‘Progressive education’ typically registers an emphasis on child-centred, active and practical learning, immersion in the natural world, attention to the expression and growth of the child, to education for the whole of life, not just the accumulation of formal school subject knowledge; and a valuing of democratic and co-operative relationships among students and between teachers and students. This set of research projects is exploring the transnational dimensions of progressive education as encountered and enacted in Australia from the inter-war period through to the 1970s. It takes as a particular focus the alternative and community school movements of the 1970s, and the parallel rise and reach of feminism in education and the different perspective on progressive and radical traditions they both other, then and their legacies now.
Associated publications
McLeod, Julie (2017) ‘Freedom and Tradition: How progressive education and feminism reshaped schooling in the 1970s’. Invited keynote and plenary presentation, Conference of the International Standing Committee of History of Education, Buenos Aires, Argentina, 18–22 July.
McLeod, Julie (2017) ‘Social science archives and lessons from history: a view from Australia on research governance and practices in the age of data sharing’. Invited two-day symposium, Re-visioning the regulation of data archiving and sharing in the social sciences, Linköping University, Sweden, 23–24 March.
McLeod, Julie and Paisley, Fiona (2016) ‘The modernisation of colonialism and the educability of the “native”: transpacific knowledge networks and education in the interwar years’, History of Education Quarterly, vol.56, no.3, 473–502.
McLeod, Julie (2016) ‘Researching emotion through oral histories of educational and personal change: memory and teacher narratives’, in M. Zembylas and P. Schutz (eds) Methodological Advances on Research on Emotion in Education, Springer, 273–284.
McLeod, Julie, with P. Goad, J. Willis and K. Darian-Smith (2016) ‘Reading images of school buildings and spaces: an interdisciplinary dialogue on visual research in a history of educational innovation’, in J. Moss and B. Pini (eds) Visual Educational Research: Critical Perspectives, Palgrave, London.
McLeod, Julie (28 April 2015) ‘Progressive education in Australia and why the history of education still matters’. Deans Lecture, University of Melbourne.
McLeod, Julie (2014) ‘Experimenting with education: spaces of freedom and alternative schooling in the 1970s’, History of Education Review, vol.43, no.2, 172–89.
McLeod, Julie (2012) ‘Educating for “world-mindedness”: cosmopolitanism, localism and schooling the adolescent citizen in interwar Australia’, Journal of Educational Administration and History, vol.44, no.4, 339–59.
McLeod, Julie (1999) ‘Incitement or education? Contesting sex, curriculum and identity in schools’, Melbourne Studies in Education, vol.40, no.2, 7–39.
