IHR seminars > History of Education
History of Education
Convenors: Gary McCulloch (Institute of Education, University of London)
Venue: As announced for each session, below.
Time: Thursday, 5.30pm
| 2 February | Professor Gemma Moss (Institute of Education) Understanding the role of statistical data in the annual reports of the Committee of Council on Education, 1852-72
This paper will consider the methodological issues involved in crossing disciplinary boundaries to study the role that statistical data played in the annual reports of the Committee of Council on Education (CCE) during the payment by results era. Working from a qualitative and ethnographic perspective, rather than as a quantitative historian, my enquiries to date have led me to consider the function that the collection and publication of statistical data had for the CCE between 1852 and 1872. In many respects this has taken me away from the data themselves to what they represent in contemporary discourse and as means of abstracting from the complex social contexts in which elementary education took place. Discussion will focus on understanding the use of statistical information in this wider context and during this historical period. Torrington Room (room 104), Senate House, South block, first floor |
| 1 March | Dr David Crook (Brunel University) Politics, politicians and English comprehensive schools
In this session David Crook will examine the part played by politics and politicians in developing a pluralist model for comprehensive schools which challenged original assumptions that such schools had to be large and impersonal institutions. He sets out to explain what made plans for comprehensive reorganisation politically sensitive and controversial. What were the successes and failures of the English comprehensive school, and how did these play out in political discourses? With the term 'comprehensive' now barely featuring as a school descriptor, he considers the extent have politicians been responsible for the 'strange death' of the comprehensive school. Torrington Room (room 104), Senate House, South block, first floor |
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| 10 May | Dr Cathy Burke (University of Cambridge) 'Hidden Internationalisms' in Architecture and Education: Mary (nee Crowley) Medd (1907-2005)
This seminar will report on trans-disciplinary biographical and prosopographical research that embraces the two fields of architecture and education. Mary Crowley (1907-2005), was one of a number of individuals who, in the 20th century, devoted their professional lives in pursuit of a form of education for children and young people that would be best described as ‘progressive’ in its values, principles, practices and essential humanity. An examination of Mary Crowley’s life and career takes us from the heart of government in post-war England to previously ‘hidden internationalisms’ that existed in the overlapping networks of connections between progressive educationalists, designers, artists and socialist visionaries during the middle years of the 20th century. Today when planned renewal of school building stock is high on government agendas in many parts of the world, this life that was spent through education and architecture is highly relevant as Crowley was an architect who had the ear of government officials during the last large scale school buildings programme that followed the Second World War. Torrnigton Room (room 104), Senate House, South block, first floor |
| 7 June | Dr Kathryn L. Wegner (University of Illinois at Chicago) Constructing Citizenship: Schooling Youth in Immigrant Chicago, 1900-1940
Chicago in the early twentieth century was a city of immigrants; thirty-percent of the city’s population was foreign-born. These immigrants and their children were the targets of state mandates throughout the 1910s requiring public schools to explicitly teach citizenship, and by the 1920s, school-aged youth increasingly encountered citizenship as content in their history and civics classes. Citizenship was no longer defined as a legal category that only whites had access to, but rather as a social category that all youth could access through participation in “citizenship activities”. In this paper I reveal the everyday meanings of citizenship and explain how they were imparted through school curricula and consumed by Chicago youth. Formal citizenship curriculum as expressed in course outlines, textbooks, and Board of Education papers and reports, and the enacted curriculum, accessed through teachers’ narratives, school surveys, foreign language newspapers, and manuscript collections provides the evidence for the claim that in the early twentieth century citizenship was constructed as a social idea accessible to all. Holden Room 103, Senate House, South block, 1st floor |
