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Seminars
ICHRE runs the History of Education Seminar at the Institute of Historical Research. The seminar attracts speakers from around the world, providing a forum for established historians as well as early-career researchers to present their work. For further information please contact Sam Blaxland or Gary McCulloch at ioe.ichre@ucl.ac.uk.
All seminars will be held in ‘hybrid’ mode, with both face-to-face and online attenders. Details of rooms and Zoom links are given below. All seminars will start at 5.30pm UK time.
Welsh Not: Education and linguistic policy and practice in nineteenth-century Wales
Professor Martin Johnes (Swansea University)
Thursday 5 February, Room 731, UCL Institute of Education, 20 Bedford Way, London WC1H 0AL
And via Zoom using this link: https://ucl.zoom.us/j/95475446011?pwd=akjGXcHOualFLw5laaxJmyYO60ahH1.1 Passcode: 853184
Nearly everyone in Wales can you tell something of the Welsh Not. They can explain how Victorian schools hung a wooden board around the neck of children heard speaking Welsh. They can tell you how the board was passed from Welsh speaker to Welsh speaker until the end of the day when the poor bearer would be caned. They probably learned this story in their own education. They might recount a story of how someone in their family was a victim of it. They might explain it’s why Welsh died out in their family and region. They might cite this as an example of the English government’s oppression of Wales.
The idea that Welsh was beaten out of children is thus very powerful in Wales’ collective memory. However, the reality was more complex. The Welsh Not is not a myth and was common in schools in the first half of the 19th century. Its primary function was not to stop Welsh speaking per se but to encourage the use of English. However, it did not work and its use faded over the course of the century. The Welsh Not was replaced by more progressive and humane methods of teaching English but the education system remained apathetic or even hostile to the future of the Welsh language. By examining these processes, this paper considers not just how working-class education functioned in practice but also parental and pupil attitudes towards it and the role of education in forging a new British national culture.
Recruiting academics, capitalizing knowledge, or funding research projects? Educational research policy as a mirror of higher education transformations in France (1960s–2010s)
Professor Clémence Cardon-Quint, (University of Montpellier-Paul Valéry)
19 March 2026, Room A5.03, UCL Institute of Education, 20 Bedford Way, London WC1H 0AL
And via Zoom using this link: https://ucl.zoom.us/j/99948622724?pwd=2UGqmnkGWWibm8EzAAaAb0xS04QFyz.1 Passcode: 628328
In France as in other Western countries, the expansion of secondary education in the 1950s and 1960s generated renewed interest in educational research as a tool for addressing emerging challenges, particular to achieve equality of educational opportunity. The creation and subsequent expansion of the academic field known as “sciences de l’éducation” (educational sciences) was only one among several initiatives designed to stimulate research on what was increasingly perceived as a major societal issue. The development of dedicated ministerial departments, the introduction of targeted competitive research funding, efforts to mobilize the Centre national de la recherche scientifique, the reorganisation of the Institut national de recherche et documentation pédagogique, and the recruitment of academics within teacher-training institutes all constituted additional—yet far less studied—policy instruments. It’s commonly argued that these initiatives repeatedly fell short of expectations, and that the research-policy nexus in France remained comparatively weak, at least until the most recent period. The limited existing scholarship tends to attribute these shortcomings to the alleged specificity of the educational field itself. Drawing on new finding from an IUF-funded project, this paper explores the multi-dimensional history of educational research policy in France and highlights the ways in which it reflects structural transformations in higher education, during a period marked by two distinct waves of rapid expansion.
A tale of two Oxford: Transformation lessons from the histories of two divided university towns
Claire McCann (University of Oxford)
Thursday 14 May 2026, Room 739, UCL Institute of Education, 20 Bedford Way, London WC1H 0AL
And via Zoom using this link: https://ucl.zoom.us/j/96132725782?pwd=pxZzqNNahzX2aCDYv3ReCb2rSk0xZY.1 Passcode: 829381
Universities across the world are institutions in transformation, particularly in relation to colonial legacies, inequality, and access. Yet debates about transformation may remain abstract, policy-driven, or symbolic. This paper argues that historical landmarks offer a way to understand transformation as material, spatial, and lived. Drawing on archival research, interviews, life histories, and secondary literature, this paper compares two historically entangled institutions situated in divided university towns: the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom and Rhodes University in Makhanda, South Africa. While Oxford represents one of the world’s oldest universities, and infamous for its historical ‘town and gown’ divide, Rhodes University was established in the early twentieth century as an ‘Oxford in the bush’, closely tied to British imperial networks and the Rhodes Trust. Through three landmark clusters, namely cathedrals, war memorials, and the enduring presence of Cecil Rhodes, this paper traces how enclosure, violence, and exclusion echo through space and place. It shows how Oxford’s landmarks reflect a long process of enclosure, while Makhanda’s landmarks remain sites of unresolved colonial violence, neglect, and contestation. Across both contexts, young people emerge as inheritors of these landscapes, grappling with what it means to resignify institutions they did not build. Rather than offering a prescriptive account of decolonisation or institutional reform, the paper foregrounds the messy work of transformation, suggesting that universities remain unfinished projects in which meaning shifts unevenly through struggle, memory, and use. By reading universities through their landmarks, this paper offers a spatial and comparative contribution to debates on higher education, postcolonial transformation, and the politics of memory.
Co-operative students, empire and commonwealth in the mid twentieth century: learning for decolonisation?
Professor Tom Woodin (UCL)
Thursday 4 June 2026, Room 728, UCL Institute of Education, 20 Bedford Way, London WC1H 0AL
And via Zoom using this link: https://ucl.zoom.us/j/96907628496?pwd=kfgqKCrZO2aenlFdhODJsTcYnwhKON.1 Passcode: 559041
The lives and learning of students at the Co-operative College in the UK provide fascinating insights into the contested and contradictory nature of decolonisation. From the inception of the College in 1919, it educated people from the colonies, commonwealth, the UK and other countries, in co-operation and co-operative movements. After WW2, the British government, UNESCO and the International Co-operative Alliance (ICA) were all keen to support fledgling co-operatives which they viewed as essential to the emerging independent nations as part of a wide conception of education – the College and co-operative students would grasp this opportunity and interpret it in different ways. In the context of the Cold War, colonial/western governments aimed to ensure a certain level of central control but this tendency could make it difficult to distinguish such co-operatives from those in the Soviet sphere, a contradiction which activists were quick to point out.
This paper focuses upon students and educators, their experience and trajectories which were entangled in processes of decolonisation. While adopting some dominant ideas, for instance around the role of education and modernisation, students and educators also viewed co-operative businesses as a democratising force that cut across Cold War divisions. Students from the colonies/commonwealth mixed with those from the British co-operative movement in a residential setting. This unique set of learning experiences provides a complex picture of decolonisation in which hierarchies were both challenged and reinforced and dominant discourses gradually mutated. In some settings co-operative ideas were explicitly incorporated into decolonisation movements, in others the relationship was more problematic.
