Introduction

This special issue arose from a joint conference of the History of Education Society, UK and the Australian and New Zealand History of Education Society, held in Malvern in Worcestershire, England in 2016 on the theme ‘sight, sound and text in the history of education’. Clearly, text is fundamental to the history of education because education often involves some type of reading, extracting of content or deciphering of meaning, and because historical methods tend to require the use of documentary evidence in their reconstruction of the past. As a recent special issue of the journal Paedagogica Historica attests, the last two decades have witnessed a growing literature concerning the use of the visual, and the development of a range of methodological approaches and new ‘ways of seeing’ in the history of education. Suzanne Manning’s contribution examines the use of illustrations as sources for historical analysis with reference to government policy documents on early childhood education in New Zealand.