Sharing Early Education History Through
Media and Technology:
Helpful Hints from the Field
Blythe Hinitz, Ed.D.
The College of New Jersey
Presented at: NAEYC History Seminar
November 12, 1999
The history of early childhood education has many facets. It is concerned with individual children and adults, group programs of varying sizes and all the periods of history from earliest antiquity to the present. The knowledge base includes ideas, content and practice information, and excellent models. As we approach the twenty-first century, professional development has embraced media and technology as a communication vehicle. Distance learning, CD-ROMs, and the Internet bring this knowledge to our fingertips. Email and web sites offer a wealth of data to broaden our understanding of the ways in which our history impacts our present. The handout from my 1998 NAEYC presentation, which provides an overview of early education history is available on my web site at: http://www.tcnj.edu/~hinitz as well as through a link to the NAEYC web site.
The best overall source on the internet for the history of education in general and early education and childhood history remains the History of Education Site maintained and edited by Henk van Setten of the Netherlands at: http://www.socsci.kun.nl/ped/whp/histeduc
The site is updated weekly. A perusal of the page for November found an illustration of the "Pigeon House" game from an 1883 manual for Kindergarten teachers. A listing for a German Propaganda Archive maintained by Randall Bytwerk of Calvin College in Grand Rapids Michigan, includes a description of the ceremonial rites passage of children in Nazi Germany from the "Jungvolk" to the Hitler Youth, and a 1940 speech in which Joseph Goebbels tells adolescents to care for their younger siblings while their parents fight the war.
The page detailing October additions includes An Indian Boyís Story, a first-hand account of the re-education of a boy from the Mohawk tribe in an "Indian institution" of the early 1900s. It also references the 1915 British volume, How to Tell Stories to Children and Some Stories to Tell by Sara Cone Bryant. This teachersí manual for storytelling in kindergarten and primary school, dedicated to the authorís mother ("the first, best story-teller,"), is arranged according to grade level, and includes a discussion of the purposes of storytelling in the classroom. The book is one example of the E-Texts available online at the Electronic Text Center of the University of Virginia Library at http://etext.lib.virginia.edu Each complete work at the site can be downloaded in Adobe format, or printed from the Internet. Another E-Text source, Franz Peter Waiblingerís Forum Didacticum has the preface from the 1658 German language edition of Comeniusí Orbis Sensualium Pictus.
A wonderful resource that just became available to all who love the history of education is H-Education. This moderated discussion list for scholars in the history of education has joined the other H-Net lists which originate electronically online from Michigan State University. Other lists include H-Childhood, H-Teach, H-Urban and H-Women. H-Education was officially launched at the recent History of Education Society meeting. To subscribe, email the line >> SUB H-Education [your firstname your lastname, your institution] << to: listserv@h-net.msu.edu
The H-Education list is headed by Jack Dougherty, Assistant Professor of Educational Studies at Trinity College in Connecticut. I am a member of the Advisory Board, and am one of the two book review editors. There are six editors who rotate monthly moderating duties. The web site is in the process of formation at: http://www.h-net.msu.edu/~educ/
I encourage historians of early childhood education to subscribe to this list, so that it will include us along with all other levels of education.
Examples of recent postings on H-Childhood which are of interest to early childhood educators:
A query from William McGowan of UCSB [University of California at Santa Barbara] in August about the wages paid to teachers in the Kaiser shipyards child care centers during World War II brought the responses: "I saw a fascinating overview of the Kaiser operation on a History Channel special," and "Yes, I think there's a history of the day care at Kaiser. I can't secure the cite at the moment but I recall that it existed".
An October request for testimonial accounts of children's participation in American labor protests and civil rights struggles elicited such references as Nasawís Children of the City, "Newsboys: The Exploitation of 'Little Merchants,'" in Newsworkers: Toward a History of the Rank and File edited by Hardt and Brennen, and Freedom's Children by Ellen Levine.
Kathleen Jones, one of the H-Childhood editors is seeking syllabi for courses relating to the history of childhood. She has collected four which are currently posted on the list web site at: http://www.h-net.msu.edu/~child/
To subscribe to H-Childhood follow the same procedure detailed above, but use H-Childhood instead of H-Education.
For those interested in statistical trends, Child Trends recently posted a research brief which looks at children in long-term poverty (over a 10-year period) on their web site at:
One can subscribe to Child Trends News by visiting their web site at: http://www.childtrends.org/listserv.cfm
International Linkages
Listservs provide an international highway for communication through the Internet. One of the most interesting recent items came from the Geography Listserv. It is a request from Ms. Nilgun Aydogan, MPH, Central Asia Director of the Mother Child Education Foundation (MOCEF) in Istanbul Turkey. MOCEF is a national Turkish NGO involved in early childhood care and development, parent education and female literacy; and the Central Asian regional representative of the Consultative Group on Early Childhood Care and Education, an international and multi-agency advocacy group. MOCEF has signed an agreement with UNESCO to serve as a Co-operating Center on Early Childhood for Central Asia, with the aim of facilitating a network on early childhood development in the region. They hope to bring together people in the field from different sectors who are involved in early childhood development; and to influence policy and facilitate projects related to young children in the region. They are requesting articles on innovative program approaches, field experiences, reviews and reports on early childhood education, as well as conference and meeting announcements for publication in their newsletter. The deadline for the first issue is November 15th for an issue at the end of December. To contact Ms. Aydogan email to: acevist@turk.net
There are many online E-Journals. Two with particular relevance to our work are:
The Future of Children published by the David and Lucile Packard Foundation in Los Altos, California. Many issues of the journal are currently available on the web, with more to come in 2000. Examples include issues on such topics as: Children and Poverty, Welfare to Work, Home Visiting: Recent Program Evaluations, and articles, such as, "Changing Demographics: Past and Future Demands for Early Childhood Programs" by Donald J. Hernandez, and "A Brief History of Federal Financing for Child Care in the United States" by Abby J. Cohen. Look at: http://www.futureofchildren.org/fin/index.htm
Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood is a new refereed online journal edited by Nicola U. Yelland and Susan J. Grieshaber [of Queensland University of Technology in Australia]. A relevant article is: "The Scientific Discourse of Education ó Predetermining the Lives of Others: Foucault, education and children," by Gaile S. Cannella of Texas A & M University at: http://www.triangle.co.uk/ciec/index.htm
A recent addition in the U.S. is Early Childhood Research & Practice, an Internet journal on the development, care, and education of young children edited by Lilian Katz and Dianne Rothenberg. The Spring, 1999 issue and instructions for authors may be found at: http://ecrp.uiuc.edu
Archives
One of the best tools a historian of early childhood education has is the wealth of archival materials available all over the world. Many of these archives have online web sites which list the contents of their collections. Some examples of useful archives follow.
The Archives of the Association for Childhood Education International, which hold materials from the founding of the organization in 1892 on, are located at the University of Maryland, College Park. [Lauren Brown Curator of Archives and Manuscripts]. Included in the collection are the personal papers of some prominent members. For ACEI's 1992 Centennial Conference in Saratoga Springs, Lauren brought the original charter and ten cases worth of materials to display. Lauren Brown may be reached via email at: lb42@umail.umd.edu
The University of Pennsylvania Archives at Van Pelt Deitrich Library contain materials relating to the Philadelphia Kindergarten Exposition of the 1870s as well as the personal papers of a few early childhood educators. Nancy Shawcross, Curator of Archives and Manuscripts, may be reached at: shawcros@pobox.upenn.edu
The library web site is: http://www.library.upenn.edu/special
I recently utilized an unheralded treasure trove - The Froebel Archive for Childhood Studies located at Froebel College of Roehampton Institute London [Jane Read archivist]. Among the contents are: The Gifts and Occupations; Froebelís writings in English and German (including several first editions); texts and childrenís books representing the Froebel curriculum; a complete set of the Froebel Society journal Child Life; the archive of the Froebel Educational Institute (founded in 1892); New Era (journal of the New Education Fellowship, the key organization for progressive education; plus texts, videos, government reports, teaching apparatus and historical childrenís literature. An overview of Froebel College, and the archival collections can be found online at:
In conclusion, I would like to bring us back to the start - Head Start in particular, to remind us that we have to look no further than our own back yards for materials on the history of early childhood education. One example of an organization that is well aware of this responsibility is the Kootenai Valley Head Start program in Northwestern Montana includes a three page history on its home page at: http://homer.libby.org/~kvhstart
Another is the East Coast Migrant Head Start Program, which can be accessed at:
http://www.ecmhsp.org/about.htm
It is important that we preserve the history of our current early childhood education programs and search out the history of those that came before them. The technological tools that we now have available can assist us both in researching the history of past programs and people, and in preserving the current history of early childhood education for future generations.