TY - JOUR
T1 - Cultivating an ‘earthly paradise’
T2 - nature, informal education, and the contested politics of youth citizenship, 1910s-1940s
AU - Roberts, Sian
PY - 2020/7/3
Y1 - 2020/7/3
N2 - This article discusses contested discourses of youth citizenship in Birmingham, UK, in the early twentieth century. It explores how socially committed Quakers and labour and co-operative activists in the city drew on transnational social and political critiques of the urban, and a powerful discourse of nature as facilitator of a morally and physically healthier citizen, to adopt pedagogic responses aimed at securing a more peaceful and egalitarian world. Taking the British Camp Fire Girls and a local fellowship of the Woodcraft Folk as case studies, the article considers the role of the natural world in the pedagogy of youth citizenship, and how organisational rhetoric at a national level was translated into practice locally. It analyses the political and religious motivations of the adults who developed these initiatives, and argues that suburban south Birmingham provided a very particular pedagogic landscape in which alternative conceptualisations of youth citizenship were possible.
AB - This article discusses contested discourses of youth citizenship in Birmingham, UK, in the early twentieth century. It explores how socially committed Quakers and labour and co-operative activists in the city drew on transnational social and political critiques of the urban, and a powerful discourse of nature as facilitator of a morally and physically healthier citizen, to adopt pedagogic responses aimed at securing a more peaceful and egalitarian world. Taking the British Camp Fire Girls and a local fellowship of the Woodcraft Folk as case studies, the article considers the role of the natural world in the pedagogy of youth citizenship, and how organisational rhetoric at a national level was translated into practice locally. It analyses the political and religious motivations of the adults who developed these initiatives, and argues that suburban south Birmingham provided a very particular pedagogic landscape in which alternative conceptualisations of youth citizenship were possible.
KW - youth citizenship
KW - informal learning
KW - Quakers
KW - co-operative movement
KW - Woodcraft Folk
UR - https://www.tandfonline.com/toc/thed20/current
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85087021171&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1080/0046760X.2020.1753827
DO - 10.1080/0046760X.2020.1753827
M3 - Article
SN - 0046-760X
VL - 49
SP - 498
EP - 516
JO - History of Education
JF - History of Education
IS - 4
ER -