Upcoming Conferences

It’s going to be a busy fall for the Transnational Femininities project, as we will be doing presentations in Budapest, Hungary; Liverpool, England; and Wellington, New Zealand.

Let’s start with the last one first, as Stephanie has been invited to give the keynote address at the  Australian & New Zealand History of Education Society conference to be held in December, whose theme is Intersecting and Contested Histories of Education. She will be discussing the project and our research on school and college stories written for teenage girls in the US and the UK.

In September, Stephanie travels to Budapest for the ECER 2015 conference: “Education and Transition. Contributions from Educational Research”.  Her paper, ‘“Truth is Stranger than Fiction”.Reflections on the Use of Fiction as Historical Evidence for History of Education’ considers the use of fictional as historical sources. You can read the abstract here.

In November both members of the team (Stephanie and Nancy)  will travel to Liverpool for the UK History of Education Society‘s annual meeting. Their paper, ‘Materialities: Covers and Illustrations in British and American School and College Stories’, will consider how covers and illustrations engaged readers, drew attention to particular moments in the plot, and identified key characters in the stories.

#histedmonth — using teen fictions as historical sources

As members of the UK History of Education Society, we are participating in a project to raise awareness of the history of education across social media platforms — #histedmonth.  You can read more about the project on the History of Education Society blog.

This project uses novels that feature school and college settings and that were written for a primarily teenage and female audience. We use these books as a means to try to understand the process and effects of informal education, education that takes place outside of schools and through multiple mediums. Readers of school and college novels could learn about ideal behavior for girls and adults, often from a gendered perspective.  They learned what school might be like and learned about character traits to be emulated, such as loyalty, caring for others, honor, and, that schoolgirl standard, pluck. These qualities and lessons emerged through reading the books and engaging with their characters.

In addition to being an enjoyable avenue of research, these teenage fictions offer important insight into what readers could gain from their perusal of these stories.