Senior Lecturer in Education Studies and Postgraduate Research Tutor
I am Susannah Wright, Senior Lecturer in Education Studies and Postgraduate Research Tutor for the School of Education. My academic background is as a historian, and much of my research falls within the history of education and childhood. I have focused predominantly on the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, examining moral education and citizenship, and local studies of education and welfare. My publications cover both my funded research and historical projects, and a monograph - Morality and Citizenship in English Schools. Secular Approaches, 1897-1944 was published by Palgrave Macmillan earlier in 2017, and in 2020 was awarded the History of Education Society's Kevin Brehony prize for the best first book in the English language published on the history of education published between 2017 and 2019. Current research projects focus on young people, war and peace, historically through research into the young people's engagement with the peace movements and pacifist beliefs from the 1920s to the 1960s, and in the present day through research into remembrance in schools. I was a co-editor of the journal History of Education from 2013 to the end of 2019, and in January 2020 was appointed Hon. Secretary of the History of Education Society.
Most of my knowledge exchange work has focused on remembrance in schools. The Remembrance in Schools project started in 2013, and since then has involved a team of four colleagues investigating how schools mark remembrance day. We have sought teacher and pupil views through interviews and questionnaires, and visited schools to observe their remembrance events. We will continue this work with project schools in early 2021, to investigate through short online interviews, what remembrance in schools was like for them under the socially-distanced circumstances of November 2020.
The main knowledge exchange elements of our work include:
- Our pamphlet Planning Remembrance Day Events in your School - this was published in 2018, written by the project team in collaboration with teachers, interest group representatives and arts-based and heritage professionals . It is available to download from our project website. The resource list included in the
- In 2019 we worked closely with two of our project schools, one primary and one secondary, to help them facilitate pupil work which investigated what remembrance meant to people in their schools.
- Media work includes an article in the Times Educational Supplement in early 2020.
S. Wright (2020) 'War and Peace: Armistice Observance in British Schools in 1937', Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth 13 (3), pp.426-445
S. Wright (2020) 'Creating Liberal-Internationalist World Citizens: League of Nations Union Junior Branches in English Secondary Schools, 1919-1939', Paedagogica Historica, 56:3, pp. 321-40
A. Haight, S. Wright, D. Aldridge, P. Alexander (2019) 'Remembrance Day practices in schools: meaning-making in social memory during the First World War centenary',
S. Wright (2018) 'Educating the Secular Citizen in English Schools 1897-1938', Cultural and Social History 15 (2), pp. 215-32
S. Wright (2017) Morality and Citizenship in English Schools: Secular Approaches, 1897-1944, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan