Towards an Epistemic Network Analysis of Teachers College’s Role in Globalizing Educational Ideas

• In Event: The world in Teachers College, Teachers College in the world

Proposal

This paper will be split in half. The first half will be presented at the beginning of the panel as a framing device, while the second half will be used to wrap up the panel by putting some of the pieces presented above together as part of the larger puzzle that is this research project.
As part of the framing, the paper will explore central aspects of the history of Teachers College, while at the same time undermining the impulse to center it as an actor in the production and circulation of knowledge. Instead, inspired by Foucault’s Archeology of Knowledge (1972), we seek to trace the rules that governed the production of knowledge and discourse, and how different actors, institutions, and regimes of truth participated in the shaping of the (educational) world at the time, as an effort to contribute to a history of the (educational) present. The framing of the panel will include an overview of the study’s methodological approaches, it’s emerging database, and the reasoning behind the decision to present this particular slice of data and initial findings, using Prof. Kandel as a focal node in the epistemic network being built.
The second half of this paper, to be delivered at the end of the panel, will conclude by specifying the ways in which Kandel’s ideas, those of his students, and those promoted by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching(CFAT) were contributing to shaping and were shaped by what was thinkable and actionable in the educational world of the time. This will lead panelists to point to future directions within this study, as ways to work both interdisciplinarily -what relations existed, for instance, between the ideas explored here and Thorndike’s epistemological framings within psychology-, and transnationally, exploring the movement, appropriation, and resistances that took place in ,say, China or Puerto Rico, to the ideas promoted by Kandel and CFAT through the works of Idabelle Main and Juan Osuna respectively.

Author

• Daniel Friedrich, Teachers College, Columbia University