The recent meeting of ISCHE has approved the founding of the new Standing Working Group on Educational Media in Comparative Perspective, which aims at investigating the history of learning and teaching media. The term “educational media” is used in a wide sense including not only material that is used in schools and other educational institutions but also all kind of media that, on the one hand, help children and young people to acquire knowledge and to appropriate their environment. On the other hand, it also addresses media that are produced to facilitate the teaching process – institutionally, public, and privately – for professional and lay educators. Only in recent years has this topic gained some interest within the history of education. To be sure, school textbook analysis has been a well-recognized field of research for some time; however, it has been mainly confined to the investigation of perceptions and images in current textbooks. Although the history of textbooks has been researched to some extent, much less is known about other educational media, such as educational cinema, youth literature, exhibitions, theme parks, toys, comics and the Internet, to mention just a few. In addition, existing studies are mainly confined to national boundaries; comparative and systematic approaches to educational media are rare. This is somewhat surprising since, on the one hand, the history of schools and teaching is closely connected to (changing) educational media and, on the other hand, the cultural turn in the humanities has switched the focus to the materiality of historical processes.
The SWG intends to address these different types of educational media in a series of meetings scheduled for the next five years. The goal is not just to examine the pedagogical aspects of educational media but rather to draw attention to the social and cultural functions of these material artefacts in different historical contexts and in comparative perspective. The topic for the first meeting at Rutgers University in 2008 will be “Print Media in Educational Institutions”. We invite contributions dealing with the role of textbooks, reference books, and other student’s materials as well as of teaching material in and outside the classroom. Since the overall conference theme of ISCHE 2008 is “Education and Inequality”, proposals on the representations of inequality in these printed media as well as the role of them in constructing and perpetuating equality are particularly welcome. Your proposal should include an abstract of the presentation (about 500 words in English) and a short CV of no more than two pages, including a list of relevant publications. The deadline for submissions is 15 January 2008. The chosen applicants will be notified by mid-February 2008.

Conveners:
Eckhardt Fuchs (Georg Eckert Institute for International Textbook Research/University of Mannheim)
Ian Grosvenor (University of Birmingham)
Daniel Lindmark (Umeå University)

Proposals should be submitted (preferably by email) to:
PD Dr. Eckhardt Fuchs
Research Director
Georg Eckert Institute for International Textbook Research
Celler Str. 3
38114 Braunschweig
Germany
E-Mail: fuchs@gei.de
Tel. + 49 (0)531 590 99 50
Fax + 49 (0)531 590 99 99