POSTPONED - Histories of international education and development and transnational flows: educational exchanges between Rabindranath Tagore and the Elmhirsts

This seminar starts with a consideration of the roles that historical analysis can play in the field of international education and development.

Please note that this event has been postponed

For example, history can provide temporal as well as geographic context to contemporary issues; through postcolonial analysis we can recognise the continuing implications of the postcolonial condition; and a historical lens can also lead us to problematise present day global issues and imagine alternative futures.

The seminar will explore the transnational flow of education ideas and practices between networks of educators in India and Britain during the latter stages of empire c.1890-1947. The nature and quality of these relationships, the direction of global flow and the alternative and broadly progressive education practices which these educators advocated were quite different to those typically associated with the colonial encounter. Motivations underpinning these relationships were often not only pedagogical but also philosophical, spiritual and political. To illustrate these points this the case of the relationship between Nobel prize winning poet, musician, philosopher and educationist, Rabindranath Tagore and Leonard and Dorothy Elmhirst and their respective education and community projects at Santiniketan, Bengal, India and Dartington Hall, Devon, England will be discussed, drawing on materials from Dartington Hall archive. The contemporary significance of this case and of these alternative networks in relation to international education and development will also be considered.  

Please email esj-admin@contacts.bham.ac.uk to register for this free event.

All welcome!