Backing the actor as agent in discipline formation: an example of the “secondary disciplinarization” of the educational sciences, based on the networks of ovide decroly (1901–1931)

Abstract

The works of the Belgian neurologist and educationist Ovide Decroly extended over the medical and pedagogical fields as well as both the practical-professional and the theoretical-disciplinary fields. For this reason, Decroly seemed to be a suitable starting point for a contribution to the problem outlined by Hofstetter and Schneuwly of "the birth and development of a disciplinary field in education", all the more so because they proposed that the topic be broached from "the role of institutes and congresses". Putting Decroly in the centre of our perspective offers a double advantage. The making of science, thus also the discipline-formation process, is an inherently communicative and social event and is bound to the individual or "the actor as an agent of change". In addition, a case study of Decroly gives the opportunity to test against a multitude of different congresses the concrete problem of the birth and development of a disciplinary field in education. In the limited scope of an article, however, it is not possible to analyse all these congresses in detail. In spite of his apparently very wide-ranging congress itinerary, two constants struck us: first, it turned out that Decroly in his presentations limited himself to only a handful of closely related subjects, and, second, two associations predominated throughout Decroly's entire congress itinerary: the Société protectrice de l'Enfance anormale (SPEA) and the Société belge de Pédotechnie (SBP). The SPEA and the SBP seemed to form a bridge between the academic-institutional level and the communicative level of the congresses. The two associations, which can be considered networks that operated at the intersection of the theoretical-disciplinary and the practical-professional fields, thus provided a promising way for the authors to operationalize their objective -the study of congresses and institutes starting from Decroly. This article will proceed in three stages. First, the SPEA and the SBP will be introduced and the relationship Decroly had with these associations will be examined. Then, the extent to which the SPEA and the SBP determined Decroly's congress itinerary will be examined, and on the basis of Decroly's relationship with these associations, it will be shown how they contributed to the institutionalization of the educational sciences in Belgium. Finally it is wondered whether, by shifting the focus from congresses and institutes to networks, one does have a concretization of what Hofstetter and Schneuwly, refering to Stichweh, call the "(predominantly) secondary disciplinarization" of the educational sciences?

Networks and the History of Education

“…35 Although the term 'networks' has lately been used more frequently, it mainly served as a metaphor to describe phenomena without theoretical or methodological reflection. 36 Only very recently Eugenia Roldàn Vera and Thomas Schupp exploited social science network analysis for the investigation of the transnational network of the monitoring system in Spanish-America in the early nineteenth century. In using standardized quantitative methods they present their aggregated data graphically -for example the diffusion of monitoring schools follows an 'S-shaped' curve 37 -and in network sociograms as a series of nodes and lines (to illustrate the network of the 'early adopters' of the monitoring system and their geographical mobility).…”

An Atypical Biography Concluding More Than Twenty Years of Decroly Research

“…The first and only international congress on pedology in 1911 (Ioteyko, 1912;Depaepe, 1987) can be seen as a model thereof. Which associations and figures from among those Belgian networks played a key role is examined in chapter seven, originally published in 2004(i.e., Van Gorp, Depaepe & Simon, 2004. In reality, we have simply changed tack: instead of looking at the internal scientific side, we turn our focus to the extra-scientific side of the history of the development and dissemination of knowledge about the scientific study of the child.…”

Why Even Today Educational Historiography is not an Unnecessary Luxury. Focusing on four Themes from Forty-four Years of Research

“…For the sake of presumably ideological differences -Buyse was Catholic -the latter never totally belonged to the core of the Brussels Decrolyens. Better biographical research is also urgently needed in this regard: which networks did Decroly actually frequent, and how did he engage with them beyond the obvious sphere of Brussels liberalism and paedology (Van Gorp, Depaepe & Simon, 2004)? Who were his sponsors?…”