Pam Hirsch

Mark McBeth

This book focuses on two educationalists, Oscar Browning (1837-1923) and Elizabeth Hughes (1852-1925) who were the principals of the two separate day training colleges for men and women at Cambridge. The early initiatives of these two leaders began the development of education studies at Cambridge University and, therefore, serve as test cases to examine the relationship between teacher training and the university. As their early programmes foreshadowed the work of the present-day Faculty of Education, a historical review of these Victorian educational experiments uncovers how the unstable relationship between teacher trainers, the university and the government of the day has affected the status of the Education Department within the university. Oscar Browning and Elizabeth Hughes were extraordinary, larger-than-life characters, who have not yet been well-served in the historical accounts. Their ideals about what teaching should be about is one well worthy of re-visiting. The colleges they set up at Cambridge acted as models for training colleges all over the country so they were an influence on the national scene. In so far as they visited and lectured in Europe, America and Japan, they also had international influence.

The Initiatives of Oscar Browning and Elizabeth Hughes

Teacher Training at Cambridge

In a documentarian investigation of the major LGBTQ archives in the United States, Queer Literacies: Discourses and Discontents identifies the homophobic discourses that prevailed in the twentieth-century by those discursive forces that also sponsored the literacy acquisition of the nation. Mark McBeth tracks down the evidence of how these sponsors of literacy—families, teachers, librarians, doctors, scientists, and government agents—instituted heteronormative platforms upon which public discourses were constructed. After pinpointing and analyzing how this disparaging rhetoric emerged, McBeth examines how certain LGBTQ advocates took counter-literacy measures to upend and replace those discourses with more Queer-affirming articulations. Having lived contemporaneously while these events occurred, McBeth incorporate narratives of his own lived experience of how these discourses impacted his own reading, writing, and researching capabilities. In this auto-archival research investigation, McBeth argues that throughout the twentieth century, Queer literates revised dominant and oppressive discourses as a means of survival and world-making in their own words. Scholars of rhetoric, gender studies, LGBTQ studies, literary studies, and communication studies will find this book particularly useful.

Mark McBeth

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