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Normal Schools Revisited: A Theoretical Reinterpretation Of The Historiography Of Normal Schools, Garrett H. Gowen, Ezekiel Kimball

Journal of Critical Scholarship on Higher Education and Student Affairs

This article provides a theory-driven account of the emergence, development, and ultimate disappearance of the normal school as a unique institutional form within higher education. To that end, this article engages new institutionalism in order to construct a composite narrative from the historiography of teacher education which counters the cursory treatment of normal schools in popular and widely-used synthetic histories of higher education. This article also responds to the challenge of better integrating normal schools into the historiography of higher education and suggests future avenues for theory-driven history.