The new model school of education: Thomson,Moray House and Teachers College,Columbia

The University of Edinburgh and Moray House teachers’ college began to develop a new model of research and teaching, institutionalised in a combined university department and teachers’ college, with a research laboratory and advanced research degree in the 1920s. This new institution was modelled on the innovative and influential Teachers College, within Columbia University, New York, and was driven by a strong Scottish demand for advanced practice in education. It benefited from, and was shaped by, its new head, Godfrey Thomson, and his capability and leadership produced a model of a school of education that would be radical today had it survived the 1950s.     

'When in doubt,preserve': exploring the traces of teaching and material culture in English schools

To start with polytechnics, and so on, is like presenting a naked man with a top‐hat when what he wants is a pair of trousers. ^{1 1}D. Dilks, Curzon in India, (2 vols., New York, 1969), I, 244.

Lord Curzon, 1901

     

Schoolwork: interpreting the labour process of teaching

In 1981 we gave a paper at the International Sociology of Education Conference at Westhill, subsequently published as ‘The Educational Worker1? A Reassessment of Teachers’, which was a polemic on the subject of teacher professionalism and proletarianisation. This paper is partly a critique of ‘The Educational Worker’, following from a belated recognition of the importance of gender in analysing teachers’ work, and also makes use of more recent historical and comparative research. This paper puts the emphasis on the social construction of skill and argues for the study of ‘schoolwork’, that is for the study of the labour process of teaching.     

The ‘Usefulness’ of Learning: the struggle over governance,meaning and the European education space

The creation of a distinctive and useful European education policy space is a necessary part of the project of Europeanization in the European Union. A ‘European education area’ is fundamental to the contemporary structuring of the European Union; it announces the arrival of a major discursive space, centred on education in which the legitimation, steering and shaping of European governance is being played out. This article explores the problem of governance and education, through its first stage, the construction of a European education project, based on cultural inheritance and then cooperation networks; then it examines, in the second stage, the determination of a new policy of lifelong learning. This new policy shifts the emphasis from formal institutional influence and centres on the individual learner, stressing performance and comparison. The article discusses the difficulty of this task, and its most important aspect, connecting governance and a meaningful project.