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A lack of esteem for teachers and the teaching profession is a central tenet underpinning policy reforms put forward by the 2010 UK Government White Paper ‘The Importance of Teaching’. This article argues that the policy problem and solutions presented in the White Paper lack awareness of the historical and social positioning of teaching. Drawing on in-depth interviews with 32 London-based secondary teacher training students from various social class and ethnic backgrounds, this paper asks how the profession is perceived and what sort of choice it is for the trainees. It employs a Bourdieusian lens and concepts of social and cultural capital to examine the interplay of gendered, classed and ‘raced’ biographies in relation to individuals’ decisions to become teachers. Understanding the social world as ‘accumulated history’, as Bourdieu does, stresses that experiences and outcomes are rooted and collected in a series of historical structures and functionings. The paper argues that the ambiguous status of the profession is both a function and an effect of its conceptualisation as feminised. It also asks whether the weak professional standing of teaching has further destabilising consequences in the present political moment where a string of neoliberal and neoconservative policy reforms reshape the profession. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Abstract: In this paper we consider the potential of autobiographical narratives for accessing ‘storied knowledge’ in research around geographies of health voluntarism. We firstly consider what is meant by elicited autobiography and how the narrative approach has been used in research more broadly. Drawing on fieldwork undertaken in Manchester, UK and Auckland, New Zealand we then demonstrate how this approach has helped us to map out and unpack the career journeys of mental health activists working within and across the voluntary and statutory sectors. Through our autobiographical narratives we illustrate how this approach has enabled us to elicit important insights into the triggers and trajectories underpinning mental health activism and how events and moments in time have provided critical junctures in these trajectories. We consider places as sites of significance in activist career paths; and as central to the researcher-participant gestalt within which the autobiography is elicited and recounted. The autobiographical process, we suggest, offers reflective insights into mental health activism that might not otherwise be gained using more conventional methodologies. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

The article presents a criticism of the life of Margaret Paston through some of her private correspondence and papers. Paston was a fifteenth-century gentry family of Norfolk, England. Her letters have been an invaluable primary source for medieval scholars in piecing together the social, cultural, economic, and domestic details of the Paston's life in the late medieval period. Her letters have been a biography that display a woman of considerable influence and consequence in the Paston family.

This paper outlines the pre-1663 biography and intellectual development of the Herefordshire minister and horticulturalist who played an active role in the Hartlib Circle in the late 1650s. Central to Beale's enduring Baconianism, and possibly to his mechanical and Hermetic philosophy, was his close association at Eton with Sir Henry Wotton. He became a major contributor to Hartlib's compilation of Baconian histories through his treatises on horticulture, natural history, astronomy, optics, mechanics, prophecy, and mnemonics. A pragmatic visionary, Beale's kinship with the Hartlib Circle--both in scientific and in religious matters--stemmed from a blend of idealism and utilitarianism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]