* What is historical research in education?

* How can researchers get started in this area?

* Why does this field offer a common project for historians, educationists, and researchers across the social sciences?

This book explores how to set about historical research in education. The first general guide of its kind for fifty years, the book locates this field in relation to changes in educational research, historical research, and a wide range of social sciences. It offers a theoretical guide to the rationales and problems of the field as well as to current opportunities for research. It also gives practical advice for getting started and for suitable research methods in different kinds of projects, and in doing so draws critically on extensive international literature. It includes detailed case studies on the following topics in historical research: Curriculum and Classrooms, Foucauldian Interpretations, the 'Alternative Road', Literacy in the Nineteenth Century, and the University History Curriculum.

"I Shall put this valuable study into the hands of any of my students writing on historical topics in education, since it is an intelligent, scholarly and eminently sensible introduction to the kind of methodological issues it is actually helpful to address - David Phillips

Gary McCulloch is Professor of Education at the University of Sheffield. He has a History PhD from the University of Cambridge and is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. His recent published works include The Politics of Professionalism, Failing the Ordinary Child? and Educational Reconstruction. He is currently Editor of the international journal History of Education.

William Richardson is Professor of Education at the University of Exeter. He has a D.Phil in history from the University of Oxford. In addition to his publications on the historiography of education he is currently preparing a series of entries on sixteenth and seventeenth century British educators for the New Dictionary of National Biography.