webb 1904; Woodin et al 2013). These expansive visions have abutted technical aspects of social control, surveillance and reproduction. Indeed, early eighteenth century and nineteenth century initiatives in the education of teachers were framed in a concern to address the ‘problem’ of poverty, to subdue fractious populations, an impulse which may exert continuities to the present day. These broader developments were paralleled in the history of teacher education where a technical focus on skills has sometimes been in friction with a broader concern with culture, theory and disciplinary approaches, all of which were to provide the aspiring teacher with deeper understandings of their craft. Specifically cultural approaches infused a tendency in England to address social issues through cultural proxies, crystallised by the highly influential educational inspector, Matthew Arnold, in Culture and Anarchy (Arnold 1993/1869). Class tensions were thus expressed in the desire of teachers’ self-improvement, the influx of middle class women in the late nineteenth century, and the assumption that teachers were necessarily on a lower cultural level.

The very visible class and gender clashes reflect the liminal and ambiguous status of teachers. On the one hand, the growth of the teaching profession was tied up in a ‘silent social revolution’ which witnessed the expansion of the professional identity of teachers within a public system of education (Gosden 1972, Tropp 1957). On the other, teachers at different historical moments have been viewed as stepping out of their allotted social roles in assuming an equivalence with other professions such as law and medicine. In more recent time, political control of curriculum and pedagogy has curtailed teacher control of the classroom. Changing assumptions about knowledge have pervaded these debates and arisen from various sources. Teacher agency is thus a problematic notion that needs to be unravelled. Teachers have developed their own areas of expertise, drawing upon bodies of knowledge and collective practices (Bischoff 2019; Groves and Robinson 2016).

Ukrainian teacher education in emigration represents an important yet insufficiently explored component of the history of European education in the second half of the twentieth century and the early twenty-first century. Within the transnational history of education, attention has focused on institutions operating beyond the nation-state that preserved pedagogical traditions and national identity in conditions of prolonged emigration. The Ukrainian Free University in Munich (UFU) exemplifies such an institution, integrated into the European educational space while sustaining the Ukrainian academic tradition.

The Pedagogical Institute played a distinctive role within the institutional structure of the UFU, which, between 1977 and 2012, provided teacher education for Ukrainian educational environments in the diaspora. The Institute emerged from earlier pedagogical initiatives of the UFU, including summer pedagogical courses, and gradually developed into a stable institutional form of teacher education within an émigré context. Its activities were aimed not only at the professional preparation of teachers, but also at the preservation of the Ukrainian language, culture, and pedagogical continuity in the absence of an independent Ukrainian state.

Despite the widely acknowledged significance of the UFU in the history of Ukrainian science and education, the activities of the Pedagogical Institute have not yet been the subject of a systematic history-pedagogical analysis. Existing studies (Patzke, Szafowal, & Yaremko, 2011; Kobchenko, 2023; Musiienko, 2007; Tsivatyi, 2022, and others) predominantly focus on the institutional history of the UFU and do not conceptualize teacher education in emigration as a distinct phenomenon within a transnational perspective. As a result, this has made a gap, particularly about the role of émigré educational institutions in sustaining national identity within the Ukrainian diasporic educational environment.

The relevance of this study is further reinforced by current events. As a consequence of Russia’s full-scale war against Ukraine, large numbers of Ukrainians – children, students, and educators – have been forced to reside outside the country. In this context, the question of establishing sustainable educational forms capable of supporting national identity beyond the nation-state has regained urgency. The historical experience of the Pedagogical Institute of the UFU may therefore be interpreted as a model of an educational center that combined professional teacher education with the preservation of Ukrainian educational traditions abroad.

This research aims to analyze the activities of the Pedagogical Institute of the UFU (1977–2012) as a center of Ukrainian teacher education in emigration, with a particular focus on its institutional foundations, the content of its educational programs, and its pedagogical practices.

The central research question is how the Pedagogical Institute of the UFU functioned as a model of teacher education under conditions of emigration and what role it played in preserving Ukrainian pedagogical traditions within the transnational educational space.

The study discussed the following sub-questions:

- What organizational and educational principles defined the activities of the Pedagogical Institute of the UFU?

- How were Ukrainian pedagogical traditions combined with European academic standards within its educational programs?

- What conditions of emigration influenced the content and forms of teacher education?

Conceptually, this study draws on approaches from the transnational history of education and research in emigration (Green, 1997; Fuchs & Roldán Vera, 2019), which allow the Pedagogical Institute of the Ukrainian Free University to be interpreted as a space of transnational circulation of pedagogical ideas and practices.

This paper examines how disciplinary procedures in kindergarten teacher education translate everyday conduct into judgements of professional suitability, thereby shaping professional identity. Rather than viewing discipline primarily as the maintenance of institutional order, I conceptualise disciplinary regimes as boundary-work through which teacher education institutions define what counts as a trustworthy and respectable future kindergarten teacher. In this view, rules and their enforcement link behaviour to vocational credibility, employability, and institutional reputation.
The study speaks to international scholarship on professionalisation, feminised caring professions, and the governance of conduct in education. Across European and wider contexts, early childhood education has frequently been framed as requiring not only pedagogical competence but also forms of respectable conduct, self-regulation, and moral reliability. Disciplinary archives are particularly revealing for tracing how such expectations are made institutionally legible, contested, and sanctionable. At the same time, these records require careful source criticism because they are produced within administrative genres and unequal relations of voice.
Empirically, the paper focuses on the (Higher) Kindergarten Teacher Training Institute in Sopron, Hungary, in the 1960s. This period saw the consolidation of socialist institutions and a heightened emphasis on public trust in educational and caring professions. The central research questions are: (1) How did disciplinary procedures convert formal rules into assessments of professional suitability? (2) Which evaluative categories and justificatory vocabularies were used to connect everyday or "private" behaviour to professional risk? (3) What do disciplinary files reveal about the lived norms and boundaries of a feminised caring profession in training?
The analysis concentrates on recurrent case-types documented in disciplinary files such as alcohol-related misconduct, unauthorised absence or late return (including dormitory curfew breaches), and theft of peers' belongings. These are analysed not as isolated deviance but as moments when institutional authority made explicit what counted as reliability, sobriety, time-discipline, communal trust, and moral conduct. Such qualities were repeatedly framed as prerequisites for caring work with young children and for safeguarding institutional legitimacy.
By foregrounding disciplinary documentation as a site where professional norms are operationalised through documentation, hearing procedures, and sanctions, the paper contributes a transferable approach for historians of education and teacher education researchers. It highlights how archives preserve not only policies but also the mechanisms through which norms are enacted, negotiated, and enforced in teacher formation.