Working-Class Writing and Publishing in the Late-Twentieth Century

From the early 1970s, working class writing and publishing in local communities rapidly proliferated into a national movement. This book is the first full evaluation of these developments and opens up new perspectives on literature, culture, class and identity over the past 50 years. Its origins are traced in the context of international shifts in class politics, civil rights, personal expression and cultural change. The writing of young people, older people, adult literacy groups as well as writing workshops is analysed. Thematic chapters explore how audiences consumed this work, the learning of writers, the fierce debates over identity, class and organisation, as well as changing relations with mainstream institutions. The book is accessibly written but engages with a wide range of scholarly work in history, education, cultural studies, literature and sociology. It will be of interest to lecturers and students in these areas as well as the general reader

Useable pasts for a co-operative university: as different as light from darkness?

The ferment of ideas which developed around co-operation and higher education in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries helps to contextualise the current initiatives in Co-operative higher education. The consumer co-operative movement became a major economic and social presence in the UK and, in many respects, it was an educational movement. The early ideas for what became the Co-operative College developed slowly on the ground. Nevertheless, significant visions of the transformation of higher learning were generated within the co-operative movement from its inception in the early-nineteenth century. These ideas were part of a growing educational shift concerned with access to learning for everyone. In addition, the co-operative movement highlighted the equal need for both liberal and technical education and so traversed prevailing educational divisions. The tensions and dilemmas involved in building a co-operative university are critically assessed within a historical context

Working class education and social change in nineteenth and twentieth century Britain

Recent decades have witnessed the waning fortunes of social class as a historical category of analysis. In particular working class education is rarely discussed in historiography although there has been significant work done in this area, particularly in adult education and literacy. A re-assessment of these studies allows us to examine the ways in which working class educational initiatives have been conceived in the past and how they might be approached in the future

The history of education in Britain and Ireland: changing perspectives and continuing themes

Reviewing the historiography of education provides insights into both the past and present of this growing area of research across the UK and Ireland. In the nineteenth century research reveals a close association with national identities. These were often Whig histories that celebrated the present and emphasised the progressive nature of educational development, sometimes characterised by an ‘acts and facts’ approach. From the 1960s, it is possible to identify a series of revisionist histories, which diversified further in the coming decades and morphed into the familiar patterns that we can identify today: theoretical and conceptual complexity; a concern with inequalities; an eclectic and widening interest in primary sources; a focus on schooling but moving beyond it, for instance to childhood, welfare and literacy; and a (re)discovery of new topics such as the emotions, senses and identities