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Drawing on life-history interview data collected as part of a research project funded by the Froebel Trust, this paper explores the family backgrounds and educational experiences reported by nine women who attended Froebel College located in London in the United Kingdom (UK), in the 1950s and 1960s. Informed by Bourdieu’s theories of habitus and field and theories of identity, this paper explores any shared habitus and dispositions within the early childhood and family milieu reported by the participants. The paper also considers the women’s educational experiences and their stories of getting into Froebel College, reflecting on the commonality of family values and the secondary education pathways they reported. The findings show some striking resonances between Froebel’s educational ideals, in particular his belief in the mystical and transformative power of learning through play and engaging with nature, and the participants’ stories of their early childhood experiences. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper explores the educational and migrational pathways which a number of middle-class women from Bangladesh took as they grew up in the 1980s and 1990s. It draws on qualitative research, conducted between July and November 2011, with highly educated Bangladeshi women who migrated to Britain in the early 2000s. French Sociologist Pierre Bourdieu's critique of education, as a means of middle-class social reproduction [Bourdieu, P., and Jean-C. Passeron. ([1977] 1990).Reproduction in Education, Society and Culture. 2nd ed. Translated from the French by Richard Nice. London: Sage], and his notion of ‘academic capital’ [Bourdieu, P. 1984.Distinction: A social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Translated from the French by Richard Nice. London: Routledge; Bourdieu, P. 1986. “The Forms of Capital.” InHandbook of Theory and Research For the Sociology of Education, edited by J. G. Richardson, 241–258. New York: Greenwood] are applied to this empirical data. While the participants’ experiences of early education confirms Bourdieu's arguments, in terms of the centrality of the family's educational and cultural capital in making a qualitative difference to their children's academic achievements, the analysis of the participants’ higher education complicates this picture. Here, the paper calls Bourdieu's umbrella term ‘academic capital’ into question. The author suggests that three categories of academic capital were needed to explain the different and unequal ‘value’ of the participants’ academic qualifications before and after migration. These are – elite, standard and general. Through this exploration of these women's educational and migrational pathways, and the classed and gendered nature which many of them took, this paper seeks to further the feminist project of making Bourdieu's theories ‘useful’ in understanding contemporary issues which affect women's lives (Adkins, L. 2004. “Introduction.” InFeminism After Bourdieu, edited by L. Adkins and B. Skeggs, 110–128. Oxford: Blackwell, 3). [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The new universities of the 1960s were innovatory, in their curricula, architecture, independence and academic ambitions. They also marked a different relationship between universities and their localities. For a century, new universities had been predicated on local demand, whereas the 1960s universities were conceived of as national institutions meeting a national demand. This new approach to university–civic connections was sudden, novel and contributed to a sense of remoteness attached to the new universities. This paper examines how the different policy was formulated, predominantly by the UGC, and considers some examples of how the policy played out in practice. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The University of Birmingham was planned, advanced and established with both national and German models of a University in mind. Civic reasons for the planning of the University need to be viewed within a broader motivational context. Even with a strong sense of civic place, the University was conceived as a modern University with multiple founding visions. The set-up goals shifted as the size and complexity of the University increased and early ideas of social mission were either restricted or largely absent in practice. The paper examines the nature of the original institutional commitment to the ‘civic’ dimension of the University between 1900 and 1914 and highlights the many tensions that emerged between the growing academic standing of the University and its continued enthusiasm for the City and regional links. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The separation of examining from teaching, pushed furthest in the ‘examining university’ of which London University, founded in 1836, was the model, was a much-debated principle in nineteenth-century Britain. This separation was generally rejected in Scotland, but only after complex controversies that illustrate how Scots defined their university tradition in comparative terms, and how Scottish developments interacted with those in England and Ireland. Among the issues involved were proposals for a National University or central examining board, and claims that graduates should have a right to give ‘extramural’ teaching in competition with professors. The paper traces this aspect of university reform in Scotland from the 1820s to the 1890s, and argues that the professorial model and the integration of teaching and examining were successfully consolidated and defended. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Over the last 40 years, teacher education in England has been the focus of a stream of ‘reforms’ with the ultimate aim of placing provision into schools, the justification for such a radical policy being that higher education is alleged to be failing to provide good quality teachers thereby compromising the social and economic development of the country. The process whereby these reforms have been introduced is described and then used as a way of comparing and contrasting the way in which similar reforms can be identified in the international teacher education communities represented in this special issue of theJournal of Education for Teaching(JET). The paper closes by identifying lessons that can be learned from international comparators. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper traces the key periods, players and events which have contributed to the shaping of the current landscape of teacher education in Scotland. Starting with the Wheatley Report and the formation of the General Teaching Council (Scotland) in the 1960s through to the most recent Donaldson Review of Teacher Education, we examine ebb and flow amongst GTCS, government, colleges of education and universities. Following its own trajectory, Scottish Education resisted and rejected policies emanating from an ‘English’ ideology, capitalised on respect for and influence of the GTCS, and successfully moved teacher education’s base from autonomous colleges to high-status universities. At the core of teacher education in Scotland is the continuing desire for partnership-working amongst key stakeholders: local and national government, GTCS, schools, teacher education institutions, teaching unions, parents and pupils. A teaching profession of trained graduates, underpinned by university-led subject study, is now moving steadily towards Masters-level professional learning for all. Although having faced some troubled episodes, this period has also been characterised by remarkable stability and consensus and, although still tackling the improvement agenda suggested by the recent Donaldson review, teacher education in Scotland has retained a high degree of public and political trust. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper argues that theTimes Higherprovides a powerful tool for understanding the changing character of UK higher education (HE) and can usefully be seen as representative, and in some ways constitutive, of that changing character. Drawing on an analysis of a sample of stories from theTimes Higher, it documents the changing policy climate of UK HE from 1979 to 2010. It offers a broadly chronological account of themes that have emerged as prominent at different times during this period, pointing,inter alia, to fears about threats to the humanities, the rise of various forms of instrumentalism and the incorporation of HE institutions and agencies into a common mindset characterised by a preoccupation with marketing and corporate success. The last of these is embodied in the changing format of the newspaper itself and in its own activities as a key player in the HE sector, notably as a sponsor of university rankings and awards. Whilst being sensitive to countervailing tendencies, the authors suggest that the growing instrumentalisation of HE and related cultural shifts represent a changed ‘structure of feeling’ in UK HE. They conclude that the university rankings, awards and other image commodities that are a key part of this changed structure of feeling now play such a substantial role in the cultural life of universities that the norms of both rationality and professional ethics which tended to prevail in deliberations about university strategy 30 years ago may no longer be taken for granted. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper explores Indian women's views on arranged marriages in the United Kingdom. It is based on research carried out with 32 Indian women studying at a university in the South East of England, UK. The article draws on Wenger's social theory of learning to explore how Indian women's participation in communities of practice in higher education contributes to their participation in arranged marriages. The concept of 'social capital' is used to discuss how women are able to negotiate their participation in arranged marriages, It is used to examine the knowledge and identity resources that women develop through their participation in higher education, which provides them with the means from which to develop the necessary 'bridging ties' leading to their active participation in the wider South Asian community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the migration patterns of women who studied at Girton and Newnham prior to 1939 through whom dissemination of knowledge and values flowed from Cambridge overseas. It also considers organisations that fostered women's mobility in empire, particularly the Colonial Intelligence League for Educated Women and the International Federation of University Women. The former exemplified links with empire and Europe and dissemination of imperial values and practices, while the latter fostered women's international mobility around interwar notions of the 'international mind' and links with the League of Nations. It ends by looking at the work of Cambridge-educated women in League of Nations structures. The article addresses cultural transmission through a prosopographical approach to mobility to illustrate the larger patterns constituted by the myriad individual lives that formed themselves in networks, relationships, institutions and careers across a global canvas. For some Cambridge-educated women the notion of career included shifting combinations of paid employment, voluntary activity and domestic and familial responsibilities. While teaching formed their main occupation and the most direct medium for dissemination of knowledge and values, it must be seen alongside a more diverse range of occupations in which academic values might also be embedded. It is argued that values and practices of empire and commonwealth became inflected in internationalism in new ways, and the authors point to the need for further research into the role that Cambridge-educated women played in the tensions of empire, commonwealth and internationalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]