Celebrating 100 years of Save the Children … and ongoing collaborations with the University of Birmingham

Over the past few years, I have been collaborating with Save the Children on a research and policy project related to the implementation of their Global Policy Position on User Fees and Private Schools. So I’m especially pleased to announce that, along with my colleague Paul Lynch, I have been awareded a PhD studentship by the Economic and Social Research Council Doctoral Training Partnership to investigate how private schools can provide inclusive education to disadvantaged and marginalised children in India.

Towards the end of last year, the year in which Save the Children celebrated their centenary, the University of Birmingham hosted a double-bill event showcasing aspects of collaborative work with the organisation. In the first part, Dr Laura Day Ashley with Save the Children India’s Technical Advisor for Education, Kamal Gaur, and Save the Children International’s Early Childhood Education Officer, Rowan Ainslee discussed their collaborative research and policy impact project on private sector involvement in education in India. In the second part, a collaboration of a different nature was explored. With the Save the Children archive being held at the Cadbury Research Library, University of Birmingham, archivists Holly Waughman and Matthew Goodwin presented a show-and-tell exhibition of selected materials from the Save the Children collection to an audience of historians, educationists, museum archivists, post-graduate research students, as well as our guests from Save the Children, Rowan and Kamal, who, given their contemporary work for the organisation in this area, found the exhibition very moving.

Cadbury Research Library archivists Holly Waughman and Matthew Goodwin present a show-and-tell exhibition of selected materials from the Save the Children collection at the University of Birmingham

Offering a tour of the Strong Room, Holly and Matthew explained how the collection arrived at the University of Birmingham in 2011 and is now being catalogued and re-packaged as part of a Wellcome Trust funded project. The exhibition took a chronological approach, taking records from each decade from the 1910s to the 1990s to show the history and evolution of the organisation. Through this arrangement, archive items were able to show some of the key campaigns in Save the Children’s history, such as relief for victims of the Russian famine in the 1920s, support for Hungarian refugees in the 1950s, and the STOP Polio vaccination campaign of the 1980s. The exhibition included a wide range of materials, including reports, correspondence, photographs, posters, and objects, such as the Save the Children collecting tins.

Materials from the very early beginnings of the organization were on display, including a copy of the flyer – depicting starving Austrian children suffering due to the continued Allied blockade of Europe after the First World War – which founder, Eglantine Jebb, was distributing in April 1919 when she was arrested in Trafalgar Square for breaking censorship laws. Also on display was a beautifully illustrated ‘concertina comic strip’ created by Corrine de Candole, c1925. The illustrations depict Corrine’s interview at Save the Children Fund, her first week at the office and a trip to Geneva for the charity’s Summer School. 

Cadbury Research Library, Save the Children Fund Archive EJ299, A417, EJ 299: Clever and Humorous Pictures by C. de Candole.

One section of the exhibition focused on materials relating to Save the Children’s education programmes, including education fundraising, work in schools to support disabled children, nursery schools and play groups, and health education programmes. These records – including material such as, project reports, photographs, artefacts, educational resource packs, posters, and leaflets – offered a small sample of the material held in the archives. You can read more about these on the Save the Children archive project blog.  

Geographically, materials from a number of countries were incorporated into the exhibition, including reports on a health education programme in Peru, photographs of projects in Korea, and blueprints for Save the Children’s kitchens in Greece. In keeping with the theme of the event, one section of the exhibition had a special focus on India. Save the Children has had a strong connection to India since its inception, with £3,461 being donated from the country in the first five years of the Fund’s existence. Save the Children began working in India from the 1960s establishing homes and nurseries for Tibetan refugee children. Operations expanded throughout the country where the organisation responded to natural disasters, provided emergency relief for Bangladeshi refugees, supported nutrition and education projects, and developed a sponsorship programme.  By 1983 the charity was working with over 40 different projects across the country. Today, Save the Children India’s work spans 19 states with Education being a key focal area.

With our new ESRC doctoral studentship award, the University of Birmingham and Save the Children have the opportunity to build on and continue their collaborative work in India. We are looking for a highly motivated applicant to work with us on a PhD funded by ESRC DTP on how private schools provide inclusive education to marginalised children – more information on this link. The closing date is 2^nd March 2020 – informal enquiries about the research before application can be directed to Dr. Laura Day Ashley and Dr Paul Lynch.

Save the Children collection archivists Holly and Matthew would also welcome enquiries about using material from the collection in research projects. If you are interested in using this material or would like to find out more, please contact them on special-collections@bham.ac.uk. Additionally the Cadbury Research Library is hosting a Study Day on Wednesday 1^st July 2020 to explore the potential and value of charity archives, including the Save the Children archives and have opened a call for papers (closing date 27^th March 2020) – more information on this link.

Bringing History to Life

Winterbourne House and Garden, School Pageant ensemble entitled ‘The Lost Property Office’

On a rare sunny day in March we took a group of almost 50 undergraduate students in Education to Winterbourne House and Gardens as part of their teaching and learning programme on our year one module, Schooling: a social and cultural history. This module focuses on the changes and continuities in schooling in England over a period of just over 100 years, from the 1870s and the introduction of mass compulsory schooling through to the 1980s; it also considers how changes impacted children’s experiences, considering a broad range of dimensions of diversity such as social class, gender, ethnicity and disability. The Winterbourne visit, or ‘experience’ as we like to call it, provides an insight into the lives and educational experiences of a middle-class family, the Nettlefolds, in the late 19^th and early 20^th Centuries.

Winterbourne House and Gardens were built and designed for John and Margaret Nettlefold in 1903, a well-connected Unitarian industrial family with an active interest in housing reform. Winterbourne is now part of the University of Birmingham but there was a connection from the start as Margaret was the niece of well-known politician and founder of the University of Birmingham, Joseph Chamberlain. Across a number of rooms in Winterbourne House, exhibits and displays tell the story of John’s working life; Margaret’s education, including at the new private school for girls, Edgbaston High School; Margaret’s lifestyle before marriage, and her home life as a married woman engaged in charity work and with a household of 10 servants. Upstairs, a nursery room is set out illustrating a play and learning environment for the young Nettlefold children, cared for by their nurse. Another room tells the story of the Nettlefold’s only son, John Kenrick and his public school and Oxford University education, interrupted by service in the territorial forces during the First World War. 

In the spirit of enquiry-based learning, our undergraduate students completed a treasure trail activity to gather information from Winterbourne exhibits and displays to inform their understanding of the educational lives of Margaret Nettlefold and her children. Then, in small groups they spent time with our host, Collections Officer, Henrietta Lockhart, to look behind the scenes at some of the historical materials from Winterbourne House and Garden’s archive. These included some of Margaret’s Edgbaston High School reports, dating back to the 1880s; our students were interested to see the wide range of subjects she studied including Physiography, Political Economy, Grammar, Latin, Greek, Discussion and Composition alongside subjects more familiar to them such as English Literature, French, German, Geography and History. There were images of girls and women in fancy dress for a school pageant in outfits that included the ‘Lost Property Office’ and the ‘School Building’ (see images) complete with brickwork detail; we commented on how these showed ‘off the wall’ humour and imaginative thinking ‘out of the box’ (excuse the puns!) and how it reminded us of how similar events continue in schools today, with for example, children and teachers dressing up to celebrate World Book Day, as many did earlier this month.

Winterbourne House and Garden, School Pageant ensemble entitled ‘School Building’

There was also a ‘found object’ from the archive that caused much intrigue – a beautifully and delicately hand crafted ‘Nature Book’ that included carefully pressed flowers sewn into the pages with recordings of the precise locations in which they were found. Henrietta explained to us that the child’s surname on the exercise book matched that of a domestic servant and so the book may be a product of a schoolchild attending a state-run school, rather than of a middle-class child’s private education. This, as yet, incomplete story gave insight to the work of the archivist and the fragmented nature of historical investigation.

Winterbourne House and Gardens, Nature Study book

‘For us, being given a focus like this for an archival session is immensely valuable, because it makes us search our archives in new ways and make new and unexpected connections. Most of the material we showed the students related to middle-class education, but this year we discovered some school exercise books in our collection which might have belonged to the daughter of a domestic servant. This will lead to further research, and perhaps next year we will be able to tell more of that story! Furthermore, the questions raised by students can start new lines of thinking for us. We look forward to further collaboration with the School of Education’

Henrietta Lockhart, Collections Officer

The Winterbourne experience has become a regular feature on our module and an event that that our students and tutors look forward to alike. As our students have said, being in the environment of the Nettlefold family home and having the opportunity to leaf through their school reports, photographs and writings ‘brings history to life’. In our ongoing collaboration, not only are we bringing students to the sites and materials of the past, but we are also bringing historical evidence to our students by sharing relevant archival materials from Winterbourne via our students’ online learning environment. We plan to use these materials with students in their learning in lectures and seminars, and to make them accessible to students so that they can draw on and use them as evidence for analysis and interpretation to inform their own assignments. We very much look forward to our next Winterbourne experience and to finding out more about its unfolding stories of education.   

Producing histories from below

On Wednesday 13 March the Domus Centre for Interdisciplinary Research in Histories of Education and Childhood officially relaunched. Forty people braved the wind to join us in a convivial screening of the short film, made by Sam Lockyer of Iconic Productions, ‘Beyond the Battlefields: Käthe Buchler’s Photographs of Germany in the Great War’.

Thank you to all of you who travelled to be with us. A special mention and thanks to Professor Julie McLeod, all the way from the University of Melbourne, who offered characteristically thoughtful observations on the film and on producing histories of education and childhood today.

We chose the film because it helps to exemplify some of the themes, and ways of working, that we are interested in.

Firstly, it fits with an expansive definition of education that includes any of the processes by which culture is organised and transmitted across generations and between social groups. Buchler’s photographs captured this process in action during the First World War. Their contemporary re-presentation in a touring exhibition, and in the accompanying film, ensures they survive, as historical sources, educational tools and aesthetic objects, today.

Secondly, both the exhibition and the film were the products of collaboration and they present histories in ways other than in formal and individual scholarship. We have a particular interest in working with partners in the community and exploring what history from below means today.

Thirdly, what the photographs show, and how they can be interpreted, are of course matters for debate. There was some fascinating discussion around their significance as a contribution to historical knowledge by an early woman photographer; as a chronicle of everyday life; as a source for children’s experiences of war; as a significant moment in the history of disability; as testimony to shared human experiences across national borders and a whole range of other topics.

Fourthly, the photographs, exhibition and film help us to identify and interpret the legacies of the First World War. We’re looking forward to continuing that conversation at the Voices of War and Peace Legacies Festival next week.

Education in the Spanish Civil War

I’m delighted to be studying at the University of Birmingham on the Visiting Scholars Programme. I chose Birmingham, and the Domus research group as my host, for two reasons.

Firstly, historians here have written a lot about the educational aspects of the Spanish Civil War. As well as being a military conflict it was also an ideological one. My own interests are specifically in the campaign of literacy conducted by the Republican Government within the citizen Popular Army.  Literacy, and a broader cultural education, was understood both as a motivation for victory and a mechanism for achieving popular revolution.

Secondly,  Domus is associated with a particular interest in visual methods in historical and educational studies. I’m hoping that colleagues in Domus can help me to interpret the 228 publications that came out of the soldiers press. Illiteracy was common among soldiers so these publications were rich in images. I’m working on how to interpret the iconography and choreography of these images and what they can tell us about messages the republican government wanted to transmit.

I’m giving a Domus seminar discussing aspects of my work on 29 April. Before that I’m intending to visit various archives and newspaper libraries because I would like to find and research images of the British international brigades.

Biography

Avelina Miquel is studying for a a PhD in the Department of Pedagogy and Didactics at the University of the Balearic Islands on photography and school culture in the period 1900-1970. She is a member of several scientific societies, such as the Societat d’Història de l’Educació dels Països de Llengua Catalana (SHEPLLC) and the Spanish Society of History of Education (SEDHE).

A home for histories of education and childhood

Histories of education and childhood can be elusive. Neither children, nor the people, ideas and practices associated with learning, feature prominently in mainstream histories. Yet histories of education and childhood are universal because every adult has been a child and everybody learns.

Domus is a collaborative cluster of people interested in exploring these elusive histories of education and childhood. Domus, in case you’re wondering, is a Latin term for home. It prefixes our formal title (the Interdisciplinary Centre for Histories of Education and Childhood) because we want to try and create a home for all those who do, or would like to, research in this area. That includes academics from a range of disciplines, educators in different institutions and students across age ranges and levels of study.

Walter Buchler and friends (Photo © Estate of Käthe Buchler – Museum für Photographie Braunschweig/Deposit Stadtarchiv Braunschweig)

We’ve been working on this since Domus was established in 2000 by Martin Lawn, Ian Grosvenor and Ruth Watts. Now we are delighted to announce that will be re-launching on March 13 2019 and hope that you can join us for a screening and panel discussion of Sam Lockyer’s film based on the ‘Beyond the Battlefields’ exhibition of Käthe Buchler’s Photographs of Germany in the Great War.

We’ve chosen the film screening and panel discussion because it nicely demonstrates some (but not all) of the things we do.

Firstly, the film is about the experiences of people in the past who are frequently written out of mainstream histories. In this case, the lives and experiences of women and children during the First World War can help us understand more about how the war was experienced by different groups of people and what its legacies were, and are, for later generations.

Secondly, this new research was collaboratively organised and produced. 
Domus seeks to work collaboratively with community groups, arts and heritage organisations and educational institutions to conduct and promote research. Thanks again, in this case, to UHGalleries, Museum Für Photographie, Braunschweig and the AHRC funded First World War engagement centres at the University of Birmingham (Voices of War & Peace) and the University of Hertfordshire (Everyday Lives in War). 

Thirdly, the film will help to demonstrate that when the production of historical knowledge becomes more collaborative the boundaries of historical enquiry broaden. New topics and sources emerge. New debates and disputes, about archiving and interpretation, modes of representation and about the power of the past, develop. These debates have always been important, but at a time when images of the past, and claims to it, seem to circulate with increasing rapidity and urgency, a vibrant and open historical culture seems more important than ever.

History produced collaboratively and democratically necessarily engages with a wide range of viewpoints and perspectives. It is open to different experiences. It involves learning that history is not a list of facts or events but a highly contingent form of knowledge always open to contestation and to change. Producing the past, rather than simply consuming it, necessarily engages researchers with questions about the self and subjectivity, and with notions of community and identity. It helps us to realise that humans are partly constituted by the ways in which they remember and understand the past. Futures, says this home for histories of education and childhood, can be radically transformed by collaboratively reworking the past.