Philip Gardner

Oral history in education: teacher's memory and teachers' history

Methodological issues in oral history For some years past, my colleague Peter Cunningham and I have been involved in recording and archiving the professional memories of classroom teachers from the twentieth century. Over successive projects, our research team has conducted more than 300 oral history interviews with former teachers. The data emerging from these encounters have been rich and revealing. Yet for many, perhaps because the discipline has been traditionally so closely attuned to documentary methods, oral history remains an approach that raises a number of important methodological issues for the history of education. What follows is an attempt to explore one of these issues: the challenge presented by the exercise of memory as a historical method, together with its implications for the uses of historical data generated by memory work. Philosophically, as well as methodologically, oral history turns easily and naturally towards the concept of the self. It is, after all, a real flesh-and-blood person who sits across the room from us during an interview, recounting and revealing memories of a life that he/ she alone has lived and knows as can no other. At one time, this recognition might have expressed itself as a departure from the narrow objectivist ambitions of traditional historical realism towards the authentic world of individual experience and phenomenological perception; ‘The individual life is the vehicle of historical experience’. From such a perspective, voices from the past—particularly should they wear the same mantle of political exclusion and scholarly neglect as E.P. Thompson’s ‘poor stockinger’—seemed to offer us a direct line to intimate inner truths about lives from that past. Today, it is less easy to take such a straightforward view. It is certainly not hard to make a case in support of oral history as widening and enriching the evidential base for historical research. Neither is it difficult to construct political or ethical arguments for oral history in terms of democratizing the production of history. In both cases, the addition of the voice of the classroom teachers of the past to those of policy makers, trade union leaders and local administrators is easy to defend. What has become much harder to

Oral History and Teachers’ Professional Practice: a wartime turning point?

Abstract This exploratory article has a two‐fold aim. In the first place, it seeks to investigate changing patterns of teacher‐pupil relationships in the twentieth century through the lens of the professional lives and pedagogical practices of classroom teachers themselves. Such an investigation is engaged through the application of oral history methods. An unexpected result of a succession of oral history interviews has been the identification, by former teachers themselves, of wartime evacuation as a significant turning point in the development of teacher‐pupil relationships. The second aim of the article is to relate the findings of oral history interviews to those which emerge from documentary and secondary sources. In this way, the particular strengths of oral history methods for the investigation of past pedagogical practice are assessed.

Teacher Trainers and Educational Change in Britain, 1876-1996; 'a flawed and deficient history'?

This essay is designed to complement an earlier and related article which examined the ways in which schoolteachers have sought to accommodate the profound changes which have impacted upon the structure and functioning of the education service in England and Wales over the last century. On this occasion, the subjects of the discussion are teacher trainers. The article shares with the earlier piece an insistence that responses to the pressures of change in the contemporary moment are best understood under the illuminating light of a longer historical perspective. The argument also retains a similar organisational structure, seeking to analyse patterns of change against a background of three notional generations of teacher trainers between the years 1876 and 1996. The article seeks particularly to understand the construction of teacher trainer identities during this period in terms of professional responses to policy changes impinging upon the training of teachers and concludes by assessing why teacher trai...

'Saving the Nation's Children': Teachers, Wartime Evacuation in England and Wales and the Construction of National Identity.

The teachers in charge[of evacuation]are performing national service of the highest importance. … The successful maintenance of the morale and the steadying of nerves of the civil population will be worth several battles to the nation, and in the early critical days of a war this will depend largely upon the teachers, to whom the children and their parents will look for guidance, inspiration and support.

4.3 “Of Time and the City”: Young People’s Ethnographic Accounts of Identity and Urban Experience in Canada

The exploration of narrative expressions constitutes a central element of the ethnographer’s trade. It also, however, presents numerous methodological and interpretive dilemmas which are not easily resolved. For example, such dilemmas may emerge when a young person may be interviewed about, or asked to visualize, their past experience in a neighbourhood, the wider city or family life. For experienced ethnographers, we learn that young people may often imagine they have little history to tell and that many young people have been born into local conditions of loss that have substantially erased patterns of familial or community memory. In this chapter, we argue that narratives expressed by young people always carry residual meanings which operate in the present in reappropriated forms and which shape their projected futures. It is the ethnographic interpretation of these narratives that may assist us in better understanding how particular identity categories – such as a young person imagining he or she is Eminem or seeing oneself as ‘a Thug’ or ‘a Gina’ – may be seen as part of a larger narrative imagination – as a form of social and cultural meaning which carries residual effects into the present.

The ‘Life‐long Draught’: From Learning to Teaching and Back

A significant but seldom explored feature of social change brought about by popular education in the modern period lies in its intimate and complex association with the humanizing idea of the ‘lifelong’. At a moment when the idea of ‘lifelong learning’ exercises a considerable policy influence, it is perhaps timely to reflect on the relation of education with the ‘lifelong’ in an explicitly historical way. In this paper, the notion of this concept is seen to exert an immensely attractive but fundamentally unstable influence over educational activity. Across time, its hegemonic potential may be seen to be readily available to one or other of the two sides of the act of education—teaching and learning—but seldom to both simultaneously. The paper traces a historical trajectory which describes the eclipse of nineteenth‐century lifelong learning in terms of an intellectual migration towards lifelong teaching in the twentieth century. At the end of that century and into the twenty‐first, we see that a new incarnation of lifelong learning has been paralleled by the decline of a century‐long tradition of teaching as the guardian of the ‘lifelong’ in education.

The Educational Afterlife of Greater Britain, 1903-1914.

Following its late nineteenth-century emergence as an important element within federalist thinking across the British Empire, the idea of Greater Britain lost much of its political force in the years following the Boer War. The concept however continued to retain considerable residual currency in other fields of Imperial debate, including those concerning policies and practices of education across the Empire. This paper explores aspects of such debate by examining the intellectual contexts, theoretical assertions and conceptual formulations deployed in relation to questions about education, leadership, Imperial unity and racial identity in the early twentieth century. These issues are illuminated by an analysis of proposals by the Imperial theorist E.B. Sargant for the educational “colonisation” of the Empire of white settlement by “daughter” schools transposed from the traditional public schools of the metropole and staffed by teachers conceived as “the regulars of the State”.

5.2 Silences and Interpretations: Historical Approaches in Understanding Classroom Teachers from the Past

This essay takes as its starting point Kate Rousmaniere’s lastingly important book on the lives and work of New York school teachers in the 1920s, City Teachers: Teaching and School Reform in Historical Perspective. Rousmaniere shows how the absence of teachers’ voices from the historical record has meant that the history of the teaching profession has remained a sketchy and indistinct one. Using a combination of oral and documentary sources, Rousmaniere seeks to address a range of substantive questions through engaging a previously ‘silent’ teachers’ voice and restoring it to a legitimate and authentic historical importance. In so doing, Rousmaniere opens the way for a methodological consideration of another significant ‘silence’ within the history of education, namely that relating to methodological approach and procedure. In particular, her work invites more detailed comparative consideration of two distinctive forms of historical data – the written word, as engaged by documentary history, and the spoken word, as engaged by oral history. These are here considered in terms of the processes of historical interpretation, understood principally through the lens of Ricoeurian hermeneutics.

Memory, Identity and Witness

ABSTRACT Drawing on Paul Ricoeurs notion of narrative identity and on his observations concerning testimony in Memory, History, Forgetting, this article explores the operation of memory under two aspects, that of narrative identity and that of witness. This exercise involves some related discussion both of the history/memory problem and of the relationship between written and spoken traces in engaging the past. The methodological focus for the work is a written text of an unusual kind, comprising an extensive and detailed eyewitness account written, forgotten and re-discovered by the same individual – Lionel Curtis – after an intervening period of half a century.