Bernard Crick (1929-2008) was a British political theorist and public intellectual who had actively engaged in British politics since the 1950s. Throughout his life, Crick constantly promoted his political theories and emphasised the importance of political relevance (Jeffery, 2009). In particular, in 1997, Crick was appointed by his former student, David Blunkett, the Secretary of State for Education, to chair the Advisory Group to provide advice on teaching citizenship and democracy in schools. A year later, the report titled ‘Education for Citizenship and the Teaching of Democracy in Schools’ was published, commonly referred to as the ‘Crick Report’ (Crick, 1998). This report outlined a vision and ambition for promoting citizenship education in secondary schools. The key area of this study focuses on Crick’s perspectives on citizenship education and his contribution to the Crick Report of 1998. As a pivotal moment, a qualitative historical study with a combination of documentary and oral history methods has been employed, including the individual archives of Bernard Crick, the institutional archives of the Advisory Group and semi-structured interviews with leading political figures and key individuals involved. These archives contain invaluable undiscovered information such as personal correspondence and meeting minutes of the Advisory Group, shedding light on the concealed intricacies of the Crick Report and the complicated process of negotiating, reconciling, and compromising between different interests within the Group. Meanwhile, oral history interviews have been applied to offer firsthand accounts to explore the nuanced policy-making process, thereby bridging the gap between archives and context, which is a crucial means to deepen the understanding of Crick’s contribution and diversify the understanding of the shifting periods from 1997 to 1998. As an example of the relationship between the chair of a committee and the report produced in the history of educational policy in Britain, combining archival sources and oral history interviews helps diversify narratives of Crick’s significance in making the Crick Report and deep understanding about the nature, purposes, content, and approaches of citizenship education. Moreover, Crick previously challenged views about citizenship with a colonial basis and emphasised decolonised ideas about citizenship in a post-colonial society. As such, delving into the underlying ideas of the Crick Report provides a valuable lens for evaluating the contested ways in which citizenship and democracy are conceived in schools. This evaluation is crucial for educators grappling with dilemmas within a broader educational and political context. Furthermore, as evidenced by recent election results in the Netherlands and Argentina, the rise of populist movements illustrates how democracy and citizenship are topical issues that influence interpretations of what is happening. Reflecting on this, Crick insisted on a change in political culture towards far greater active participation, contending that such engagement should be integrated within schools to mitigate adverse effects associated with populist and market forces. In this respect, by examining the evolution of Crick’s ideas about citizenship education and his significance in making the Crick Report, this research contributes to diversifying discussions surrounding civic and public good and the nature of a democratic society.

This study is part of a larger project on the historical study of academic freedom in the Global South. The overall project response to recent innovations in the use of "Big Data" that have created new opportunities for historical scholarship. Until recently, big data historical projects have tended to analyze digitized books to examine cultural change and reform over time using such methods as word counts, word proximity, and other language patterns. Over the past few years, researchers have also begun pioneering the use of technologies for examining much larger data sets focused on regional newspapers. Moving beyond digitized books has allowed for greater precision in the examination of key transition points in political history, medical history, and women's history, among other subfields. Inspired by recent developments in big data methods, this paper explores the intersection of historiography, technology, and the case of academic freedom in the Global South. It discusses potential uses of historiography, technology, and big data to overcome an existing depth-breadth divide. It also provides a preliminary overview of methodological approaches and interpretive challenges that exist when unpacking big data sets to construct global perspectives on academic freedom history and change. To provide context to this investigation, we have selected academic freedom in the Global South as our focus and the challenges presented as our sub-focus. This article offers a systematic review of the historiography on academic freedom in the Global South with a specific focus on the political, social, and economic challenges to the preservation of academic freedom rights in relation to settings studied, research methods employed, and stakeholders involved. While historical research on the topic tends to examine institutional or country-level developments, little is known about academic freedom's evolution across the Global North or Global South, particularly in terms of which agents and policies represent the largest challenges to the preservation of academic freedom rights. This study targets a gap in our understanding of how researchers have approached analyzing academic freedom as a tradition and dynamic concept in the Global South. Using longstanding frameworks to define the parameters of higher education freedoms, this project constructs a portrait of the main political, social, and economic power struggles surrounding academic freedom. Focusing on such challenges illuminates the conflicts, reforms, and power dynamics that exist in a post-colonial and decolonial era and that contribute to the evolution and devolution of academic freedom over time. In doing so, this paper offers a systematic overview of historical insights into academic freedom.

The Society for Promotion of Female Education in the East (SPFEE) was an early British Protestant Christian missionary society involved in sending female teachers first to China and other Asian countries. From the start of professionalizing female education, a select group of upper-class British women oversaw selecting particular women to serve as educators in Asia and eventually around the world. During its first decade, the SPFEE increasingly functioned as a professionalizing body for female education for both the selection and training of their Agents, chiefly following two European pedagogical systems: The British System and the Infant School System. The British System was explicitly identified as a coloniality of knowledge soft power of the British Empire, derived from the teaching system of Joseph Lancaster. With the publicity of the SPFEE, a third locally developed system of Romanised Chinese instruction was devised by Robert Morrison and developed by Mary Ann Aldersey set the stage for the widespread use of Pin Yin in modern China. It became the most significant body for establishing professional standards of female teachers sent abroad, and is perhaps the most widespread evidence of the coloniality of knowledge in China today. From its inception, the SPFEE did not have a permanent address, but mostly met in the Bloomsbury area of London. For the first eight years, most meetings were hosted by Thomas Meaux, esq., at 28 Bloomsbury Square, just along the road from Great Russell Street, in a building that would later become the first home of the Institute of Education. Initially, financial support for female education on a global basis was done as an extension for efforts in England itself, under the supervision of a Ladies’ Committee. Both Lancastrian and Pestalozzian approaches were used to education for their teacher selection and training programme. The SPFEE also established a policy of three committee members examining and reviewing candidates after their training. How the SPFEE developed its own regulations, encouraged the institutionalising of female education in various places and where they sent their Agents, how their policies formed, reforms made in the organization and resistances encountered will be detailed in this paper along with a financial analysis of their organization during its formative period.

The current research invokes to present the objective picture of the influence and integration of German philosophic-pedagogical ideas and models in the educational system of the Russian Empire in the 1870s-1900s through the analysis of translated German-language pedagogical articles. In particular, how strong the influence of the Western Enlightenment was on the schooling process in secondary educational institutions, and how the traditional organization was blended with elements of foreign origins. The development of the Russian educational system under the impact of German-based educational concepts demonstrated the evolution of pedagogy with the concrete effect of these indirect intercultural relations. At the same time, the qualitative content of education could be determined by national mentality, traditions and peculiarities of culture. The purpose of the research is to give a detailed analysis of the influence of the state educational systems of the Austro-Hungarian and German Empires on the reformation of the schooling process at the level of secondary educational institutions: secondary schools, real schools, gymnasiums and progymnasiums. The study of the modernization of the Russian educational system in the 1870s-1900s went in parallel with Western states and considered from the perspective of the professionalization theory (Schriewer, 2006). This period was determined by a complexity of socio-economic and socio-cultural factors: the increase of the demand by the society and state economy. In the vocational education of non-privileged layers, the state of national schools and their needs in teacher’s qualitative preparation, and the mercurial activity of social and pedagogical movement are all demonstrated on the pages of published periodicals. Another aspect is the continuity between Western and Eastern European cultures. The theory of cultural transfer (Kaelble, 1999; Middell, 2016; Wendland, 2012), which finds a bright approval in the centuries-old collaboration between most European states. The interaction in the Russian Empire with the experience of German and Austro-Hungarian heritage in the field of education and culture has a long history. Russian educators were actively adopting Western European ideas of the Enlightenment, in particular through acquaintance with German literature and philosophy, and were reforming the education system itself according to a progressive foreign model. As for the applied method, the research combines historical and interdisciplinary approaches such as the historical-comparative (Schieder, 1965), the historical-systemic analysis (von Bertalanffy 1968), the hermeneutics by Gadamer (Gadamer, 2004) and the Foucauldian discourse analysis (Eribon, 1991). The main idea of the study is based on the characteristics of specialized pedagogical periodicals (Mikhailov, 1890-1917), (Simashko, 1871-1888) and the assessment of the degree of frequency of occurrence in them such issues as professional educational themes, information about the literacy level in European states, the state of the pedagogical education abroad and experience of its organization, the organization of international congresses, seminars, discussions, collective exchange of opinions about the state and ways of developing the educational system. Preliminary analysis demonstrated concrete examples of the introduction of German-based (Austro-Hungarian) principles in the educational process in the Russian Empire such as the organization of pedagogical scientific communities, the implementation of teaching methodology, and the certification principles.