History of Education On Air

HistEdOnAir – Bringing History of Education to your ears.

Our podcast HistEdOnAir discusses topics in the field of education from a historiographical perspective. Delving deeper into questions such as why going to school has become a widely shared experience or how education and schooling have come to be regarded as a cure-all for problems faced by society inspired us to start this project.

Ideas and Aims

We aim to establish broader discussions on current historiographical debates that shape contemporary social questions.

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By addressing a wide audience, we want to discuss and show what scientists in this specific area are doing and why it matters. We are interested in talking about questions that relate to history of education and want to explore what it is that researchers actually do in their day-to-day work, which methodologies are used, what they allow us to make visible and what they might fail to address. Speaking about science with other scholars helps to illuminate the complexities and the diversity of science and research. We think that these kinds of conversations can enrich the somewhat standardized form of written communication common in academia. Being educational researchers ourselves, we learn the codes and standards of our profession, which we also want to question and rethink. Therefore, we especially address early career researchers and interpret our project as a way of archiving and preserving current understandings, debates, but also research and personal problems and constellations. Thus, this podcast is intended to archive – to a certain extent – not only our voices, but also current approaches to research. Thematic, Biographic, and Early Career Researcher Content HistEdOnAir provides three distinct episode formats: thematic, biographical, and early career researcher episodes. First, our thematic episodes are centered around methodological, topical or source-related questions. Second, we also think about science as a biographical experience and part of a larger social field, where individual experiences and biographies matter not only to us, but can also speak about our (social) surroundings. Therefore, we feature episodes that focus on specific biographies of scholars in our field and look at their career and personal paths in an effort to understand how (scientific) work is created and shaped. Third, some podcast episodes address topics specifically related to early career researchers, in which we discuss questions of starting a life in science and look at topics such as “how to conference” or what it feels like to publish your first paper. We also discuss questions and problems related to writing, time and conflict management, and look at working conditions in academia and their developments over time. The four of us started this podcast while working together at Humboldt University in Berlin. Since we are all active in different sub-fields of history of education, we wanted to create a flexible format that is open to various topics and conversations. Of course, our endeavor can only be realized through the dedicated support of our guests, guest hosts, and technical support, who are all part of the process of developing this podcast.