The traveling spark: Alice Yardley and child-centred education. The development of her educational thought, 1913--2002

The British author and educator Alice Yardley (1913--2002) worked in Nottingham City Schools (UK) as a teacher and headteacher between 1934 and 1961, and was instrumental in the evolution of the English Infant School for five to seven year olds as a model of progressive theory and practice in action. Between 1970 and 1974 Alice Yardley wrote a series of eight books published as the Young Children Learning Series. Each volume covers a range of topics connected to a particular aspect of the child's life in 'the modern Infant School', where the teacher-child relationship is one of mutual respect, and an individualized child-centered approach to teaching encourages exploration, experimentation, and the development of aesthetic feeling and self-expression (Yardley, 1970, p.7). When first published, these books were widely read in Britain, the US, and Canada, during a period of intense interest in the British Primary School and its American manifestation in the open education movement.; Having first read and loved Alice Yardley's books as a beginning teacher, twenty years later I became interested in the question of how the philosophical and pedagogical stance evidenced in her published work evolved in the course of her life as an educator. In 1996 I traveled to England to meet her, and in 1999 began the work of documenting her educational life story. Alice Yardley died in 2002 at the age of eighty-eight.; Based on information gathered from interviews with Alice Yardley over a three year period (1999--2002) and incorporating a number of primary sources, including her memoir, notebooks, archival documents and records, visits to places where she lived and taught, and conversations with her colleagues and students, the dissertation draws on historical and interpretive biographical methods, and a feminist oral history structure, in which subject and researcher are active in the construction of the narrative.; Setting her work in the social and historical context of a period of increased interest in 'following the child', I trace the development of Alice Yardley's educational thought through her experiences in childhood, as a teacher in infant classrooms, during World War II, and as the head of three large inner city schools. The influence of these experiences, and key events---what she called 'thinking points'---on her theory and approach as expressed in her published work is considered, and consistent themes are followed to their mature articulation in the first four books in the Young Children Learning series. A summary of Alice Yardley's educational philosophy is also included.; This work brings into the public domain the figure of Alice Yardley, a seminal woman educator and teacher-writer in the history of child-centered education. It also bears witness to our collaboration over space and time in a joint mission of making the invisible visible, capturing an important story in the history of women in education whose often unseen work contributed to the forward movement of progressive educational practice and theory in the twentieth century.