Silences and interpretations
historical approaches in understanding classroom teachers from the past
pp. 893-912
in: Paul Smeyers, David Bridges, Nicholas C. Burbules, Morwenna Griffiths (eds), International handbook of interpretation in educational research, Berlin, Springer, 2015Abstract
This essay takes as its starting point Kate Rousmaniere's lastingly important book on the lives and work of New York school teachers in the 1920s, City Teachers: Teaching and School Reform in Historical Perspective. Rousmaniere shows how the absence of teachers' voices from the historical record has meant that the history of the teaching profession has remained a sketchy and indistinct one. Using a combination of oral and documentary sources, Rousmaniere seeks to address a range of substantive questions through engaging a previously 'silent" teachers' voice and restoring it to a legitimate and authentic historical importance. In so doing, Rousmaniere opens the way for a methodological consideration of another significant 'silence" within the history of education, namely that relating to methodological approach and procedure. In particular, her work invites more detailed comparative consideration of two distinctive forms of historical data – the written word, as engaged by documentary history, and the spoken word, as engaged by oral history. These are here considered in terms of the processes of historical interpretation, understood principally through the lens of Ricoeurian hermeneutics.
