![Sample our Humanities journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5939/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Humanities.jpg"})
Abstract
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.
Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank all the women who participated in this study and who gave generously of their time to share their stories.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes
1 Sue Smedley and Kate Hoskins, ‘Learning to be Froebelian: Student Teachers’ Life Histories 1952–1965’, European Early Childhood Education Research Journal (forthcoming).
2 Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977).
3 Vivien Burr, Social Constructionism (Hove, East Sussex: Routledge, 2003); Janet M. Stoppard, Understanding Depression: Feminist Social Constructionist Approaches (London: Routledge, 2000).
4 Kevin J. Brehony, ed., The Origins of Nursery Education: Friedrich Froebel and the English System (London: Routledge, 2001); Kevin J. Brehony, ‘The Kindergarten in England 1851–1918’, in Kindergarten and Cultures: The Global Diffusion of an Idea, ed. Roberta Wollons (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000), 59–86.
5 Friedrich Froebel, Education By Development: The Second Part of the Pedagogics of the Kindergarten (New York: D. Appleton, 1896); Friedrich Froebel, Letters on the Kindergarten (London: Swan Sonnenschein, 1887).
6 J. White, The Educational Ideas of Froebel (London: University Tutorial Press, 1907): 66.
7 Froebel, Education By Development.
8 Irene M. Lilley, Friedrich Froebel: A selection from his Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967); Nanette Whitbread, The Evolution of the Nursery-Infant School (Abingdon: Routledge, 1972).
9 Helen Tovey, Bringing the Froebel Approach to your Early Years Practice (London: Routledge, 2013).
10 Joachim Liebschner, Foundations of Progressive Education: The History of the National Froebel Society (Cambridge: Lutterworth Press, 1991).
11 Tina Bruce, ed., Early Childhood Practice: Froebel Today (London: Sage, 2012).
12 Peter Weston, Friedrich Froebel: His Life, Times and Significance (London: University of Surrey Roehampton, 2000).
13 Kevin J. Brehony, ‘Theories of Play’, in Encyclopedia of Children and Childhood in History and Society, ed. Paula S. Fass (New York: Macmillan, 2003), 826–32.
14 Liebschner, Foundations of Progressive Education.
15 Kevin J. Brehony, ‘The Froebel Movement in England 1850-1911: Texts, Readings and Readers’ in Perspektiven der Fröbelforschung (Wurzburg, Königshausen & Neumann: 2006), 49–64.
16 Wollons, Kindergartens and Cultures.
17 Ibid., 7.
18 Ibid., 8.
19 Ibid., 7–8.
20 Henrietta R. Eliot and Susan E. Blow, The Mottoes and Commentaries of Friedrich Froebel’s Mother-Play (Bristol: Thoemmes Press, 2000).
21 Liebschner, Foundations of Progressive Education, xiii.
22 Bruce, Early Childhood Practice, 30.
23 Lilley, Friedrich Froebel: A Selection from his Writings, 59.
24 Smedley and Hoskins, ‘Learning to be Froebelian’.
25 Les Bash, David Coulby and Crispin Jones, Urban Schooling: Theory and Practice (London: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1985).
26 Meg Maguire, ‘Gender and Movement in Social Policy’, in The Sage Handbook of Gender and Education, ed. Christine Skelton, Becky Francis and Lisa Smulyan (London: Sage Publications, 2006), 7.
27 Jane Martin, Women and the Politics of Schooling in Victorian and Edwardian England (London: Leicester, 1999), 104.
28 Penny Summerfield, Women Workers In The Second World War: Production and Patriarchy in Conflict (London: Routledge, 1989).
29 Penny Summerfield, ‘Cultural Reproduction in the Education of Girls: A Study of Girls’ Secondary Schooling in Two Lancashire Towns, 1900–50’, in Lessons for Life: The Schooling of Girls and Women 1850–1950, ed. Felicity Hunt (Oxford: Basis Blackwell, 1987), 149–70.
30 Ibid., 106.
31 Beverley Skeggs, Formations of Class and Gender: Becoming Respectable (London: Sage, 1997).
32 Sue Ledwith and Simonetta Manfredi, ‘Balancing Gender in Higher Education: A Study of the Experience of Senior Women in a “New” UK University’, European Journal of Women’s Studies 7 (2000): 7–33.
33 Christine Heward and Paul Taylor , ‘Effective and Ineffective Equal Opportunities Policies in Higher Education’, Critical Social Policy 13 (1993): 23–4.
34 Margaret Coats, Women’s Education (Buckingham: Open University Press, 1994).
35 Ann Brooks, Academic Women (Buckingham: Open University Press, 1997).
36 Ibid., 16.
37 Rosemary Deem, Active Citizenship and the Governing of Schools (Buckingham: Open University Press, 1995), 31.
38 Brooks, Academic Women, 16.
39 Ibid.
40 Jane Read, ‘Froebelian Women: Networking to Promote Professional Status and Educational Change in the Nineteenth Century’, History of Education 32 (2003): 17–33.
41 Lisa Smuylan, ‘Redefining Self snd Success: Becoming Teachers snd Doctors’, Gender and Education 16 (2004): 226.
42 Ibid., 227.
43 Burr, Social Constructionism.
44 Sandra Acker, ed., Teachers, Gender and Careers (Lewes: Falmer Press, 1989), 9.
45 Meg Maguire, ‘Missing Links; Working-Class Women of Irish Descent’, in Class Matters: ‘Working Class’ Women’s Perspectives on Social Class, ed. Pat Mahony and Christine Zmroczek (London: Taylor & Francis, 1997), 94.
46 Pamela Cotterill, Susan Jackson and Gayle Letherby, eds., Challenges and Negotiations for Women in Higher Education (Dordrecht: Springer, 2007).
47 Liebschner, Foundations of Progressive Education.
48 Whitbread, The Evolution of the Nursery-Infant School, 34.
49 Read, ‘Froebelian Women’.
50 Tim May and Malcolm Williams, eds., Knowing the Social World (Buckingham: Open University Press, 1998), 8.
51 Allen Rubin and Earl R. Babbie, Essential Research Methods for Social Work (Boston, MA: Cengage Learning, 2009), 220.
52 Christine Bold, Using Narrative in Research (London: Sage, 2012).
53 Ivor Goodson and Pat Sikes, Life History Research in Educational Settings: Learning from Lives (Buckingham: Open University Press, 2001); Nigel King and Christina Horrocks, Interviews in Qualitative Research (London: Sage, 2010).
54 Goodson and Sikes, Life History Research in Educational Settings, 45.
55 Gesa E. Kirsch, Ethical Dilemmas in Feminist Research: The Politics of Location, Interpretation and Publication (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999).
56 Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice; Pierre Bourdieu, Sociology in Question (London: Sage, 1993).
57 Pierre Bourdieu, Algeria 1960 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), vii.
58 Pierre Bourdieu and Loic Wacquant, An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 227.
59 Diane Reay, ‘The Zombie Stalking English Schools: Social Class and Educational Inequality’, British Journal of Educational Studies 54 (2006): 288–307.
60 Pierre Bourdieu and Loic Wacquant, ‘Towards a Reflexive Sociology: A Workshop with Pierre Bourdieu’, Sociological Theory 7 (1989): 44.
61 Stoppard, Understanding Depression, 2.
62 Smedley and Hoskins, ‘Learning to be Froebelian'.
63 Tim Butler and Mike Savage, eds., Social Change and the Middle Classes (London: UCL Press, 1995).
64 Bruce, Early Childhood Practice.
65 Bourdieu, Sociology, 5.
66 Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice.
67 Brian Swartz, Culture and Power: The Sociology of Pierre Bourdieu (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 107.
68 Read, ‘Froebelian Women’.
69 Coats, Women’s Education; Summerfield, Women Workers in the Second World War.
70 Sara Delamont, Knowledgeable Women: Structuralism and the Reproduction of Elites (London: Routledge, 2002).
71 Kate Hoskins, Women and Success: Professors in the UK Academy (Staffordshire: Trentham Books).
72 Diane Reay, ‘“They employ cleaners to do that”: Habitus in the Primary School’, British Journal of Sociology of Education 16 (1995): 353–71; Diane Reay, ‘Feminist Theory, Habitus, and Social Class: Disrupting Notions of Classlessness’, Women’s Studies International Forum 20 (1997): 225–33.
73 Bourdieu, Sociology, 5.
74 Reay, ‘Feminist Theory, Habitus, and Social Class’.
75 Deem, Active Citizenship; Summerfield, Women Workers in the Second World War.
76 Sara Delamont, Knowledgeable Women (London: Routledge, 1989); Sara Delamont, ‘Old Fogies and Intellectual Women: An Episode in Academic History’, Women’s History Review 1, no. 1 (1992): 39–61; Mary Evans, A Good School: Life at a Girls’ Grammar School in the 1950s (London: Women’s Press, 1991).
77 Brian Jackson and Dennis Marsden, Education and the Working Class: Some General Themes raised by a Study of 88 Working Class Children in a Northern Industrial City (London: Routledge, 1962), 42.
78 Ibid.
79 Ibid.
80 Ibid., 46.
81 Ibid., 97.
82 Read, ‘Froebelian Women’, 17.
83 Smedley and Hoskins, ‘Learning to be Froebelian'.