Meeting minutes as sources for the history of education: A discussion based on a case study

Abstract

The article discusses fragments of the recent history of a municipal school network on the basis of elements collected from minutes of meetings, which are seen as documentary sources. These are minutes of meetings between a municipal education department and the directorship team of the schools of that municipal network from 1989 to 2004. 228 minutes recorded in the pertinent official documents were examined. This gave rise to eight categories in whose light the empirical material was analyzed. Then an interpretation scheme of the minutes was worked out on the basis of the categories. The minutes are records of the decisions and processes of management by the municipal education department. These decisions are communicated to the municipal school network through the schools’ directorship teams. Thus, to write the recent history of the education provided by that network means to turn into documents objects that, if restricted to their main purpose, are just solemn records of a meeting, but can also help to reconstruct historical processes in the field of education.

Key words: education history, record, minutes, management, education.