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The University of British Columbia
- a place of mind
- Faculty of Education
- Department of Educational Studies
Co-Founder (with Dr. Tamara Myers), History of Children and Youth Group of the Canadian Historical Association
My research brings an historical perspective to the study of education, children, and youth in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. I focus on children’s varied experiences with social inequality, shaped by race, class, gender, size, and age, and the role that educational and medical professionals have played both in deepening and mitigating inequality. The responses of young people and their families to these interventions are centrally important in my work. I believe that a clear understanding of the deep historical roots of inequality can support and further contemporary efforts to enact and protect social justice.
Research and Scholarly Awards
Books
Mona Gleason, Small Matters: Canadian Children in Sickness and Health, 1900 to 1940 (Montreal-Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2013)
Mona Gleason, Normalizing the Ideal: Psychology, Schooling, and the Family in Postwar Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999)
Mona Gleason, Tamara Myers, and Adele Perry, eds., Rethinking Canada - The Promise of Women's History, 6th Edition (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 2011)
Mona Gleason, Tamara Myers, Leslie Paris, and Veronica Strong-Boag, eds., Lost Kids: Vulnerable Children and Youth in Twentieth-Century Canada and the United States (Vancouver: University of Vancouver Press, 2009).
Mona Gleason and Adele Perry, eds., Rethinking Canada - The Promise of Women's History, 5th Edition (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 2006).
Jean Barman and Mona Gleason, eds., Children, Teachers, and Schools in the History of British Columbia, 2nd Edition (Calgary: Detselig Press, 2003)
Selected Refereed Journal Articles
Penney Clark, Mona Gleason and Stephen Petrina, “Preschools for Science? The Child Study Centre at the University of British Columbia, 1960-1997” History of Education Quarterly 52:1 (February 2012).
Gleason, M. “In Search of History’s Child,” Jeunesse: Young People, Texts, Cultures 1, 2 (2009): 125-135.
Gleason, M. “Between Education and Memory: Health and Childhood in English Canada, 1900-1950,” Scientia Canadensis 29, 1 (2006): 49-72.
Gleason, M. “From ‘Disgraceful Carelessness’ to ‘Intelligent Precaution’: Accidents and the Public Child in English-Canada, 1900 to 1950” Journal of Family History 30, 2 (April, 2005): 230-241.
Gleason, M. “Race, Class, and Health: School Medical Inspection and “Healthy” Children in British Columbia, 1890 to 1930,” Canadian Bulletin of Medical History 19 (2002): 95-112.
Gleason, M. “Disciplining the Student Body: Schooling and the Construction of Canadian Children’s Bodies, 1930 to 1960,” History of Education Quarterly 41, 2 (Summer 2001): 189-215.
Gleason, M. “Embodied Negotiations: Children’s Bodies and Historical Change in Canada, 1930-1960,” Journal of Canadian Studies 34, 1 (Spring 1999): 113-137.
Gleason, M. "The History of Psychology and the History of Education: What Can Interdisciplinary Research Offer?" Historical Studies in Education/Revue d'histoire de l'éducation 9, 1 (Spring 1997): 98-106.
Gleason, M. "Psychology and the Construction of the 'Normal' Family in Postwar Canada, 1945-1960," Canadian Historical Review 78, 3 (September, 1997): 442-477.
Gleason, M. "Disciplining Children, Disciplining Parents: The Nature and Meaning of Advice to Parents in Postwar Canada, 1945-1955," Histoire sociale/Social History 29, 57 (May 1996): 187-210.
Gleason, M. “‘A Separate and Different’ Education: Women and Co-education at the University of Windsor’s Assumption College, 1950-1957,” Ontario History LXXXIV, 2 (June 1992): 119-131.
Book Chapters
Mona Gleason, “Navigating the Pedagogy of Failure: Medicine, Education and the Disabled Child in English Canada, 1900 to 1945,” in Graham Allan and Nathanel Lauster, eds., The End of Children? Changing Trends in Childbearing and Childhood (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2012), pp. 140-160
Mona Gleason and Veronica Strong-Boag, “Community,” in Joseph M. Hawes and N. Ray Hiner, A Cultural History of Childhood and Family, Volume 6, In the Modern Age (Oxford: Berg Publishing, 2010): 39-57.
Mona Gleason, "Lost Voices, Lost Bodies?: Doctors and the Embodiment of Children and Youth in English Canada from 1900 to 1940" in Mona Gleason, Tamara Myers, Leslie Paris, and Veronica Strong-Boag, eds., Lost Kids: Vulnerable Children and Youth in Twentieth-Century Canada and the United States (Vancouver: University of Vancouver Press, 2009).
Mona Gleason, "Size Matters: Medical Experts, Educators, and the Provision of Health Services to Children in Early to Mid-Twentieth Century English Canada" in Cynthia Comacchio, Janet Golden, and George Weisz, eds., Healing the World's Children: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Child Health in the Twentieth Century, (Montreal-Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2008).
Mona Gleason, “Constructing ‘Normal’ : Psychology and the Canadian Family, 1945-1960,” in Deborah Brock, ed., Making Normal - Social Regulation in Canada (Toronto: Thomson Nelson Publishing, 2003): 104–20.
Mona Gleason, “ ‘They Have a Bad Effect': Crime Comics, Parliament, and the Hegemony of the Middle-Class in Postwar Canada, 1948-1960," in John Lent, ed., Pulp Demons: International Dimensions of the Postwar Anti-Comics Campaign (Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1999): 129-154.
Most Recent:
Project Title: The Land is My School: Children and the Landscape in British Columbia's Past and the Enrichment of Contemporary Environmental Learning (2013-2015). Role: Principal Investigator. Granting Agency: Hampton Research Grant
Project Title: Professional attitudes towards the Disabled Child in Twentieth Century Canada (2007-2010). Role: Principal Investigator. Granting Agency: Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.
Project Title: Troubling ‘Normal’: Education and the Disabled Child in Canada, 1850 to 1970 (2006-2009). Role: Principal Investigator. Granting Agency: Spencer Foundation.
Project Title: Building Healthy Children: Education, Medicine, and the Healthy Child in English Canada, 1850 to 1950. (2001-2003). Role: Principal Investigator. Granting Agency: Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.
Examples
PhD Thesis (in process)
Joyce Schneider, Indigenist Knowledge Seeking, Making and Activating: Building Community and Academy (co-supervision with J. Hare)
Anika Stafford, Exploring Everyday Gender Culture in a Vancouver Elementary Classroom.
Andreé Gacoin, Teaching empowerment?: Exploring the social relationships of teaching and learning about gender in the context of sexuality education for HIV prevention in South Africa. (Co-supervision with L. Loutzenheiser)
Satnam Chahal, Changes to British Columbia Special Education Policy
M.A. Thesis
Jonathan Fisher A History of Black Mountain College (2011)
Anthony Meza-Wilson, Educational Projects for Decolonization: Anti-authoritarian Allyship and Resistance Education in the Americas (2009-2012)
Zahra Rasul, Official Spaces: An examination of the privatization and marginalization of Muslim women’s bodies in Canada post 9/11 (2005 – 2006)
Jeannie Stubbs, Undressing the Body: A Narrative Inquiry Into Childhood (2003 – 2006)
Isabeau Iqbal, Mothers’ Experiences of French Mothertongue Maintenance: Towards a Critical Literacy Approach (2002- 2003)
EDST 314 Social Issues in Education
EDST 426 History of Education
EDST 455 History of Childhood and Youth
EDST 502A Growing Up in History: The Meanings of Childhood
EDST 506 Educating the Body: Physicality and Identity in Historical Perspective
EDST 509 Constructing “Citizens:” Canada and the Educational Past
EDST 571 Introduction to Educational Research: Relating Questions, Theories, and Methods (co-taught with Dr. Lesley Andres)
EDST 601 Doctoral Seminar
