Kew Gardens and the emergence of the school museum in Britain, 1880-1930

The idea of the school museum as an active resource for object-based learning played an important but now neglected part in programmes of educational reform during the closing decades of the nineteenth century and the opening decades of the twentieth. In this article we focus on the role of the Kew Museum of Economic Botany in supplying schools with botanical specimens and artefacts for their own museums during this period, to support a broad variety of curricular agendas, from nature study to geography and beyond. The evidence suggests that this scheme was remarkably popular, with demand among teachers for museum objects outstripping supply, and increasingly being met in other ways. Seen from the perspective of Kew, the distribution of specimens, artefacts, and visual materials to schools was a way of extending the ethos of economic botany into the classroom. For the teachers who requested specimens in large numbers, and the pupils who studied and handled them, however, such objects may have had other meanings and uses. More broadly, we propose new avenues for study that can help us to better appreciate the ways in which museum objects, expertise, and practices moved across professional, institutional, and increasingly global boundaries in this period

Introduction: Geographies, Histories and Practices of Informal Education

This extract is taken from the author's original manuscript and has not been edited. The definitive, published, version of record is available here: http://www.palgrave.com/gb/book/9781137027726#otherversion=978134943972

Geographical education, empire and citizenship 1870-1944

SIGLEAvailable from British Library Document Supply Centre-DSC:DXN017853 / BLDSC - British Library Document Supply CentreGBUnited Kingdo

Making all the difference in the world Geography's popular school texts 1870-1944

General seriesAvailable from British Library Document Supply Centre- DSC:7753.6(RHUL-DG-RP--3) / BLDSC - British Library Document Supply CentreSIGLEGBUnited Kingdo

Geographical education, empire and citizenship Geographical teaching and learning in English schools, 1870-1944

SIGLEAvailable from British Library Document Supply Centre-DSC:4316.332(35) / BLDSC - British Library Document Supply CentreGBUnited Kingdo

‘An instruction in good citizenship’: scouting and the historical geographies of citizenship education

This article was published in the journal, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers [Blackwell Publishing © The Author. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers © Royal Geographical Society (with the Institute of British Geographers)] and the definitive version is available at: www.blackwell-synergy.comThis paper examines informal citizenship training for youth and the historical geographies of education over time through analysing the Scout Movement in Britain and its activities in the first half of the twentieth century. In doing so, it highlights the complexity of youth citizenship and the significance of non-school spaces in civil society to our understandings of young people's positioning as citizen-subjects. Drawing on archival research, I demonstrate how a specific youth citizenship project was constructed and maintained through the Scout Movement. I argue that various processes, strategies and regulations were involved in envisioning 'citizen-scout' and developing both duty-bound, self-regulated individuals as well as a wider collective body of British youth. This analysis speaks to broader debates on citizenship, nationhood and youth, as well as highlighting how the historical geographies of citizenship education are an important area of study for geographers

Archival Fieldwork and Children’s Geographies

This chapter is in closed access.This chapter outlines how children’s geographers have used archival fieldwork and engaged with historical material as a research method. The chapter considers several questions: What is an archive? What are the central ways children’s geographers have engaged with archival fieldwork? What are some of the ethical and methodological challenges of archival research? How do wider practices of collection and display represent past childhoods? And what possibilities do digital technologies and social media afford children’s geographers seeking to research the ‘past’? Overall, the chapter uses a number of examples to showcase the potential for diverse archival engagements and encounters that can stimulate current debates in children’s geographies