Ian Grosvenor

'There's no place like home': education and the making of national identity

Firstly I look upon Britain as my homeland… Liberty, the love of home, tolerance and justice—these are some of the things which Britain has infused into most of her sons and daughters…. What does Britain mean to me?, I say ‘A home and the home of the good things in life’. (HAI.1.) Britain means to me my HOME. And I use ‘home’ in the fullest sense as after years spent abroad, it is always the one place I had a secret hankering to come back to (SM1.6) England is home and theres no place like home. Thats what Britain means to me. With all its faults, it means just everything to me (MIL.9.) (Report on ‘What does Britain mean to you’, 1941)1

From the ‘Eye of History’ to ‘a Second Gaze’: The Visual Archive and the Marginalized in the History of Education

This paper has several concerns. It is about both the stories we tell and the images we place with those stories; it is also about historical practice and the power of the image to generate new research approaches. The paper is organized into three sections: the ‘eye of history’ and historians and the visual archive; histories of black and minority ethnic schooling; and the idea of a second gaze in the visual archive. The paper will look at the historical literature around using visual sources in research, and in particular will draw attention to the ‘problem of authenticity’, ‘the reality effect’ and the ‘aura of believability’. It will then shift its focus to consider the educational history of black and minority ethnic children in British schools and problems associated with the dominant policy‐driven narrative that is used to explore that history. The paper goes on to address the importance of the photographic record for surfacing hidden elements in cultural history. Finally, the paper will argue that historians need to be sensitive to the idea of a second gaze when researching the educational experiences of marginalized groups in society.

‘Putting education in its place’: space, place and materialities in the history of education

Taylor and Francis HED_A_514526.sgm 10.1080/0046760X.2010.514526 Hist ry of Education 0 46-760X (prin )/1464-5130 (online) Edi i l 2 10 & Francis 39 6 0 002 10 Dr CatherineBurke cb552@cam.a .uk Over the last decade there has been a significant growth of interest among historians of education in questions of space, place, material cultures and the travel of knowledge and theory.1 This work builds and expands upon the foundations set by studies of school building programmes of earlier periods published in the 1970s and 1980s.2 More recent publications have extended the range of source materials available to us and promote a wider and deeper criticality in our ways of seeing and using such sources for the histories we tell. This collection of articles has been selected from submissions to the 42nd annual conference of the History of Education Society held in Sheffield during December 2009. The conference was unusual in several important ways. First, it was organised in collaboration with the University of Sheffield School of Architecture, a leading institution for the education of architects in the UK with an international reputation for excellence. The launch of a new master’s degree in Educational Architecture this year (2010) indicates the commitment of the School to promoting research in this field; such research necessitates developing knowledge about the changing relationship over time between pedagogical ideas, childhood and building design. Second, this collaboration was an exercise in challenging the boundaries of subject disciplines towards gaining new insights and identifying new research agendas for education histories. This was to be achieved not only through bringing together architectural and educational historians but also in stimulating further cross-disciplinary connections through keynote lectures, one of which was delivered by a leading cultural geographer. Third, the conference was international in scope as represented by the participation of scholars from several continents and across Europe. Drawing from education as a social science, but also as a cultural and spatial practice, the range and quality of the over 60 papers presented was outstanding. That fact has presented the editors of this special issue with an enormously difficult challenge of selection. In keeping with the innovative frame of reference that informed the conference through inter-disciplinary endeavour, the articles selected here display important

The Hearing School: an exploration of sound and listening in the modern school

In recent years sensory history has emerged as a research topic of growing interest to historians and has been accompanied by a call to incorporate the senses into our understanding of the past. Under modernity, social direction and control were built into the infrastructure of modern life as specialist institutions emerged and multiplied in the urban landscape; institutions which were designed to discipline, control and shape urban bodies – the prison, the workhouse, the asylum, the reformatory, the childrens home and the school. This paper focuses on one of these sites of childhood control: the school. Historians of education and childhood have to date paid little attention to the sensory worlds of schooling and childhood. This study focuses on one sense – hearing. Hearing, sound and aurality have been shown to be deeply implicated in modernitys daily elaboration. The study explores the sounds of modern schooling; the culture of listening in modern schools; the materiality of the modern school “soundscape”; and the influence of architectural acoustics on the culture of listening. In doing so, the study addresses the problems, sources and methodologies involved in writing a history of the hearing school.

The progressive image in the history of education: stories of two schools

This article explores the typology of photographic images of school and schooling used by historians who have developed visual methodologies in their research and scholarship over recent years. The authors consider the question, raised by a number of scholars, concerning the value of image‐based research and the capacity of the visual alone to produce new knowledge aside from other traditional sources. The ‘progressive image’ is discussed as one type of school photograph in the context of a range of other types and the article traces the stories of two schools, known to be progressive and innovative during the mid‐twentieth century through archived imagery. The social relationships forged between educators, artists, photographers and policy makers, known and unknown to the historian, it is suggested are by‐products of the process of considering the progressive image in the history of education, opening up new and potentially rich research agendas for the future.

Exploring supplementary education: margins, theories and methods

Existing knowledge of supplementary education, that is education organised and run by political, faith or ethnic groups outside of formal schooling, is patchy. This article is an exploration of the histories of supplementary education in the twentieth century. It is organised into three sections. The article begins by reviewing some existing literature and argues that supplementary education has been a topic of marginal concern for social historians, sociologists and historians of education. This marginal status has often been reflected in the way in which a dominant account of the history of supplementary education has entered the research literature despite a rather selective evidential base. The second section of the article deploys an expansive definition of education, and presents some new historical evidence concerning African Caribbean and Irish supplementary education. A final arguments section reflects on the significance of supplementary education and suggests some topics for a future research agenda.

Geographies of risk: an exploration of city childhoods in early twentieth‐century Britain

In recent years geographical concepts and the geography lexicon have been used in different disciplines to explore the diffusion and circulation of ideas and it is increasingly commonplace for academics to speak of a “geography of knowledge”. Little systematic work has been undertaken by historians of education using spatialised approaches to consider the emergence and circulation of educational knowledge. The circulation of knowledge, and an examination of whether spatial thinking can enable historians to gain insights and understand relationships not otherwise obtainable, are the key issues considered in this paper.

Educational research—history of education a curious case?

The article begins with an exploration of the current state of history of education by drawing on published reviews of history of education, thematic analysis of journal content, and mapping of postgraduate study. It then highlights ‘moments of insecurity’. These are characterised by a particular discourse that frames the future of the discipline in particular ways to suggest that history of education is dependent on concerted strategic decisions in response to ‘moments of challenge’ resulting from institutional change, and particularly in response to the disappearance of history of education from teacher education. Rather than seeing ‘moments of insecurity’ as stages of disintegration for disciplines the article argues that they can constitute ‘moments of opportunity’ when disciplines reach out to spaces shared with other disciplines to develop interdisciplinary ways of working. The article then discusses ‘moments of curiosity’ that enrich the methodological and substantive development of the history of education. In history of education, ‘moments of curiosity’ have occurred on the basis of intellectual exchange in a dialogic associational way within networks rather than being a direct outcome of strategic responses to ‘moments of insecurity’. They are resulting in organic growth that is developing the landscape of history of education in several ways. The article ends by pointing to the importance of an historical dimension for bringing contextual understanding to enrich contemporary research and by stressing the need within the discipline for researchers (individually or collectively) to develop an eye for ‘intelligence’ and strategic vision to link their interests with current challenges in order to highlight lacunae in current practice in and for education.

Back to the Future or Towards a Sensory History of Schooling

This conjectural essay was originally written for a symposium Historiography of the future: Looking back to the future held at the International Standing Conference for History of Education (ISCHE) 33, July 2011, San Luis Potosi, Mexico. organised by Kate Rousmaniere and Frank Simon Participants were asked to envision future challenges for the discipline and to imagine what innovations and new interests would arise in the next 30 years. Written from the vantage point of 2041 the essay describes scholarship and methodological approaches used by historians of education to explore the history of the senses.

Back to school from a holiday in the slums!: Images, words and inequalities

In the late 1960s and early 1970s SHELTER produced a series of campaign pamphlets aimed at raising public awareness of homelessness in the United Kingdom. Back to school from a holiday in the slums! was one such pamphlet which, using a mixture of photographic images and oral testimony, posed a series of questions about the relationship between living in unfit and overcrowded housing and poor educational performance. The school environment was ‘a change and a comfort’ for children living in slums, but school teachers and social workers were asked if such children had any chance of success as they came each day ‘from housing conditions so oppressive that their capacity for education … [was] severely restricted’. On the basis of these interviews SHELTER concluded that their childhood was ‘a time of lost opportunity’. Back to school from a holiday in the slums! is used in this article to explore the dialogue between the image and the word and the representation of inequalities.