Preliminary Programme

The purpose of the inter-disciplinary research project Schooling for life? Narratives and educational systems, Denmark 1945-2005, which is founded by the Danish Research Council of the Humanities, is to investigate the history of education from the perspectives of the students. Through a mixture of quantitative and qualitative studies of students, who in 1955, 1975 and 1995, went to 7th grade we want to study which role elementary education is thought to have played in the life of the informants.

Schooling is central to the Danish welfare state – and thought to be of primer importance to further education, job possibilities as well as economical independency. This project will challenge a narrow understanding of the relationship between personal success and happiness and education through a demonstration of the unpredictable in human life.

This paper is based on a field study, related to the major project described above, with a group of former high school students, who graduated in 1980 and who in the summer of 2005 will meet to celebrate their 25 high school anniversary. In this paper I will discuss methodological as well theoretical aspects of this meeting, where storytelling is expected to blend with personal narratives and life experience. In this I am – among others - indebted to the book New Jersey Dreaming. Capital, Culture and the Class of 1956 (Duke University Press, 2003) by the American anthropologist Sherry B. Orther. (Show less)

This study draws on oral histories conducted with participants in the National Teacher Corps (a 1965 Great Society alternative route to teaching designed to get the “best and brightest” into the profession) to examine their motivations, experiences and career paths. Though voices from the classroom are an important source of information about teaching and a critical aspect of educational history, in general, teachers have left little evidence of their experiences or the meanings they made of it. Indeed, while the perspectives of the federal reformers who created the NTC are well documented, firsthand accounts of the NTC participants’ lived experiences as teachers and the lessons they may offer remain untapped.

My paper uses these firsthand accounts specifically to reconsider traditional American interpretations of teachers and their work, especially in terms of their identities, qualifications, and motivations for teaching. How were the NTC participants like or different from traditional teacher candidates and the existing teachers – and students – with whom they worked? What incentives brought them to the Corps and to teaching? What were their expectations and experiences in the classroom? Who stayed in the field of education? Who left and why? And finally, what, if any, lasting impact did participating in the NTC have on their professional lives and political outlook?

Using oral histories conducted with participants who entered the National Teacher Corps between 1966-69, the paper not only sheds light on participants’ expectations for and experiences of teaching, it additionally attends to the ways in which the telling of these life stories provided opportunities for subjects to construct and reconstruct their understandings of their lives. (Show less)

The paper is based on a survey of life histories of 700 women who attended Girton College, cambridge University between 1920s and 1980s. The completed detailed questionnaires, to which many added further writing, including memoirs and letters written when they were students. Also 100 were interviewed.The paper will present some findings and discuss how the different forms of narrative-written and spoken, contemporary or based on recollection- may yield different perspectives. (Show less)