This article argues that the "airlift" language often used to describe the eight hundred Kenyan students who attended US and Canadian universities between 1959 and 1963 is misleading. It assumes that the students were being plucked out of substandard education, yet these youth had received some of the most rigorous education in the…

This History of Education Society Presidential Address primarily utilizes evocative autoethnography and narrative inquiry to convey its main points. It is written in the storytelling tradition of the African American past and analyzes the lives of three generations of Black Mississippians as they navigated life in Jim Crow Mississippi. It…

"Expect Delays: At the Crossroads of Higher Education," analyzes the cultural representations of higher education that shape personhood for minoritized identities. It argues that an emphasis on linear logics, spatial temporalities, and hegemonic visual culture impact self-fashioning for historically marginalized populations. This project…

This paper seeks to explore the aspects related to education and aspiration through the on-going experiences of Female Malay Muslim students in UK higher institutions. Building on an ethnographic approach, an in-depth interview with 30 female Malay students, I focus on the various aspects of the students' lives as scholarship holders, addressing…

The goal of this study is to examine the distinctive features of International Baccalaureate (IB) programmes in Poland, and the role of IB programmes in the Polish education system. To address this aim, a review of the relevant legislation has been carried out, accompanied by interviews with teachers and students in 9 IB schools in Poland. Results…

'One day a poster announcing the preparatory course at the university appeared in a village. Pokusa [surname, "desire" in Polish] was among the first to enrol. He was accepted after passing an exam. Now he is one of the best students! -- All you need is a good will -- he explains.' That is how a local newspaper in 1953 encouraged peasant…

John Dewey and W.E.B. Du Bois were prominent critics of how vocational education programs were often used to restrict rather than enhance student aspirations. An overview of the Bordentown Manual Training and Industrial School for Colored Youth (1886-1955) suggests that it met requirements both men articulated for the right kind of vocational…

This paper considers gender and social class in relation to teacher education through an episodic study of the development of adult educational institutions in Huddersfield. It briefly discusses nineteenth-century mechanics' institutes in the town before moving to a consideration of school teacher training college students in the twentieth…

In this article, David Lewin examines the processes of educational representation, simplification, and selection, proposing the term "pedagogical reduction" in order to clarify the role these processes play within pedagogy. Although this term is virtually unknown among Anglo-American educational theorists, it reflects a substantial…

This article draws on three assessment paradigms -- psychometrics, outcomes-based and curriculum-based assessment -- to discuss paradigmatic changes in senior school assessment and achievement standard-setting in Queensland, Australia, over the last 50 years. These include radical reforms in 1970 from university-controlled examinations to…

In an era when markers of "diversity" (race, gender, ethnicity, sexuality, nationality, language, etc.) are generally common sense, societies ignore the histories of how these markers became possible and the crucial implications these histories have in the present of educational aspirations and people's lives. This dissertation addresses…