Research

Our research into histories of education, schooling and childhood explores educational ideas, practices and outcomes across the world. This exploration includes formal pedagogy, or teaching methods and practices in schools but it is also much broader than that. Our research examines any of the processes by which culture is organised and transmitted across generations and between social groups. This includes studies of schools systems; of ideas about humans and their behaviour; of formal and informal pedagogy; the experiences of educational actors with a specific interest in those groups, including women, children and racialized groups, who are frequently written out of mainstream histories.

Current projects

Jane Martin is joint co-editor (with Professor Cathy Burke, University of Cambridge) of Progressive Education: Policy, Politics and Practice – a Routledge book series.

Jane Martin contributed to the BBC World Service women’s education Forum programme, with global broadcasts from Saturday 25 May. You can listen online on the Forum webpage or download the programme from the BBC site or through Apple podcasts Apple podcasts. 

Selected past projects

Jane Martin's book, Gender and Education in England since 1770: a social and cultural history, was the Society for Educational Studies 2023 Book Award winner. Drawing on previously unused and underutilised contemporary sources, oral history interviews, autobiographies and classic sociology of education, novels, and film, it charts continuity and difference in the relation between gender, politics and education, from the perspective of pupils/ students/ teachers/ politicians/ policy-makers/ educator activists. Personal accounts were found and used to travel through time to construct histories of education and childhood where no other evidence might exist.

Ian Grosvenor’s co-edited book with Lisa Rasmussen, Making Education: Material School Design and Educational Governance, addresses the relationship between material school design and educational governance in Europe, Latin and Central America and the United States. It demonstrates how educational governance was, and is, constituted, materialized and transformed in design of buildings and spaces and the way that school leaders, teachers and pupils have adopted, inhabited and re-shaped them in everyday school life.

A study of Indian influences on progressive education in Britain during the early twentieth century and their subsequent impact. 

This research, undertaken by Laura Day-Ashley and funded by the British Academy is based on the premise that the existence of the empire opened up channels for a two-way exchange of educational thought and practice, and was primarily concerned with the flow of educational influence from the colonized to colonizer. By concentrating on the connections between educationists and movements in Britain and India in the early twentieth century, the research seeks to gain an understanding of motivations underlying these connections from both sides and the extent to which they were political and/or pedagogical. Additionally, the research also examines how Indian influences arising from these connections were manifested in British educational thought and practice. 

Heritage education is a noticeably interdisciplinary area of research concerned with the organisations, institutions and practices devoted to the preservation, production and presentation of history, art and culture. Our research into this area is usually concerned with how the experiences and voices of those excluded or marginalised in mainstream historical accounts can come to be included. Including those experiences has the potential not only to enrich our understanding of history, it also has the potential to develop more inclusive and socially just societies. 

Current research projects

In conversation with Melissa Benn, Jane Martin contributed to the 2024 talks organised by the Pascal Theatre Company project supported by the Heritage Lottery Fund.

The audience learned about the life and networks of Jane Agnes Chessar (1835-1880) who struggled to improve standards in elementary schooling, trained teachers and was elected to represent women teachers on the Council of the College of Preceptors.

Selected Past Projects

The Children’s Lives Exhibition was part of Birmingham’s contribution to the Cultural Olympiad programme in 2012. Curated by Ian Grosvenor and Sian Roberts, and supported by the Heritage Lottery Fund, it examined the lives of children from the 18th century to the present day. It was the first major exhibition on childhood to be held in Birmingham and revealed both how the experience of childhood, and the understanding of childhood, changed over time. 

Our research into peace and humanitarianism explores the attempts of educators to alleviate suffering, particularly children’s suffering, in wartime. These attempts have included the provision of material aid; the evacuation and displacement of children to children’s colonies and camps; the development of therapeutic and creative pedagogies in these settings; the visual representations that promoted these forms of aid; and the gendered subjectivities that have been a characteristic of humanitarian organisations and the aid they give.

Current projects

Siân Roberts is collaborating with Birmingham City University and the Peace Pledge Union on a project to map the histories and archive and museum collections relating to peace education and activism, and to explore how these histories can inform current activism and campaigning. A meeting of interested parties was held in December 2018 to consult potential participants and agree the next steps. 

Siân Roberts will be participating in the workshop Humanitarian Handicrafts: Materiality, Development and Fair Trade. A Revaluation being held at the University of Huddersfield in June 2019. The workshop will explore the generation of artisanal products and folk artwork by humanitarian organisations, and Siân’s paper will explore the humanitarian and educational use of handicrafts by Quaker educators in humanitarian relief in the aftermath of the First World War. 

Selected past projects

Siân Roberts and Kevin Myers worked alongside Dr Rebecca Wynter of the History of Medicine department on the collaborative project Quakers and the First World War: Lives and Legacies. Working in partnership with Central England Quakers and volunteers, the project researched and co-produced four booklets uncovering Quaker responses to the First World War including peace activism, medical and humanitarian relief in Europe, and humanitarian and political activism on the Home Front with refugees and others. The booklets are available to download at https://www.voicesofwarandpeace.org/voices-projects/

Our research into educational politics and policy-making  combines biographical study, documentary research and oral history to explore the varied meanings of education as a site of struggle. Addressing questions of memory and forgetting, roads not taken and missed opportunities, projects include critical case studies of possibility and explorations of schools, systems, individuals and networks of influence, considering the meaning of education as a public good. Individually and collectively, we draw from the past to inform the future through focusing on social and educational movements, experience, aspiration, hope and struggle. 

Current projects

Making Good Teachers. Politics, policy-making and practice in teacher education from the nineteenth century to the present.

This project undertaken by Jane Martin, David Bray and Nuala Burgess and funded by the Society for Educational Studies, is concerned with the making of a ‘good’ teacher from the 19th century to the present day. It explores the changing settings and networks through which the professional preparation of teachers takes place in England, using documentary analysis and oral recollection to examine the experiences of staff and students, and the culture and politics of teachers’ work. 

Investigating various institutional types, the study addresses the relationship between developments in teacher education and training/ different modes of teacher preparation and broader social forces and political agendas in a range of historical moments. In developing this history, the landscape of teacher education in England is surveyed to draw attention to discourses of power, and patterns of distinction and differentiation. The purpose of this research is to consider the impact of the politics of the time and the ways in which different programmes and institutional settings were experienced and understood by trainee teachers and those who taught them. What is the perspective of teacher educators and former student teachers on ‘the making of a good teacher’ and the place of education in what it means to live a good life. 

Jane Martin is researching a book Twenty-five Women Who Shaped Education in Britain for Routledge. They represent only a small selection from the women who made a direct contribution to the development of a British state education system after 1900, but this cadre of politicians, teachers and reformers, academics, activists and writers fought prejudice and utilised the development of widening opportunities to make their way in social, economic, political and cultural spheres hitherto granted to men. All were outstanding personalities and activists. None are still alive and while some have largely gone missing from the historical record, individually and collectively their lives and work say much about how ideas of gender, culture and power might or might not intersect in educational thought, policy, and practice. 

Jane Martin founded the Caroline Benn Society to promote research into the histories of comprehensive education. That work continues to develop notably through a biographically driven project exploring the life and work of public intellectual Caroline Benn (1926-2000) and the creation of the Caroline Benn Digital Archive. This study offers a fresh appraisal of the Comprehensive Education Movement, at a time when a return of selective secondary education is increasingly promoted as a solution to social injustice and lack of upward social mobility. The American-born wife of Tony Benn (1925-2014), one of the most prominent post-war socialists in Europe, Caroline Benn’s own work, often overlooked, is critical to our understanding of the 1970s, a contested period in education and politics, and narrative histories of the post-war period. 

Selected past projects

British Academy/ Leverhulme 2014-16: Caroline DeCamp Benn: a comprehensive life, 1926-2000

Drawing from personal papers and oral histories, this biographically-driven study tracked the story of Caroline Benn and the Comprehensive Education Movement between 1960 and 2000, placing it in the larger social and political context of the time. Benn’s commitment to the comprehensive ideal that all learning and each learner and each learner’s path is of inherently equal value and is treated as such within an educational system, challenging the myth that educational potential is a fixed quantity, was famous in education circles. Using her story as a lens for analysis provides fresh insights into education, politics and policy-making, mapping how women developed influence and the ways they navigated routes through a gendered political environment.