Borrowed Robes: The Educational Value of Costumed Interpretation at Historic Sites

Pressure to develop vulnerable historic sites into competitive commercial operations has led to controversial interpretive techniques being introduced by aggressive marketing managers. Scarce resources have been invested in largely unproven technological and other innovative methods of presentation. This paper looks at the employment of costumed interpreters at historic sites, what they claim to offer visitors, and whether their services match visitors' needs. It reports the findings of an investigation into what visitors want from historic sites and the extent to which costumed interpreters contribute to their experiences. The study reported here compared the performance of 12 historic sites in four countries: two European (Sweden and the UK) and two North American (Canada and the USA); with the participation of 589 visitors. The study provides clear recommendations for site managers as to the value of costumed interpretation and offers guidelines on the levels of investment (in reproduction costume and staff training) that guarantee visitors an educational experience during their visits to historic sites.     

Engineers and engineering history: problems and perspectives

In past decades, the history of engineers and engineering has seen spectacular development. Despite this, major interrogations are still left unanswered. This article examines some of these pending questions, like the type of relation that exists between engineering knowledge and practice, or the complex articulation between continuities and discontinuities that characterizes engineering history. Finally, the article proposes to focus on engineering rationality as a possible way to address some of these issues. In order to do so, engineering rationality is not to be confused with some kind of generic and abstract logic. On the contrary, it must be historicized.     

Now that's Controversial! Tracing the Influence of Policy Discourses on History Education Reform in the Balkans

In this article, I bring an ethnographic lens to untangling the influence of policy discourses on civil society-initiated projects of history education reform in the Balkans. Drawing on data from a multi-sited project conducted amongst historians, teachers, and NGO personnel, I ask: what are the dominant discourses that impact civil society-initiated efforts to promote history education reform, and how are these discourses made authoritative? How does policy act to organize the work of this cluster of actors, and what kinds of responses does it provoke? While educational policy discourses and their impacts are varied, I argue that such discourses can be profitably viewed as technologies of governance deployed in the service of post-national citizenship formation. In analysing behaviours of “complaisance”, how “competencies” emerge as a slippery signifier whose expansive meaning was exploited to multiple ends, and how the demands of post-national citizenship can, and sometimes do, detract from the goal of addressing controversial history, I map the field of possibilities in which my interlocutors found themselves, and highlight how they navigated their positions as mediators of particular, shifting, social worlds.     

'Walking the walk and talking the talk': Bodies,conversation, gender and power in higher education in England

Combinations of speaking, listening and bodily behaviour have been neglected in accounts of the operation of power. Although often described as fluid and interactionally produced, power has been the subject of few empirically based analyses at micro-interactional scales. Drawing on interviews with undergraduates and extracts from teaching interactions at higher education institutions in England, this article focuses on talk as a situated practice. It describes how verbal and bodily behaviours together are fundamentally involved in the enactment of instructor and student roles and power relations, and the collective interactional (re)production of teaching spaces. It discusses two broad types of teaching interaction in terms of gendered differences in the structure of talk, drawing attention to how these are shaped by differences in how instructors enact power. I suggest that men may routinely engage in conversations with 'feminine' structures in teaching spaces without this compromising heterosexual masculinity, and present reasons why it may be more likely that women be problematized for using 'masculine' verbal styles. I also argue that rather than simply being inscribed on to instructors' bodies in ways that accord with the hegemonic discourses of gender, authority and respect have to continually be earned from students, and verbal behaviour is deeply involved in this process. It is not enough to 'walk the walk', instructors must also 'talk the talk', in ways that students deem legitimate.     

A case study on the revival of stone quarrying in the late eleventh century: St. Florent,Saumur and Notre-Dame,Noyers

One aspect of the late eleventh-century economic expansion in the west of France was that the abbeys of the region embarked upon an ambitious program of construction. Many houses decided to rebuild their abbey church, while the numerous small chapels and churches they received from the newly emerging class of castellans were rebuilt to serve as priories. All this required large amounts of building stone, which was difficult to obtain. For the abbeys of St. Florent, Saumur (Maine-et-Loire) and Notre-Dame, Noyers (Indre-et-Loire) texts survive that throw light on the intricate social and economic relationships that ultimately provided the abbeys with sources of building stone. One finds that the exploitation of quarries was intimately associated with the proliferation of towns and that the abbeys depended upon secular bequests of both towns and quarries to carry out their construction programs.     

A Centre for Excellence in Education for Sustainable Development

The English higher education landscape has recently experienced a significant change with the addition of 74 Centres for Excellence in Teaching & Learning (CETLs), each one devoted to a particular educational issue or theme. This paper highlights a CETL which is of special interest to geographers in that it is focused on the promotion of education for sustainable development (ESD). The CETL is based at the University of Plymouth, UK, and is tasked with the responsibility of embedding a whole-university approach to sustainability. It will also seek to encourage best practice more widely, working with other institutions regionally, nationally and internationally.     

Greening the University Curriculum: Appraising an International Movement

The declaration of the ‘United Nations Decade of Education for Sustainable Development’ (ESD), Resolution 57/254, February 2003, provides the best yet occasion for higher education institutions (HEIs) to ‘green’ their curricula. The idea for the Decade emerges from a progression of high-level international conferences, beginning with Stockholm, 1972, that have seen ESD thinking move from general statements of intent to increasingly detailed specifications for action. There has also been a growth in awareness that the changes to the curriculum for sustainable development must suffuse all areas of education provision. They cannot be restricted to the environmental disciplines or ‘ecoliteracy’ modules or even to the classroom, but must be demonstrated by the whole of an HEI's approach to the world. Obstacles to implementation include: funding and perverse subsidies, departmental and disciplinary barriers, ivory-tower traditions in teaching that externalize and objectify the subjects studied and persistence of the obsolete mind-sets of the ‘industrial age’. These barriers may mean that change in HEIs will have to be driven by external processes, such as the transformation of primary and secondary education where the fragmentation of knowledge is less entrenched. However, there now seems to be growing agreement that HEIs should equip all their students with ‘environmental literacy’ and that sustainability should be central to concerns both in HEI curricula and in operational practice.     

Bridging the Gulf between Secondary School and University-level Geography Teachers: Reflections on organising a UK teachers' conference

This study contributes to growing research on the links between school and university geography by reflecting on the value of a teachers' conference organised in 2000. Through analysis of feedback from the conference and reflection on how the event has influenced the author's teaching, the paper considers the potential for academic geographers to learn from colleagues in the school sector and vice versa. The paper also uses personal experience and the teachers' feedback to provide guidance for people considering holding similar events, particularly with regard to the likely expectations and priorities of secondary school teachers. The paper notes schoolteachers' desire for a closer relationship with university staff and argues that current pressures on all teachers limit possibilities for broader and more sustained dialogue.     

From the Holiday to the Academy: Implications for physical geography in higher education arising from 'popular' field-based geography in Dorset

The popularity of physical geography at all levels of formal education is declining. This paper argues that a key factor in the decline may be the disparity between geographies studied within formal education and the popular geographies encountered during leisure pursuit. Through the example of the Jurassic Coast Project, an initiative for the interpretation of Dorset's coastal landscape, approaches towards the integration of popular and academic geographies are explored. Drawing explicit links between popular experiences and academic knowledge may benefit physical geography, improving its status amongst public and student audiences, and addressing the concerns that surround its decline within higher education.