Yearbooks as a source in researching school practices in private religious schools

Yearbooks are a documentary source that lets us reconstruct certain school practices in religious schools that are, in general, rarely reflected in other types of primary sources. In this article, we asses yearbooks as a documentary source for learning about such practices by analysing the types of documents that fall into the category "yearbook", the religious orders or congregations in Spain that produced yearbooks and their geographic distribution within the country, how the yearbooks are structured, and the uses they have in educational historiography. We also note that, beyond their value of serving as a channel of communication between the schools and families, they also have value as builders of a historical account of school practices. To carry out our study, we examined a corpus of 1,200 yearbooks belonging the Museum of Education at the University of the Basque Country.