Abstract

This article examines a handmade scrapbook created by a Catholic schoolboy from Lancashire during a school trip to Kessingland Camp on the Suffolk coast in July 1951. Comprising diary entries, maps, lists, postcards and pamphlets, the scrapbook is analysed as a microhistorical case study of post-war British education. It explores how pupils documented and interpreted experience through material and creative practices. Situating the source within scholarship on progressive education, outdoor learning and scrapbooking, the article argues that such artefacts illuminate the interaction between formal pedagogy and lived experience. Influenced by John Dewey’s emphasis on experiential learning, teachers encouraged observation, recording and reflection as educational practices. The article introduces the concept of a “pedagogy of making” to describe learning grounded in acts of assembling, arranging and representing experience. It concludes that the scrapbook reveals how mid-twentieth-century Catholic schooling fostered creativity, discipline and agency through materially mediated forms of learning.