Remembering and reinventing progressive education: radical schooling, feminism and the 1970s.

The lecture with Professor Julie McLeod will circulate around what marks the 1970s progressive and feminist education have left on present-day schooling? What has happened to the promise of revolutions in the classroom? These ambitious agendas imagined new types of students, teachers and educational spaces, devised pedagogies enabling more democratic futures and a socially critical citizenry, and anticipated a new ethos of openness and participation – education as a feeling and practice of freedom.  Taking the case of Australia, this presentation explores the traces and memory of these earlier radical agendas, examining their practical, affective and everyday form at the time. Bringing feminist questions to the fore, it argues for greater attention to the reconfiguring of gender relations as a central, not an incidental or parallel, dimension of histories of progressive education.

Julie McLeod is Professor of Curriculum, Equity and Social Change in the Faculty of Education, University of Melbourne. Her research spans the history and sociology of education and examines the relationship between identities, curriculum and education reform. Drawing on genealogical and qualitative methodologies, current projects explore temporalities and education, youth futures, memory and schooling, and colonialism and education.

After the lecture we invite for a reception with finger food and a glass of wine and seltzer.

The lecture will take place the 3th of September 2025 at 4:00-5:15 PM at Aalborg University, Campus Copenhagen, A.C. Meyersvænge 15, 2450 Copenhagen SV, Auditorium 1.001