School exercise books

The school exercise book in the contemporary age can be seen both as an essential teaching aid and as a formidable tool for communication, thus as a unique source for exploring school culture and the approach to education in a given historical context. From cover to content, and including the codification process in its capacity as a material object, the school exercise book can tell us a great deal about the history of school and education, about teaching methods and language, and about the educational projects and policies that the various nation states sought to implement in the 19th and 20th centuries. Within that framework, the history of education and literacy goes hand in hand with the history of educational ideas and of concrete educational practice, offering hitherto unexplored scenarios for research. These proceedings - which include papers submitted by scholars from Europe, America and the Far East - offer a broad panorama of the potential of such a complex source with its wealth of implications. They represent a corpus of study and enquiry based on an exhaustive and complete range of methods and tools of investigation. The exercise book seen as a vessel for writing, as a testimonial of educational practice as implemented by teachers, and as an essential part of the political and cultural socialisation pursued in schools, helps us to focus the historical and educational dynamic on the relationships that impart concrete substance to the rapport between educational theory, teachers, institutes of education and education policy on the one hand, and the real-life players who experienced those relationships in the first person.