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The Hietzing School, founded in Vienna in 1927, was small and short-lived. Nevertheless, it served as an incubator of sorts for the psychoanalytic vision(s) of the school’s founders and teachers, including Dorothy Burlingham, Eva Rosenfeld, Anna Freud, Erik Erikson, and Peter Blos. The school was designed and run not by pedagogues but by individuals with access to money, international educational networks, and expertise at the epicentre of the transnational and transcultural spread of child psychoanalysis. The chapter focuses specifically on the culture of teaching and the evolving role of the teacher, which at times overlapped with the roles of parent, analyst, and analysand in the larger Freudian circle. The school was not intended to develop or test the efficacy of new pedagogies but instead to provide a benign, empathic, and nonoppressive educational environment for children undergoing psychoanalysis, and for other children and adults in the school’s orbit as well.

The English Malting House School experiment is well known through the writings of its head teacher, Susan Isaacs. This material is reexamined through a lens that appraises the new kind of teacher imagined in an experimental environment framed around Freudian psychoanalytic understandings of children’s social and emotional development, including an interest in fostering scientific enquiry with very young children. The chapter takes a long view of the school’s impact by examining the sites of influence of three teachers at the school: Susan Isaacs, whose research promoted new understandings of children; Nathan Isaacs, who was interested in science and engaged and critiqued Piaget’s work; and Evelyn Lawrence, who, as director of the Froebel Foundation, linked older and newer strands of progressive thinking about early education and teaching. A transcontinental impact is illustrated with an Antipodean case study, including Isaacs’ visit “down under” in 1937 sponsored by the New Education Fellowship.

This chapter describes and interprets the culture of teaching that formed inside Jardim de Infância da Escola Caetano Campos (1896–1930) in Sao Paulo, Brazil. The Jardim was the first public kindergarten in Brazil and was affiliated with the normal school. To understand how teaching was carried out in the kindergarten, we try to understand how teachers were prepared in the normal school. Its teachers produced practical and theoretical materials for teachers and students, thereby galvanising early twentieth-century educational debates in Brazil. The kindergarten brought what was considered the best in the world to the fresh Brazilian republic. We discuss the shift from what was considered modern education towards progressive education in Brazil. In doing so, we focus on the traces of pedagogical practices present in logbooks and in the magazine Revista do Jardim da Infância produced by the kindergarten.

The Dewey School, which operated at the University of Chicago from 1895 to 1904, is well known over a century later for being a laboratory for John Dewey’s curriculum ideas. Less attention has been paid to its role as a “pedagogical laboratory” for ideas of teaching and learning, which is the focus of this chapter. The chapter is organised into three parts. The first describes the experimental school as it was imagined, along with a review of Dewey’s approach to experimental educational research and his ideas on teaching and the child. The second part tells the school’s story as revealed through Dewey’s blueprint for it and the experiences of its first principal, Clara Isabel Mitchell, and the corps of teachers who subsequently developed the school as an educational laboratory. The final section describes some of the ways the Deweyan teacher and child were reimagined after the experiment ended.

Soon after the Revolution of 1917 in Russia, Stanislav Shatsky (1878–1934), one of the founders of a settlement for working-class children in Moscow in 1905, who had played a leading role in the propaganda of progressive education in prerevolutionary Russia, promptly set about reestablishing his progressive endeavour, promoting his view on education reform among Soviet bureaucrats and teachers and garnering support for an innovative idea: a network of laboratory schools, named experimental stations, devoted exclusively to experimental work. Applying a documentary method, this chapter identifies and evaluates some of the themes and forms of discourse that surrounded the use of research into child development within in-service teacher training in two laboratory schools, drawing on a range of material including trainers’ notes and trainees’ reflective diaries, commentaries in books and journals, and children’s drawings and recorded learning logs.

This book explores networks and knowledge transfer of new education ideas across an international selection of experimental schools—kindergartens, nursery schools, and one school for children from primary to early secondary—which were at the vanguard of progressive educational ideas in the early twentieth century. This chapter sets out the conceptual framework, appraises the key tenets of the twentieth century’s new education pedagogy in the early childhood realm, and seeks clues for what this pedagogy meant for teachers and teaching and the new possibilities and problems for teacher education, education policy, and the very fabric of classroom settings. The schools are illustrative of the variety and commonality of approaches and ideals around reimagining teaching and the teacher.

In much of Europe and North America, institutional forms of childcare and early childhood education (ECE) first emerged in response to processes of industrialization and concomitant societal upheaval in the nineteenth century. Concerns about child welfare and the need for women’s labour, new theories of child development and education and fears of moral and economic degeneration led to the development of institutions for the care and education of young children in many countries. Some, such as the infant schools in England and the United States, were projects of social control and benevolence intended to keep the toddlers of the poor and working class out of harm’s way and to imbue within them Christian morality and Protestant work ethics. Others, such as the kindergartens established by the followers of German pedagogue Friedrich Froebel in the second half of the nineteenth century, were founded out of pedagogical rather than social control or religious impulses; there the focus was on the emancipatory power of activity-based education designed specifically for young children (Nawrotzki 2005).

Across Europe and North America (and in other parts of the world to which we can claim no expertise), we have witnessed in recent decades a spectacular development of institutions and arrangements designed for the education and care of young children (those under compulsory school age) outside the family. In no society have young children ever been raised by their parents alone, but, with a few exceptions, collective education and care in the past took place within networks of individuals who knew each other and who were tied to each other by complex social obligations (e.g. networks of kin or neighbourhood solidarity). The early childhood education and care (henceforth ECEC) which has come to define the life of young children in contemporary societies is of a wholly different nature: it is always regulated and often directly supplied by the State; its establishment has most often been the result of intentional policies pursuing specified social goals; and the individuals providing the services do so for money and not on the basis of personal ties with the parents or children.