History of Education Society UK Podcast

The half a million international students studying in the UK are heirs to a complex legacy of overseas students studying in Britain. From medieval scholars traveling between Oxford and Paris, medical students traveling to Edinburgh, Indian students coming over in the late 19th century, or Chinese students studying in London today – politics and education combine in these students studying away from home. One moment that is particularly important for international students occurred in 1966-67, when the British government began charging different fees for overseas students than for home students.

Today we discuss that change and the student protests that came with it. Our guide is Dr Jodi Burkett, social and cultural historian of late twentieth century Britain and a Senior Lecturer at the University of Portsmouth. Her research looks at the cultural and social impacts of the end of the British Empire, with a particular focus on national movements like the National Union of Students. Her recent chapter - Boundaries of Belonging: differential fees for overseas students, c. 1967 - touches on a number of important questions about race, national identity, and student politics and how these intersected with the overseas fee hike.

A transcript of the episode is available at the History of Education Society website, along with more information about our events, publications and conferences. You can follow the History of Education Society UK on Twitter and keep up-to-date with the latest research in The History of Education journal.

Sources 

Boundaries of Belonging: differential fees for overseas students, c. 1967 in The break-up of Greater Britain by Jodi Burkett

Revolutionary vanguard or agent provocateur: students and the far left on English university campuses c.1970–90 by Jodi Burkett

Today’s conversation picks up on the discussion of American imperial education from our last episode. I speak with Brianna Lafoon, who researches the education networks that formed within and between the mainland United States and its colonial holdings. We discuss how these networks operated, the practices and ideas they spread, and how an imperial perspective informs the history of mass schooling in the United States.

Brianna Lafoon is a historian of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and she is a PhD candidate in the History Department at University of Wisconsin-Madison. In addition to her experience as a researcher, she has ten years of educational experience in New York City - seven years classroom experience as a secondary school teacher and three years as an instructional coach.

A transcript of the episode is available at the History of Education Society website, along with more information about our events, publications and conferences. You can follow the History of Education Society UK on Twitter and keep up-to-date with the latest research in The History of Education journal.

In today's episode, I was lucky enough to speak with not one but two researchers! Both Funie Hsu and Malini Johar Schueller look at the role of race and racialisation in shaping education policy during the American occupation of the Philippines. Our discussion focuses on the introduction of compulsory, English-language education, the role that conceptions of race played in developing that system, and how their professional identity shapes the ways they approach their research.

Funie Hsu is an Associate Professor at San Jose State University who studies US empire and knowledge construction. She writes regularly on language in education policy, mindfulness and Buddhism in education, and colonialism. Her current research and forthcoming book, Instructions for (Erasing) Empire: English, Domestication, and the US Colonization of the Philippines, looks at how notions of race and species difference undergirded colonial education policy in the Philippines. Prior to her academic career, she was an elementary school teacher with the Los Angeles Unified School District.

Malini Johar Schueller is Professor of English at the University of Florida. Her research focuses on, among other things, US empire studies, postcolonial theory, and postcolonial women of color. She has written widely on the construction of “the Orient” in American culture and her most recent book, Campaigns of Knowledge: U.S. Pedagogies of Colonialism and Occupation in the Philippines and Japan, examines how American ideas of the Asian “other” were instrumental in shaping colonial American educational policy.

A transcript of the episode is available at the History of Education Society website, along with more information about our events, publications and conferences. You can follow the History of Education Society UK on Twitter and keep up-to-date with the latest research in The History of Education journal.

In today’s episode, we continue our series on graduate student research with an interview with Daniel Adamson. We discuss Daniel’s research on how the British response to the Holocaust is represented in schools and museums, as well as how Daniel uses approaches from memory studies to information his research. 

Daniel Adamson is a PhD student at Durham University whose research focuses on representations of the British response to the Holocaust in schools, museums and other educational settings. Daniel writes for The Conversation, as well as the British Association for Holocaust Studies’ blog and the University of Cambridge ‘Doing History in Public’ project.

A transcript of the episode is available at the History of Education Society website, along with more information about our events, publications and conferences. You can follow the History of Education Society UK on Twitter and keep up-to-date with the latest research in The History of Education journal.

Sources
Plans for a UK Holocaust Memorial looked promising, but now debate has stalled by Daniel Adamson

Textbook Portrayals of Britain and the Holocaust by Daniel Adamson

Resilience or reticence? Holocaust memory in the United Kingdom with Daniel Adamson

On today’s episode, we speak with Adam Crymble about his new book, Technology and the Historian, which looks at the history and development of digital history as a discipline in the United Kingdom, Canada and the United States. Adam’s book focuses on the (longer than you might expect) history of using computers to do historical research and the different ways historians have integrated digital methods into their work. We discuss this history, as well as the ways that combining intellectual history with a history of academic practice can help illuminate the development of disciplines.   

Adam Crymble is a Lecturer of Digital Humanities at UCL and a historian of migration and community, with a particular focus on early modern London. He also has a strong interest in global digital humanities and collaborates with scholars working to implement digital humanities strategies for their local contexts. He currently helps lead the Programming Historian, a peer-reviewed and open access source for digital skills tutorials that is available in English, Spanish, French and Portuguese. You can see more of his work on TikTok (yes, TikTok).

A transcript of the episode is available at the History of Education Society website, along with more information about our events, publications and conferences. You can follow the History of Education Society UK on Twitter and keep up-to-date with the latest research in The History of Education journal.

As part of our commitment to sharing the work of graduate students and early-career researchers, one episode a month of Passing Notes will highlight the work of one of these scholars working in the history of education.

Today’s episode is a conversation with Rachel Rosenberg about her dissertation research, which examines the policy of gender and sexuality of American public school teachers in the twentieth century. In particular, we're going to look at several "crises of masculinity" in the American teaching force from the 1950s through the 1970s. 

Rachel is a PhD candidate in history at Yale University, where she studies women and gender, political and education history. Before returning to graduate school, she worked for two years as a middle school teacher in Dallas, Texas. 

A transcript of the episode is available at the History of Education Society website, along with more information about our events, publications and conferences. You can follow the History of Education Society UK on Twitter and keep up-to-date with the latest research in The History of Education journal.

For our first episode of the season, we talk with Rachel Bynoth about distance education in the late-eighteenth century and how using the dual lens of gender and emotions can help us better understand educational processes. We focus on Rachel's recent article in History, A Mother Educating her Daughter Remotely through Familial Correspondence: The Letter as a Form of Female Distance Education in the Eighteenth Century, and discuss how a series of letters between two women - Hitty and Bess Canning - can help us understand how correspondence could serve as a means of informal education.

Rachel Bynoth is a postgraduate researcher and associate lecturer at Bath Spa University. She is a historian of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, specializing in social, gender, and emotions history. Her PhD research focuses on the Canning family as a case study of the operation of remote familial relationships. She also serves as a committee member of the History Lab, the postgraduate wing of the Institute for Historical Research, and currently is the co-convenor of their seminar series. You can read more of her work at The Conversation.

A transcript of the episode is available at the History of Education Society website, along with more information about our events, publications and conferences. You can follow the History of Education Society UK on Twitter and keep up-to-date with the latest research in The History of Education journal.

Sources

A Mother Educating her Daughter Remotely through Familial Correspondence: The Letter as a Form of Female Distance Education in the Eighteenth Century by Rachel Bynoth

What one Georgian family can teach us about writing letters in the age of Zoom by Rachel Bynoth

Material Lives: Women Makers and Consumer Culture in the 18th Century by Serena Dyer

‘”A celebrated correspondence between the charming Mrs C- formerly well-known in the fashionable World – & her Amiable Daughter”’: The Historical Importance of the letters of Hitty and Bess Canning by Rachel Bynoth

Did you ever got caught passing notes in class? I definitely did.

Welcome to Passing Notes - Season 2 of the History of Education Society’s podcast. In this season, we’re going to talk with the people who have kept passing notes. Each episode you’ll hear from historians of education and other scholars whose research intersects with the field in exciting and thought-provoking ways. They’re the kind of people who enjoy making new connections and who build their own networks of knowledge.

Passing Notes premieres on February 14th with new episodes dropping every 2 weeks.

A transcript of the episode is available at the History of Education Society website, along with more information about our events, publications and conferences. You can follow the History of Education Society UK on Twitter and keep up-to-date with the latest research in The History of Education journal.

This month we were joined by Professor Gary McCulloch and Dr. Heather Ellis to talk about the new book series, A Cultural History of Education, which is out now from Bloomsbury. Spanning thousands of years, from antiquity to present day, this ambitious new series takes a thematic approach to the cultural history of education. It traces themes such as church, religion and morality; family, community and sociability; literacies and life-histories; and teachers and teaching across different periods, cultures and societies. In our discussion, series editor Professor Gary McCulloch talks about the background to the series; how we might define the cultural history of education; and the process of developing such an ambitious project. Dr. Heather Ellis, editor of the fifth volume, A Cultural History of Education in the Age of Empire (1800 - 1920), discusses the challenges and opportunities presented by 'empire', how this developed in the volume, and how we might counter 'grand narratives'.

A Cultural History of Education is available now from Bloomsbury. 

You can follow the History of Education Society UK on Twitter, keep up-to-date with the latest research inThe History of Education journal, and learn more about our events, publications, and conferences on our website. 

For this month's episode we were joined by Carmen Flury and Dr. Rosalía Guerrero to talk about their research into computer education in Europe, as part of the project 'Education and the European Digital Agenda: Switzerland, Germany and Sweden after 1970', based at the University of Zurich. We explore how computer education emerged in Sweden and East Germany, and the conditions that drove and shaped it; the varying roles of the state, civic society, and teachers; the role of women in computer education; and future ideas to explore the history of computer education beyond Europe.

To find out more about Education and the European Digital Agenda project, visit the project website here.

You can follow the History of Education Society UK on Twitter, keep up-to-date with the latest research inThe History of Education journal, and learn more about our events, publications, and conferences on our website.