Public Histories of Education: Perceptions, Memories and Constructions. Introduction

Historians of education spent decades working collaboratively with diverse audiences and publics. Their determination to maintain public engagement with the past and to make history in a participatory way is neither new nor recent. If in the last decades – given our interest in history, memory, didactics and heritage – we have witnessed the expansion of “public history”, it is only recently that we have incorporated the term “public history of education” to denote those ways of making an “history of education” not only “for”, but also “by” and “with” non-specialised people, non-members of the academic community. In this special issue, we try to provide reflections, historiographical analyses and studies of concrete products and experiences for a critical analysis – from different academic traditions and geographical contexts – of what is currently understood as “public history of education”.