Appendix: Gender articles in History of Education since 1976

This appendix accompanies Ruth Watts' presidential address for the History of Education Society (UK), published in History of Education, May, 2005, vol.34, no.3, pages 225–241 under the title of ‘Gendering the story: change in the history of education’. The article in vol.34, no.3, looks over the history of women's and gender studies in the history of education from 1976 to the end of 2004 and examines the changes and effects of these studies in order to ask what historians of education can learn from this and where they should go next. The focus of the article is not just the presence of women or papers on them in history of education but whether the greater presence has changed both understanding of gender issues themselves and whether it has affected the whole field and if so, how? The article begins with a brief historiographical review of the field; second, it draws out key issues which represent the present state of affairs; and third, it provides a comparison of what is happening in gender history in a related field, science. It ends with suggestions for future research. The appendix printed below lists the articles published in History of Education from 1976 that formed the basis of the survey on which ‘Gendering the story: change in the history of education’ was based.     

Headteachers’ readings of and responses to disadvantaged contexts: evidence from English primary schools

Existing research demonstrates the impact of context on school organisation and management, curriculum and pedagogy and on student peer relations. New developments in English education policy will devolve more responsibility for dealing with these issues to headteachers. Headteachers' readings of their contexts and the responses that they make are thus of increasing interest. This paper draws on interviews with eight headteachers of less advantaged English primary schools to explore how they understand and articulate the contexts in which their schools operate and how this knowledge is translated into strategies for organising curriculum, pedagogy and other school processes. These headteachers observed context through the lens of the behaviour of parents and children in relation to school, contrasting it with an assumed middle‐class normality. More critical perspectives on families' social and economic position or on the contribution of school practice to educational exclusion were largely absent. School responses were many and varied but, given the constraints of budgets, market and performative pressures, were unlikely to substantially transform the educational experiences and outcomes of disadvantaged students. We point to the continuing need for more contextualised funding mechanisms and policies to improve schools in disadvantaged areas and also, in the light of devolution to schools, to the need to develop mechanisms of support to headteachers to help them to develop critical understandings of context and to reflect on school process and practices in the light of these understandings.     

Communicative reading

This essay examines aspects of Tom Paine's “vulgar” style by comparing the sentence structure and diction of Common Sense with that of four other pamphlets of the American Revolution. It concludes that Paine adapted his prose style to the popular audience, in part, by avoidance of noun modifiers and overly long subordinate clauses, and a preference for uninterrupted subject‐verb‐object sentences, active verbs, and forms of “to be.”     

‘Becoming and being writers’: the experiences of doctoral students in writing groups

The use of writing groups to support students undertaking post-graduate research within universities has begun to receive attention from academic supervisors and doctoral researchers. Very little has been written by doctoral students themselves on the benefits of working within such writing groups. In this article, the experiences of working within a doctoral writing group at an Australian University are presented, primarily from the perspective of students. The authors identify two main benefits they have experienced through participating in a writing group using a ‘multi-voiced’ approach. First, they discuss the kind of learning that they achieved through working in a writing group. They do this with reference to key principles of peer learning and of peer review. Second, they focus on the ways the group worked as a community of discursive social practice. An overarching message for them in participating in the group and now writing this article is the shift in their thinking and experience of writing from seeing writing as an essentially private and implicit process to writing becoming a matter of public and shared work. These two notions are bound by the concept of identity building, drawing from the literature on communities of practice.     

Experiences of young (minor) asylum seekers in further education in Malta

This study appraises the particular challenges that minor asylum-seeking migrants who are in the 16–18 age category confront when pursuing their studies in a vocational college in Malta, a central Mediterranean island which is the smallest EU member state. The study explores how they exercise resilience in their desire to forge a future for themselves and traces their passage from Africa to Malta and their prospective aspirations to eventually settle elsewhere. It also explores how they integrate their lives as college students with these aspirations and how they see this as contributing to their lifelong education and ongoing processes of personal growth.     

Critique of the Definitions and Ideologies of Child Sexual Abuse that Underpin Current Educational Texts for Teachers

Teachers in a large, all-male urban school in Jordan were interviewed about their perceptions of the most frequently occurring student misbehaviour. It was hoped to be able to identify the causes of such ‘disruption’ to teaching and learning in the school. Teachers spontaneously identified eight forms of student misbehaviour, which reflected clearly different kinds of interference with the teacher's authority. Teachers showed great awareness of the constraints which operate in the school context, which in turn affect their means of managing discipline in the classroom. Though this study was undertaken in a context which is significantly different from England, it is interesting that the issues these teachers saw themselves confronted with were not significantly different from those reported in this country. The conclusions that the researchers draw from their data have relevance beyond the specific context in which this study was undertaken.