Journeys Through Space and Time: Refugee Educators, Transnational Entanglements and Peripheral Traces

2026/07/28 by Siân Roberts
Arts and Humanities · Social Sciences · #Global Educational Policies and Reforms #Historical Education Studies Worldwide #History of Emotions Research

paper · pdf · doi:10.1080/0046760x.2026.2703011

openalex publication_date 2026/07/28 · openalex created_date 2026/07/29 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/30

Abstract

Refugee educators who arrived in Britain in the 1930s have hitherto received little scholarly attention in the history of British education. This paper contributes to addressing this absence by exploring one educative space, the Camphill School for children with learning disabilities, established by Austrian refugees inspired by the educational theories of Rudolf Steiner. Taking as its starting point a photographic essay by the émigré photographer and educator Edith Tudor Hart in Picture Post, this paper considers Camphill as an example of refugee pedagogy characterised by a commitment to socially just approaches in education and rooted in creative and therapeutic practices that emphasised the nurturing of pupil identity and an ethics of care and belonging. It argues that if historians of education are to locate and evaluate the traces of refugee educators we must look to spaces on the peripheries of mainstream education and its histories.

Citations

• BEYOND COMPARISON: HISTOIRE CROISÉE AND THE CHALLENGE OF REFLEXIVITY1
• Crossing borders: academic refugee women, education and the British Federation of University Women during the Nazi era
• Stories as Lived Experience: Narratives in Forced Migration Research
• Picturing progressive texts: images of ‘democratic schooling’ in the work of John and Evelyn Dewey and contemporaries
• From savages to capitalists: progressive images of education in the UK and the USA (1920–1939)
• The history of education in Britain and Ireland: changing perspectives and continuing themes
• “Scholars in Great Need:” Responses to Refugee Staff and Students at the University of Birmingham 1933–1945

Related

• Refugee education: Education for an unknowable future
• Crossing borders: academic refugee women, education and the British Federation of University Women during the Nazi era
• A story of belonging: schooling and the struggle of students of refugee experience to belong
• Refugee students' perspectives on inclusive and exclusive school experiences in Austria
• The Purposes of Refugee Education: Policy and Practice of Including Refugees in National Education Systems