Research Circle Events in 2024

Three Research Circle events took place during 2024, and recordings are available for the following events:

This year, each event connected to the following theme:

Backwards Travellers, looking Forwards – Reflections on cultural, spiritual, political, working-class history of education – learning from the past to inform our future

Summary of 2024 Events

Event One took place on April 26th 2024, under the title of A crisis in the human spirit: Spirituality and reimagining the world.

This event was a launch of Sharon Clancy’s book: Sir George Trevelyan, Residential Adult Education and the New Age: To Open the Immortal Eye. It featured presentations from Sharon, giving an overview of her research and the evolution of the book, Dr Barrie Trinder, FSA, historian and writer on industrial archaeology, who was the Area Tutor/Co-ordinator at the SAEC in the 1960s, Dr Cilla Ross who has recently written a review of the book, Professor Tom Woodin, Professor Emeritus Linden West and Professor Emeritus John Holford, who was Sharon’s PhD supervisor.

Event two took place on Friday 5th July entitled: The unknown EP Thompson and Raymond Williams and roles of imagination in the education of adults and re-imagining our futures.

This seminar was in three parts. In Voice, Memory and Storytelling: the place of Imagination in Adult Education, Dr Sharon Clancy and Professor Liz Hoult met, in conversation, and focused on the role of the imagination in the education of adults and its centrality in helping us to re-imagine our futures. We combined this conversation with a presentation by Professor Tom Woodin Listening in adult education: A usable past?. Tom considered the neglect of EP Thompson and Raymond Williams’ role in workers’ education and extramural commitments. Tom reflected on cultural politics and working-class histories – with a focus on non-vocational and vocational education. Finally, we gave space for a broader discussion on memory and the imagination.

Event Three took place on 4th October, entitled: Radical dissent: Mining, workers education and strengthening of democratic community.

This seminar was in two parts, with Professor Emeritus Linden West talking first about Wilful remembering: the Kent Miners, workers’ education and creating a participative democracy, 1920-1985. His talk embodied the constant struggle between forgetting and memory, in a context where the powerful have constructed miners as an ‘enemy within’, and industrial ‘Luddites’. The talk represented a kind of backward travelling, using oral history, to revisit the history of workers’ education in a mining community as part of our contemporary struggle to reinvigorate notions of the common good and popular education. The work culminated in an exhibition – Radical dissent, the Kent Miners and workers’ education – curated at the Betteshanger Miners’ Museum.

Part two featured Sharon Clancy talking on the subject of Northeast Derbyshire miners – Training, the importance of vocationalism and the transition from collier to miner.

Sharon’s talk examined, through oral history testimony, perspectives on miner’s education in the North Notts/NE Derbyshire coalfields, exploring the experience of her father, and his journey from miner to social worker, via day release provision offered by the National Union of Mineworkers, in conjunction with the University of Sheffield. The scheme enabled engaged and intelligent men to seek to further their education and was initiated in Derbyshire and South Yorkshire in 1953 by Bert Wynn, the Trade Unionist, Communist, and later Labour Party politician who was Secretary for the Derbyshire Area of the National Union of Mineworkers from the late-1940s up to his death in 1966. Sharon also talked about the importance of an adult educational approach in miner’s education underground and how this balanced both a vocational and a broader ‘lifewide’ non-vocational approach which respected the lives and experiences of the mining community, particularly when the transition took place from manual coal mining to machine mining.


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