Staff Profiles

I teach mainly on the BA Education Studies and MA Education programmes, teaching historically and sociologically informed content within a number of modules, and research methods. I also supervise dissertations at MA level. 

Undergraduate

• U71701: Constructions of Childhood
• U70724: The Social World of Childhood and Youth (module leader) 
• U71728: Historical Perspectives on Education

Postgraduate

• P70001: Researching Education, Childhood and Language (module leader)
• P70002: Dissertation (supervisor)
• P70800: Childhoods in Context (module leader)

Supervision

My academic background is as a historian, and much of my research falls within the history of education and childhood. I have focused predominantly on the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, examining moral education and citizenship, and local studies of education and welfare. My publications cover both my funded research and historical projects, and a monograph - Morality and Citizenship in English Schools. Secular Approaches, 1897-1944 was published by Palgrave Macmillan earlier in 2017. Current research projects focus on young people, war and peace, both historically through research into organisations that promoted peace among young people from the 1920s to the 1960s, and in the present day through research into remembrance in schools.  

Research group membership

Research grants and awards

Funded research and consultancy projects

• 2004-06: Nuffield Review of 14-19 Education and Training (funded by the Nuffield Foundation).
• 2006-07: The Student Learning Experience in Higher Education (funded by the Higher Education Academy).
• 2007-08: 14-19 education and training: establishing a baseline of evidence (funded by the Qualifications and Curriculum Development Authority)

Research projects

Current research projects:

• Remembrance in Schools (2013-19). I am working with colleagues in the School of Education and at Brunel University as part of a multi-disciplinary team investigating remembrance events on or around 11 November in schools in Berkshire, Buckinghamshire and Oxfordshire. To date we have conducted two online surveys and interviews with teachers, and are now embarking on observations of remembrance events, and questionnaires with pupils to run in November 2017 and 2018.
• Peaceful Youth. I am in the early stages of a new monograph project which will examine - through documentary research and oral histories - organisations that promoted peace among young people from the 1920s to the 1960s. 

Books

• Wright S, Morality and Citizenship in English Schools: Secular Approaches, 1897-1944, Palgrave Macmillan (2017)
  ISBN: 9781137399434 eISBN: 9781137399441
  Abstract This book sheds new light on early twentieth-century secularism by examining campaigns to challenge dominant Christian approaches to the teaching of morality and citizenship in English schools, and to offer superior alternatives. It brings together, for the first time, the activities of different educators and pressure groups, operating locally, nationally and internationally, over a period of 47 years. Who were these activists? What ideological and organisational resources did they draw on? What proposals did they make? And how did others respond to their views? Secularist activists represented a minority, but offered a recurrent challenge to majority views and shaped ongoing educational debates. They achieved some, albeit limited, influence on policy and practice. They were divided among themselves and by 1944 had failed to supplant majority views. But, with the place of religious and secular ideals in schools remaining a subject of debate, this analysis has resonance today.Website 

Journal articles

• Wright S, 'War and Peace: Armistice Observance in British Schools in 1937'
  Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth (2020)
  ISSN: 1939-6724 eISSN: 1941-3599
  Abstract

  This article examines individual narratives of armistice observance in British schools at a moment of polarized public debate about war and peace. Teachers and pupils described what they did, thought, and felt during their school’s commemorations on November 11^th, 1937, in accounts penned for the social research organisation Mass Observation. They experienced the symbols, rituals, and texts of acts of collective remembrance in complex ways. Whilst participating in compulsory acts of observance their articulation of a common civic act was shaped by the power dynamics and priorities of the school setting, and individual histories and ideological commitments.
  

• Haight A, Wright S, Aldridge D, Alexander P, 'Remembrance Day practices in schools: meaning-making in social memory during the First World War centenary'
  Journal of Beliefs and Values (2019)
  ISSN: 1361-7672
  Abstract

  Each November, commemoration of the First World War armistice (and subsequent military events and conflicts) is almost ubiquitous in UK schools and has been given increased importance during the centenary years of the First World War. Yet as seemingly isolated occasions outside the regular curriculum, school practices of remembrance, and the understandings and perceptions surrounding them, have been subject to surprisingly little scrutiny. The Remembrance in Schools project (2013–19) investigates armistice commemoration in primary and secondary schools in three counties in southern England. This paper considers the theorisation of public commemorative rituals and relates this to teachers’ reports of school-based events. It analyses teachers’ accounts and perceptions, from survey and interview data, of the ways in which the First World War and subsequent conflicts are remembered, presented and discussed through school commemoration events. We conclude that such events mirror the ‘social technologies’ of public remembrance rituals. However, behind almost ubiquitous practices (the two-minute silence) and symbols (the poppy), these accounts reveal nuanced variations in teachers’ views of the knowledge and values children gain from armistice commemoration in schools. These variations are inflected by individual schools’ histories, community contexts, and pupil demographics, as well as teachers’ own histories, values and ideals.
  

  Website 
• Wright S, 'Creating Liberal-Internationalist World Citizens: League of Nations Union Junior Branches in English Secondary Schools, 1919–1939'
  Paedagogica Historica (2018)
  ISSN: 0030-9230 eISSN: 1477-674X
  Abstract

  The League of Nations Union (LNU) was one among the many organisations, in different countries, that promoted internationalist education among the young in the interwar years. But it was a particularly large and prominent one and appealed to a wide cross-section of teachers and pupils in English schools. LNU junior branches were established in many English secondary schools. Occupying a space at the intersection of youth organisations, a larger political movement, and the school itself, these junior branches were part of a wider agenda of active citizenship through extra-curricular means. Their focus was a liberal-internationalist version of “world citizenship” which accommodated existing loyalties to nation and empire as well as loyalty to the wider international sphere, and which sought peace but would countenance the controlled use of armed force against breaches of international agreements. Case studies of junior branches in two girls’ schools and two boys’ schools draw on school magazines and other relevant sources to shed light on what world citizenship could look like in different school contexts. The traditions and cultures of these different schools, the LNU’s ideals and resources, and changing international events, all emerge as important shapers of junior branch activities, and the response to what junior branches offered. Examining the micro-contexts of junior branches in schools contributes new, grounded, insights to a historiography of internationalist education, indicating ways in which ideals of liberal-internationalist world citizenship were negotiated, promoted, taken up, passed on, altered, and, sometimes, challenged or ignored.
  

  Website 
• Wright S, 'Educating the secular citizen in English schools, 1897–1938'
  Cultural and Social History 15 (2) (2018) pp.215-232
  ISSN: 1478-0038 eISSN: 1478-0046
  Abstract
  This article examines secularists’ efforts over 41 years to shape civic morality and civic culture in their own image. Through pressure groups – the Moral Instruction League (1897–c.1923) and the League of Nations Union (1919–1938) – activists aimed to create secular citizens in English schools. In so doing, they aimed to act as ‘agents of secularisation’. Some (limited) political influence was achieved, and their publications reached many thousands. Yet campaigners were unable to unite a majority of Christians, or even all secularists, behind their proposals. The process of forming the non-Christian citizen proved a complex one, involving shifting alliances, dialogue and compromise.
  Website 
• Wright S, Wilde S, 'Book review: Supporting student transitions 14-19: Approaches to teaching and learning'
  British Journal of Educational Studies 64 (1) (2016) pp.124-126
  ISSN: 0007-1005 eISSN: 1467-8527
  Website 
• Wright S, 'Book review: Mr Potter's people: a headmaster, his school and his village of Barton under Needwood 1939-60'
  History of Education (2015)
  ISSN: 0046-760X
  
• Forsaith P Wright S, 'Educational lives in two training colleges'
  History of Education Researcher (2013)
  ISSN: 1740-2433
  
• Wright S, 'Book review: Britannia Calls: Nottingham schools and the push for Great War victory'
  History of Education (2013)
  ISSN: 0046-760X
  
• Wright S, 'Teachers, family and community in the urban elementary school: evidence from school log books c 1880-1918'
  History of Education 41 (2) (2012) pp.155-173
  ISSN: 0046-760X
  Abstract Researchers have identified a civilising mission in elementary schools in the decades around the turn of the twentieth century, particularly in poor urban areas. School log books from the 14 schools in Birmingham and Leicester, supplemented by other primary and secondary sources, are examined for insights into how headteachers perceived, and acted towards, their pupils and pupils’ families. This article explores ways of reading and analysing log books, and considers their value as a historical source. It considers how far headteachers – particularly those working in schools in poor urban areas – were able to intervene in practice in the lives of their pupils, and the implications of this analysis for thinking about the work of teachers in the present day.Website 
• Wright S, 'Our future citizens: values in late nineteenth and early twentieth century moral instruction books'
  History of Education and Children's Literature (2009)
  ISSN: 1971-1093 eISSN: 1971-1131
  
• Wright S, 'The work of teachers and others in and around a Birmingham slum school 1891-1920'
  History of Education 38 (6) (2009) pp.729-746
  ISSN: 0046-760X
  Abstract The 'Floodgate Street area' was a notorious slum district in the city of Birmingham in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This article presents a case study, drawing on the rich archival sources available for this area, to examine the language that local authority and voluntary workers used to describe the local area, and their engagement with local children in terms of welfare provision and punitive measures. The work of teachers at Floodgate Street School is located within a local discourse of urban poverty, and within local attempts to improve conditions for the inhabitants of slum areas. Local activities and discussions are contextualised within broader debates concerning slums and patterns of welfare. This article places schools at the centre of a historiography of urban poverty and welfare from which education is largely absent. It explores the possibilities, and limitations, of using the local archival record for this sort of analysis.Website 
• Wright S, ''There is something universal in our movement which appeals not only to one country, but to all': international communication and moral education 1892-1914'
  History of Education 37 (6) (2008) pp.807-824
  ISSN: 0046-760X
  Abstract This article examines international communication around moral education in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and the role of the ethical movement in facilitating this communication. Three moments of international communication are analysed. The first, in the 1890s, involves the dissemination of Felix Adler's book The Moral Instruction of Children among English moral educators. The second, in 1908, involves the report of a major international inquiry, and the first International Moral Education Congress in London. The third examines Frederick James Gould's tours of the USA and India between 1911 and 1914. The ethical movement's ideology and organisational structures meant it was well placed to stimulate international communication about moral education, well beyond the movement's boundaries. But it is less clear that this communication led to educational reform or sustained activity, or that there was a shared understanding - ideological or pedagogical - of moral education that crossed national borders.Website 
• Ertl H, Wright S, 'Reviewing the literature on the student learning experience in higher education'
  London Review of Education 6 (3) (2008) pp.195-210
  ISSN: 1474-8460
  Abstract This paper reports on the work of a six-month review project commissioned by the Higher Education Academy which aimed at mapping the research base around the student learning experience in higher education (HE). The project aimed to 1) provide an overview of the ways in which the student learning experience in HE has been and is conceptualised; 2) provide an overview of interventions aimed at producing a more effective learning experience; and 3) review the methodological approaches adopted to investigate the student learning experience. The paper outlines the review approach adopted by this project and presents an analytical map in which reviewed studies are categorised in terms of the methods they adopt and the area of investigation. Selected findings in the areas of inventory-based studies, assessment and feedback and teaching, curriculum and learning environments are discussed. The project identified a large, but broad, heterogeneous and somewhat scattered research base, dominated by a tradition of studies using inventory methods, and otherwise by small and localised studies often conducted by practitioners researching their own subject areas. The paper concludes with a discussion of the strengths and weaknesses of the project's methods, and recommendations for developing the student learning experience research base in the future.Website 
• S. Wilde and S. Wright, 'On the same wavelength but tuned to different frequencies? Perceptions of academic and admissions staff in England and Wales on the articulation between 14-19 education and training and higher education'
  London Review of Education (2007)
  ISSN: 1474-8460
  

Book chapters

• Wright, S., 'Moral instruction, urban poverty and English elementary schools in the late nineteenth century' in N. Goose, K. Honeyman (ed.), Childhood and Child Labour in Industrial England. Diversity and Agency, 1750-1914, Ashgate (2013)
  ISBN: 9781409411147
  
• Wright, S., 'Citizenship, Moral Education and the Elementary School' in Brockliss, L. and Sheldon, N. (ed.), Mass Education and the Limits of Statebuilding 1870-1930, Palgrave Macmillan (2012)
  ISBN: 978-0-230-37021-0
  
• Wright S, 'Log books from late nineteenth century and early twentieth century English elementary schools' in Braster S, Grosvenor I, del Mar del Pozo M (ed.), The Black Box of Schooling: A cultural history of the classroom, 1700-2000, Peter Lang (2011)
  ISBN: 978-90-5201-760-0
  
• Stasz C and Wright S, 'A framework for understanding and comparing 14-19 education policies in the United Kingdom' in Raffe D and Spours K (ed.), Policy Making and Policy Learning in 14-19 Education, Institute of Education Bedford Way Papers (2007)
  ISBN: 0 85473 746 4
  

Membership of professional bodies

Conferences

Selected conference and seminar papers

• 'Remembrance in Schools' (with Annie Haight and David Aldridge). 'Their Past, Their Memories symposium, AHRC Teaching and Learning War Research Network, King's College London, 15 September 2017 (invited round-table participant).

• ‘"Our Future [British] Citizens"? Secular Approaches to Teaching Values in the Early Twentieth Century’, BERA History SIG Annual Colloquium (Teaching British Values), 7 July 2017 (invited keynote speaker). 

• ‘Secularism and Character Formation in English Schools 1897-c.1923’, Jubilee Centre for Character and Virtues seminar series, University of Birmingham, 8 March 2017 (invited speaker).

• '"A world where their descendents enjoy all that they set out to secure". The League of Nations Union and Armistice Commemoration, 1919-1939'. History of Education Society/ANZHES Annual Conference, Great Malvern, November 2016.

• 'The Ethical Movement and Moral Instruction. Moments of International Activity 1892-1914'. European Conference of Educational Research, Dublin, August 2016.
• (with David Aldridge, Patrick Alexander and Annie Haight) 'Remembrance in Schools'. Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences Lunchtime Lecture, 28 April 2016.
• 'League of Nations Union Junior Branches 1919-1939'. European Conference of Educational Research, Budapest, September 2015.
• 'Creating world citizens in British Schools, 1919-1939'. History of Education Society Annual Conference, Dublin, November 2014.
• (with Peter Forsaith) 'Dora Cohen: an educational life'. History of Education Society Annual Conference, Exeter, November 2013.
• 'Saving the Birmingham Slum-Child, 1890-1910'. International Standing Conference for the History of Education, Riga, August 2013.
• 'The ethical rebel? Frederick James Gould and world citizenship 1919-39'. History of Education Society Annual Conference, Winchester, November 2012.
• 'Religion and philanthropy in Birmingham 1890-1910'. Invited seminar: Religion, Health and Welfare since 1750, Glasgow Caledonian University, October 2012.
• 'Creating world citizens? League of Nations teaching in English schools, 1919-39'. Invited speaker: Institute of Historical Research History of Education Seminar, London, 3 November 2011.
• 'Creating religious or secular citizens? Moral instruction in English elementary schools at the turn of the twentieth century'. History of Education Society Annual Conference, London, November 2010.
• 'Moral education and the English elementary school'. Citizenship, Modernisation and Nationhood: The Cultural Role of Mass Education 1870-1930, Magdalen College, Oxford, 25-26 September 2009.
• 'Religion, secularism and morality in English elementary schools'. International Standing Conference for the History of Education, Utrecht, August 2009.
• 'Inside the Black Box? School Log Books'. Invited symposium: The black box of schooling: a cultural history of the classroom, Rotterdam, June 2008.

Other experience

• 1993-1996 University of Leeds, BA Joint Honours History and Sociology
• 1997-1999 Oxford Brookes University, MA Historical Studies
• 2000-2006 Oxford Brookes University, PhD (History Department)
• 2003-2007 Oxford University Department of Education, Research Officer 
• 2007-2009 Oxford Brookes University, Research Fellow in Education
• 2009-Present Oxford Brookes University, Senior Lecturer in Education 

Further information