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

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.