Teacher training and the public good: the University of Winchester Alumni Project

In this paper data are used from the University of Winchester Alumni oral history project to suggest how the historic culture of the institution, as one of the original church training colleges, founded in the mid-nineteenth century, might have been transmitted to those who attended it as trainee teachers from the 1930s, the earliest data that are available, to the late 1970s when its courses diversified. Two questions will be posed. The first will ask what might have been distinctive about teacher training at a church college. The second will consider the possible effects of such training on the professional lives of the alumni as teachers, and beyond, in the community more generally. In their analysis of the data the authors utilise Pierre Bourdieu's key concepts of 'field', 'capital' and 'habitus'.