“Schooldays” with the Dublin Seminar in Deerfield, 19-21 June

Sunday, 15 February, is the deadline for submitting a proposal for a paper to this year’s Dublin Seminar for New England Folklife at Historic Deerfield. The theme is “Schooldays in New England: 1650-1900.” The conference will be held in Deerfield on 19-21 June.

Here’s the organization’s call for scholarly papers about “the culture of education in New England and adjacent areas of New York and Canada from the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries” (P.D.F. download):

The conference will focus on schooling and curriculum beginning with the one-room public schoolhouse and extending to private academies, religious academies, female seminaries, high schools, colleges, and universities; it will also encompass specialized educational venues like circuit and summer schools, singing schools, dancing academies, penmanship schools, schools of art and drawing, academies for blind and deaf students, ethnic language schools, and schools for African Americans, Native Americans, and other populations.

The conference will deal with educational artifacts; school architecture; school settings; pedagogy and discipline; school uniforms; primers and educational publications for children; community and parental involvement in education; nostalgia; public exhibitions of skill and awards of merit; and the shifting profiles and roles of teachers and students in New England schools and society.

The Seminar encourages papers that reflect original research, especially those based on primary or underused resources such as letters and diaries, vital records, federal and state censuses, naturalization records, district school committee records, school attendance and evaluation records, badges and medals, as well as newspapers, portraits, prints and photographs, business and banking records, material culture, and autobiographies.

The seminar committee is seeking to fill the program with about seventeen lectures of twenty minutes each, along with tours or demonstrations related to education in past centuries. Selected papers will appear as the 2015 Annual Proceedings of the Dublin Seminar, scheduled to be published about eighteen months after the conference. You can also download a P.D.F. copy of the call for papers.

Public school teachers who attend the seminar in June can receive professional development points. Look for information at Historic Deerfield.