School Subjects: Photography as Source on Children’s Lives in the History of Colonial Boarding Schools

Abstract

Despite a visual turn in the field of history of education, including visual sources has far from become standard practice when writing histories of education or when considering children’s voices from the past. Yet photographs can be especially fruitful when considering marginalised children who left few traces in other records. Building upon theories and insights from multiple disciplines, this article aims to contribute to recent methodological approaches to researching the experiences of marginalised children. Through the preservation of bodies, actions, and movements in space and time, photography may provide access to the lives of children growing up in colonial boarding schools. From a case study of a school in Merauke, West Papua (Netherlands New Guinea) in the 1920s, three specific merits of photography as source in educational history are discussed, as well as the difficulties and limits of this approach.