Earlier this week, I had the opportunity to introduce the IOE Library’s Special Collections to visitors from the Royal Historical Society, colleagues from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, and members of the Institute. In this short presentation, I focused on showcasing the collections I most often use in my teaching, which also informs the historical inquiry work I do with doctoral researchers. This post expands on that introduction, and draws attention to some of the research outcomes that have emerged from scholars using these collections.

The Institute was founded in 1902 as the London Day Training College and became the Institute of Education in 1932, by which time it was regarded as the Empire’s most important educational institution. The library began with just a few books in the Principal’s office, and as the Institute expanded, these collections grew into a recognised flagship collection, one that supports teaching and research and is of national and international significance. The Special Collections, which evolved from the Institute’s working library and expanded through generous donations over the years, are actively used by staff, students and independent researchers from around the world.

But what unites the diverse holdings of the IOE Special Collections? A deceptively simple object: the textbook. As John Issitt (2004) notes, textbooks are ‘vehicles of pedagogy’ that contain the ‘received knowledge’ of their time, yet they are often dismissed as having little intrinsic value. Textbooks are, in fact, rich cultural artefacts. They reveal not only what was taught in schools, but also how teachers were trained, which knowledge was valued, the ideologies shaping generations of teachers and learners, and where silences appear. Thus, far from being neutral transmitters of facts, they reveal changing teaching methods, social and political priorities, prevailing attitudes towards class, race and gender, and provide insights into everyday life. A key figure in recognising textbooks as worthy objects of scholarly inquiry was Ian Michael, Deputy Director of the IOE in 1973. He established the Textbook Colloquium and founded the journal Paradigm, legitimising textbook research in the 1980s as a recognised area of study. His personal library now forms part of the Special Collections.

One of the collections that most clearly illustrates the significance of textbook research is the Historical Textbooks Collection. It grew out of the National Textbooks Research Library, established in the 1960s to allow teachers to browse materials before purchasing for their schools. It includes a wide range of school textbooks spanning all subjects and levels until the introduction of the National Curriculum. History and geography textbooks, the latter forming a discrete collection, demonstrate how Empire and colonised peoples were portrayed in educational materials. The collection also reflects pedagogical developments over time, from rote learning to more differentiated and child-centred approaches, and offers insights into the history of publishing and school material culture.

The History of Education Collection adds further depth, containing textbooks used for teacher training, including works by early educational thinkers such as John Locke and John Dewey, as well as texts produced by the Institute’s own principals and directors. The collection also includes teachers’ manuals and handbooks, including those by the prolific children’s author Enid Blyton, whose works were frequently endorsed by the Institute’s second director, T. Percy Nunn, as they shared the same educational ideals. These manuals not only provide insight into classroom methods, but also reflect the growing standardisation of teaching practice. This standardisation was part of the wider move towards professionalising teaching. In addition, the collection has some historic gems, including the first illustrated children’s book, Orbis Pictus by the Moravian educator, John Amos Comenius, published in 1658, and the 1740 edition of Dilworth’s A New Guide to the English Tongue, one of the most widely used textbooks of its day. It is referenced in Charles Dickens’s Sketches by Boz, and is said to have helped Abraham Lincoln learn to read. 

Textbooks also appear throughout our subject-specific collections. The Rainbow Collection focuses on music education, whilst the Baines Collection contains 18th and 19th-century children’s books and encyclopaedias. Our various Comparative and International education collections reveal how pedagogical ideas travelled between nations, reflecting in particular the institution’s wider influence on colonial education. The personal libraries of His Majesty’s Inspectors (HMIs) are particularly revealing, illustrating the intersections of pedagogy and policy. For example, HMI Captain Grenfell’s collection on physical education anticipated the subject’s compulsory status amid concerns about national efficiency, whilst HMI F. H. Hayward’s materials on moral education and responsible citizenship reveal links with the Eugenics Education Society, which sought to promote ‘moral hygiene’ or sex education, steering youth away from vice and toward ‘fit’ marriage partners.

Beyond print, we have the BBC Broadcasts for Schools (1926 to 1979), which by 1930 were used in approximately 5,000 schools. The ‘wireless lessons’ were, in essence, ‘textbooks of the air’, and they pioneered audio and then audio-visual learning. These broadcasts had a sustained influence on education for fifty years, teaching children ‘Received Pronunciation’, promoting aesthetics education and reinforcing British cultural heritage. Connected to all of these collections is the School Examination Papers Collection, which dates back to the late nineteenth century. It represents educational policy and practice, linking the textbook to the broader question of what was deemed worth knowing and assessing.

Then we have the 1960s MACOS (Man: A Course of Study) Collection, which exemplifies ongoing transnational influences in education. This multimedia social studies curriculum attempted to teach cultural diversity through studying the Netsilik Inuit and was adopted in schools across the United States and Britain. However, it faced intense conservative and religious opposition, which ultimately led to funding cuts and the programme’s decline in 1975. The ILEA Collection of publications tells a parallel story. This progressive education authority, active from the 1960s, produced materials that were often controversial, particularly around issues of race and sexuality. The authority was abolished by the Conservative government in 1990.

These collections are far from static. They actively support teaching, research, and curatorial work across UCL and beyond, with students and researchers engaging with original materials in ways that develop critical analytical skills while uncovering new historical insights. Funded research projects, such as the ‘Literacy Attainment’ study (now published as a monograph by Professor Gemma Moss), as well as the ongoing work on the Empire, Migration and Belonging project, illustrate the breadth of scholarly engagement. Students have explored constructions of class, gender, and race, conducting close textual analysis to trace how social hierarchies were naturalised through everyday classroom materials. For example, one student examined illustrations in a textbook to reveal how Chinese people were visually portrayed, showing that racial stereotyping was embedded in educational resources. Her work will appear in Paper Trails, the BOOC published by UCL Press. Beyond the IOE, other historians, including independent scholars, often consult the IOE’s collections, sometimes in conjunction with materials from the IOE’s archives. A recent example is the 2024 publication by independent researcher Daniel O’Neill, whose book This Excellent Man: Derbyshire Architect G. H. Widdows and English School Design, 1904-1936, draws extensively on both rare books and archival collections, making a significant contribution to our understanding of pedagogy and school architecture.

The IOE’s Special Collections — and I have only touched the tip of the iceberg among the catalogued collections — remain invaluable for studying how knowledge has been constructed, transmitted and contested. They document not just what was taught, but the ideological frameworks that shaped education, the networks through which pedagogical ideas circulated, and the evolution of teaching practices across centuries. The seemingly simple textbook opens complex questions about power, knowledge, and whose voices were centred or silenced. As we continue to catalogue, preserve, and make these materials accessible, we invite researchers to engage critically with this history to understand not just what education was, but what it might become.

We would also like to invite researchers to respond to our call for papers for a special issue of Paper Trails on ‘Difficult Collections’, or to consider applying for one of our Research Institute for Collections Visiting Fellowships. These opportunities offer a chance to engage directly with our rich historical collections. 

This post is by Pia Russell, who was was awarded the ‘Liberating the Collections Visiting Fellowship’ by the Research Institute for Collections in 2023.

Maria Lawson. A History Canada for Use in Public Schools. Toronto: W.J. Gage, 1908. p. 2. https://archive.org/details/historyofcanadaf0000laws/page/2/mode/2up

This scholarship occurs in the homelands of the WSÁNEĆ and LƏK̓ʷƏŊƏN peoples on whose lands the University of Victoria now stands and whose relationships with this land remain today.

Constructing settler colonial origin stories

In 2020 a petition signed by more than 268,000 people, asked the United Kingdom (UK) government to make the teaching of Britain’s colonial past more prevalent in the compulsory primary and secondary curriculum.  In doing so, signatories hoped that children in UK schools would learn how: “Colonial powers must own up to their pasts…and how this contributes to the unfair systems of power at the foundation of our modern society.”[1]  The following year, the UK’s Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities released a report which included among its 24 recommendations the teaching of an inclusive curriculum regarding the making of modern Britain.[2]  While these initiatives are not without challenges, they do demonstrate two important aspects.  First, that so often schools are ground-zero for debates about collective historical consciousness.  And second, that the UK is beginning a process of self-reflection about their colonial legacies which can feel overdue to many in former colonies.  While there is much public and scholarly discussion of our so-called postcolonial world, those living today in the peripheries of former empires continue to experience imperial realities as very much a part of our present.

In British Columbia (BC), Canada’s most western province, the Ministry of Education implemented an entirely revised elementary and secondary (K-12) curriculum in 2016.  A leading influence of this redesign was a response to calls for increased Indigenisation and decolonisation, largely influenced by the 2015 findings of the Commission for Truth and Reconciliation (TRC) Commission of Canada.  The TRC was a federal government inquiry which sought to document the painful histories of the Indian Residential School (IRS) system and provide survivors of this system with opportunities to share their experiences.  Among the TRC’s 94 Calls to Action, many relate specifically to education.  For example, Call 62.i asks governments at all levels to: “Make age-appropriate curriculum on residential schools, Treaties, and Aboriginal peoples’ historical and contemporary contributions to Canada a mandatory education requirement for Kindergarten to Grade Twelve students.”[3]  Today, BC’s K-12 curriculum policy includes Indigenous ways of knowing and being at every grade level and in every subject.[4]  While considerable work still remains ahead, it is nonetheless a start towards decolonising the often fractured relationship between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples living within the context of the Canadian state.  Whether it is controversy about curriculum, statues, the commonwealth, or museum collections, the process of how decolonisation is discussed in the heart of former empires—the imperial metropole—feels rather different than how it is increasingly discussed in its former colonies.

One powerful way for learners and educators to think about colonial legacy, is to understand how the narratives of our past often inform our present.  Reflecting on our historical consciousness asks that we think critically about how it is we came to know our past.[5]  By critically re-reading settler colonial origin stories we might begin to trace a line of how power was, and continues to be, expressed in the lives of people on the colonised ground.  In Canada, for most non-Indigenous people, a leading source of such stories has been school textbooks.  As the Education Librarian in Special Collections at the University of Victoria (UVic) Libraries, I curate BC’s historical textbooks (BCHT) collection.  It is a growing print and digital archive of our province’s textbook history.  In Canada, education is structured provincially so over the past 153 years of BC’s existence, a defined corpus of textbooks has been required reading for hundreds of thousands of public school pupils.  What stories might these textbooks have told children over time about the place they called home?  To be clear, we cannot always assume that just because children read a textbook that somehow meant they adhered to its ideology—what book historians often refer to as the receptivity fallacy[6]—but we can imagine that their interactions with the book’s narratives introduced them to commonly held attitudes portrayed in the textbooks.  So, what were the early textbook stories that British Columbian’s told their future citizenry about colonization and empire?  And, how might these compare to the textbook stories told in the heart of empire, the British metropole?

Liberating the Collections Visiting Fellowship

Self-image of Pia Russell, outside the Institute of Education (July 2023)

In July 2023, I had the remarkable opportunity to ask these internationally comparative scholarly questions about colonisation and empire in children’s school books when I was the 2023 Liberating the Collections Visiting Fellow at the Research Institute for Collections (RIC) at University College London’s Faculty of Education and Society.  Here I had the opportunity to review dozens of UK textbooks in the IOE’s Historical Textbooks Collection that were contemporaneous to the ones I curate in BC.  Currently my focus is on the first fifty years of BC’s textbook history.  During the fellowship, I also developed wonderful professional collaborations with counterpart colleagues such as the exceptional Dr. Nazlin Bhimani, Research Support and Special Collections Librarian.  Together, we were able to share best practices for the unique technical aspects of the rare books we curate, and also comparatively discuss the social contexts our collections exist within.  Serving as a Liberating the Collections Visiting Fellow initiated a completely new and innovative line of inquiry within my existing program of scholarship.  My long-term scholarship has focused on decolonising, anti-racist, and feminist analyses of these unique historical sources.  Most often I partner with and take guidance from Indigenous colleagues who work locally.  This is essential, truth-telling work that seeks to establish more respectful cross-cultural research partnerships and personal connections.  Through a Liberating the Collections Visiting Fellowship, I was able to include a dynamic international dimension to my historical textbook scholarship and this provided a beautiful complement to my already established local relationships closer to home.  When engaging in decolonising work in such deeply colonised lands as British Columbia (a problematic colonial name, to be sure), such complementarity not only strengthens the scholarly work but also takes seriously the responsibility of being a historian working in this place.  When reflecting on the histories, presents, and futurities of the Indigenous homelands where I reside, understanding the centuries old power structures of the British empire that instigated this colonisation through actions such as map making, land surveying, and textbook provisioning is essential.  Through my Fellowship at the UCL’s RIC, I strengthened my understanding of critical imperial studies alongside my engagement with local Indigenous ways of knowing and being.  As a result from dialog with colleagues such as Dr. Bhimani and while examining rare books in the RIC, I am now better able to fulfill my responsibilities as a historian who hopes to raise up previously suppressed voices and bring their histories in from the literal and figurative margins of both BC’s and Britain’s historical school textbooks.  Our vocational partnerships show much future promise and I look forward to exciting public history work together in the years to come.

Side-by-side: comparing historical textbook narratives

One specific outcome of my time as a Liberating the Collections Visiting Fellow at the Research Institute for Collections (RIC) was the development of a teaching resource that utilises these textbooks as historical objects of truth-telling instigation.  The resource seeks to embrace a pedagogical approach that is comprehensively decolonising.  By drawing upon both the UK’s Key Stage Three History curriculum alongside BC’s Grade 9 Social Studies curriculum, we now have an internationally cohesive, curriculum-aligned, learning tool.[7]  This resource guides teachers and students through critical re-readings of historical textbooks to reveal that narratives of empire did not tell the whole story and had considerable consequences lasting up until today. (more…)