Australia and New Zealand History of Education Society Conference 2024: Truth Telling in Histories of Education
11-13 December 2024
In a tribute to the late, esteemed Yolŋu elder, Dr Yunupiŋu, anthropologist and geographer Marcia Langton recalled his observation that ‘Like a fire, the truth burns ... That’s how we know it is the truth.’ (Langton, ‘Energy, Power, Strength: Dr Yunupingu’, The Monthly, May 2023). In this penetrating analogy, Dr Yunupiŋu conveyed the feeling provoked by reinterpretation, by considering evidence and testimony that is uncomfortable, painful, or once judged better left unwritten. We are living through a such a moment in the history of education. Institutions are confronting difficult histories. The names of once- esteemed individuals are being removed from buildings, their statues toppled or installed upside down. Ideas once seen as progressive have come under fresh scrutiny, educational practices recognised as colonialist, racist, gendered. The means by which University collections have been assembled, and their continued right to hold them are challenged. Questions are raised about the source of money for philanthropic gifts to schools and universities. Truth telling is fraught with consequences: does it burn down, illuminate or promote new growth in different directions?
Taking Dr Yunupiŋu’s observation as a prompt, join the 2024 ANZHES Conference as historians of education, those interested in contested histories, historians of place, heritage and collections reflect and explore the friction sparked by truth telling reinterpretation of the past. Throughout the Conference, we will seek to explore the following questions:
- What methods are needed to write this new history?
- What voices must be heard and how are they to be interpreted?
- How do we do justice to the legacies of those from the past?
- How are we to grapple with the reaction that reinterpretation provokes?
- What more are historians of education obliged to do with new stories?
Enquiries
If you have any queries, please contact Dr James Waghorne.
Day 1 - Wednesday 11 December
10.00-10.30am | Registration Foyer, Level 5, Arts West Building | |||
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10.30-10.45am | Welcome to Country Thane Garvey-Gannaway, Wurundjeri Woi-wurrung educator Room 556, Level 5, Arts West Building | |||
10.45-11.00am | Housekeeping Room 556, Level 5, Arts West Building | |||
11.00am-12.00pm | Diversity of Critique: Histories of the Present and Institutional Truth Telling Professor Warwick Anderson, The University of Sydney / The University of Melbourne Chair: Dr James Waghorne Room 556, Level 5, Arts West Building | |||
12.00-1.00pm | Lunch break Foyer, Level 5, Arts West Building | |||
1.00-3.00pm | Forum: Writing university histories in a time of truth-telling Professor Marcia Langton AM, The University of Melbourne Professor Warwick Anderson, The University of Sydney / The University of Melbourne Associate Professor Tamson Pietsch, The University of Technology Sydney Professor Zoë Laidlaw, The University of Melbourne Dr Ross Jones, The University of Melbourne Dr James Waghorne, The University of Melbourne Room 556 Level 5, Arts West Building | |||
3.00-3.30pm | Afternoon tea break Foyer, Level 5, Arts West Building | |||
Concurrent sessions (Level 5, Arts West Building) | ||||
Medical Truths: Histories and Collections Chair: Dr Ross Jones Room 556 | Schooling and Policy in Settler Colonial Contexts Chair: Dr Matthew Keynes Room 553 | |||
3.30-5.00pm | Joel Barnes - Historical Truth-telling at the University of Sydney: Race and Indigeneity in the School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine | Rosalie Triolo - A Bush Calendar: How Victoria’s school children learned more about Australia’s plants a century ago, and what might be learned from that today | ||
Marcia Langton - Ancestral Remains and the Donald Thomson Collection | Deb Towns - Before ‘free, secular, compulsory’ and Port Phillip’s and Victoria’s schools | |||
Rohan Long - Human remains and invisible collectors | Ardra KS - History of an ‘Aided School’ Policy in the State of Kerala: Contested Narratives through an Ethnographic Account | |||
5.15pm | Launch of Special Issue of History of Education Review, 'Post-pandemic positions: new perspectives on international education and public diplomacy in Australia' University House, 53 Professors Walk, Parkville |
Day 2 - Thursday 12 December
9.30-10.30am | Education in Cultures of Redress, 1980s— Dr Matthew Keynes, Faculty of Education, The University of Melbourne Chair: Professor Julie McLeod Room 556, Level 5, Arts West Building | ||
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10.30-11.00am | Morning tea break Foyer, Level 5, Arts West Building | ||
Concurrent sessions (Level 5, Arts West Building) | |||
Activism and Social Change in Education Chair: Dr Joel Barnes Room 556 | Memory, Testimony, and Archives Chair: Associate Professor Tamson Pietsch Room 553 | ||
11.00am-12.30pm | Frances Kelly - A Space to Debate issues of the day: a 1968 student union as a ‘sphere of free action’ | Gary McCulloch - The 1980 Education Act and the UK Treasury: From the Welfare State to the New Right in education | |
Beth Marsden - School strikes for segregation? Protesting school access for First Nations communities, 1900s-1960s | Frederic Fovet - The ‘regulation’ of alternative therapeutic schools in the UK | ||
Jessica Gerrard & Helen Proctor - The New Christian Right, sex, and sexuality in schools: transnational conservative networks of evidence and expertise, 1970s-1980s | Heather Ellis - Food for Thought: Rewriting the History of School Meals in Britain | ||
12.30-1.30pm | Lunch break Foyer, Level 5, Arts West Building | ||
Concurrent sessions (Level 5, Arts West Building) | |||
Reformers and Reforms in School and University Histories Chair: Dr Tao Bak Room 556 | Indigenous Histories and Perspectives in Education Chair: Dr Rosalie Triolo Room 553 | ||
1.30-3.00pm | Shannon Peters - From Underlings to Social Agents: The Teacher Self-Government Movement in 1910s New York City | Issac O. Akande - Indigenous Voice in the History of Indian Education: The Potawatomi & the Treaty of 1846 | |
Piper Rodd - ‘Our working conditions are student learning conditions’: An analysis of the recent history of industrial action by Australian university workers | Kay Whitehead - Vale Margaret Valadian (1936-2023): A purveyor of difficult truths | ||
Neville Buch - Resolving Educational Epistemology to Defeat the Culture-History War | Frank Wilson - Learning and unlearning our histories: opportunities for anti-racist and anti-colonial teaching and learning in the Aotearoa histories curriculum | ||
3.00-3.45pm | ANZHES AGM Room 555, Level 5, Arts West Building | ||
3.45-4.15pm | Afternoon tea break Foyer, Level 5, Arts West Building | ||
4.15-5.15pm | Land endowment and public education Associate Professor Tamson Pietsch, The University of Technology Sydney Chair: Dr James Waghorne Room 556, Level 5, Arts West Building | ||
5.30-6.30pm | Drinks (at own cost) | ||
6.30-8.30pm | Conference Dinner (at own cost) |
Day 3 - Friday 13 December
Concurrent sessions (Level 5, Arts West Building) | |||
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Māori and Aboriginal Activists in Education: Historical Stories from Australia and Aotearoa, New Zealand Chair: Dr Julian Kusabs Room 556 | Contesting Higher Education Chair: Dr Dorothy Kass Room 553 | ||
9.00-10.30am | Julie McLeod - Walter Page: Indigenous education advocacy, progressive ideas and ‘international understanding’ | Maria Ahmad - Standing tall to design the indigenous ways of being on/in time: Clocktowers in the colonial universities | |
Julian Kusabs - Miraka (Mira) Szászy: An Educational Leader for Māori Women | Ren-Hao Xu - (Re)making the ‘National’ in Taiwan’s allocation of student places (1980s-2000s) | ||
Emily Dawson - Uncle Lionel Bamblett & transforming exclusionary systems through a community-centred, Koorie-led approach. | Tao Bak - Contemplative approaches in Higher Education: examining the contributions of Arthur Zajonc | ||
10.30-11.00am | Morning tea break Foyer, Level 5, Arts West Building | ||
Student Support and the Making of Universities Chair: Dr James Waghorne Room 556 | Postwar Education: Global Perspectives on Values, Welfare, and Expertise Chair: Dr Beth Marsden Room 553 | ||
11.00am-12.30pm | Kate Darian-Smith (presenter), Julia Horne and Stephen Garton - Universities, Students and Rebuilding Australia: the Commonwealth Reconstruction Training Scheme | Kok Yin Chu - How did Singapore promote Confucianism as civic and moral education during the 1980s through three different persons? An outlook from Goh Keng Swee, Wu Teh-yao, and Lau Wai-har | |
Gwilym Croucher (presenter), James Waghorne - In Search of the Commonwealth Scholarships: influences and themes | Alexandra Frost - ‘The Blending of Cultures’: At the Intersection of Anthropology and Education in late colonial Papua New Guinea | ||
Anna Kent - Acronyms and identifiers: The many names of Australia’s international scholarships | Heather Ellis & Gary McCulloch - The Second World War and its educational legacies: the case of the UK School Meals Service | ||
12.30-12.45pm | Closing Room 556, Level 5, Arts West Building | ||
12.45-1.45pm | Lunch break Foyer, Level 5, Arts West Building |
Enquiries
If you have any queries, please contact Dr James Waghorne.
Plenary sessions
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Diversity of Critique: Histories of the Present and Institutional Truth Telling
Professor Warwick Anderson (The University of Sydney / The University of Melbourne)
In response to the perceived growth of racist politics and white nationalism from the late 1990s onward, many Australian historians, cultural anthropologists, social theorists, and Indigenous scholars wrote and spoke widely about the continuing presence of racial thought and practice in this country. Some of us were denounced as ‘race traitors’, a label we accepted with alacrity. In the past decade, much of the critique of Australian racism and structural violence and exclusion has focussed on institutional ‘truth telling’ – primarily in our older universities – resulting in different modes of storytelling and different forms of history, often led or shaped by Indigenous academics. Some twenty years ago, many of us wrote about university-generated racism and white nationalism but we failed to see these social pathologies in relation to the ethical status of the university. What may have been gained – and what lost – in this contemporary reframing? I believe it is timely to reflect critically on the resituating and reshaping of Australian histories of the white nationalist present from my Cultivation of Whiteness (2002) to my contribution to the University of Melbourne’s Dhoombak Goobgoowana (2024) and my current participation in the University of Sydney’s plans for truth telling.
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Education in Cultures of Redress, 1980s—
Dr Mati Keynes (The University of Melbourne)
Education, in past and present, has been central in recent debates about reparation, redress and reconciliation. Histories of assimilatory, colonial, and segregated schooling for Indigenous and other minoritised children are of vital concern in contemporary national truth and reconciliation processes in Sweden, Norway, Finland, and Australia. This follows the landmark Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada (2008-2015) which investigated the history and legacies of the Indian Residential School System. Truth commissions increasingly investigate systemic wrongdoings produced through and within educational institutions, as well as make recommendations for education reform as a key pillar of peacebuilding and social transformation. Histories of other total institutions, including boarding and reformatory schools, orphanages, and other forms of residential out-of-home care for children have also been the subject of major inquiries in numerous countries. Current scrutiny of curricular representations of colonialism, empire, and slavery in places like the United States, UK, and Aotearoa New Zealand, are the latest in long-standing contests over the teaching of foundational national narratives. These debates are taking place against an international humanitarian discourse of truth-telling and healing that has gained traction since the 1990s, and is now powerfully reflected in the global industry of transitional justice embedded in the United Nations.
In this plenary session, Mati will examine the rise of redress in and through education. Concentrating on established liberal democracies founded on legacies of historic injustice, Mati will explore how education reform has emerged as a key mechanism to redress historical wrongs, shape national citizens, and reconcile the nation. Specifically, Mati will discuss four national cases—Australia, Canada, Northern Ireland and South Africa—and compare examples of policy, curriculum, textbook, pedagogical reform and their surrounding debates, as they have been directed to redress the past and support social change, drawing out key limitations and opportunities.
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Land endowment and public education
Associate Professor Tamson Pietsch (University of Technology Sydney)
The “great land rush” of the nineteenth century, and the violence that accompanied it, dispossessed First Nations peoples and radically transformed landscapes across the settler colonial world. The value extracted from these lands underwrote the modern expansion of the settler state and its liberal institutions. But land is missing as an analytic in our histories of education. This paper presents work-in-progress that examines the creation of land endowments for public education in nineteenth century Australia. It argues that land was key to liberal reforms of education in a way that both connects the Australian colonies into a larger settler colonial story of educational land-grants and re-contextualises existing accounts of the move away from state-aid to religion. Finally the paper concludes by asking what a proper reckoning with this history might mean, for universities and school systems alike.
Medical Truths: Histories and Collections
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Historical Truth-telling at the University of Sydney: Race and Indigeneity in the School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine
Dr Joel Barnes (The University of Queensland)
Universities across the Anglophone world are increasingly engaging in reckonings with their histories of slavery, colonialism, Indigenous dispossession, race science, institutional racism, and eugenics. Following such examples, and in the context of wide-spread moves for national truth-telling about Australia’s settler-colonial history, the University of Sydney is currently pursuing a truth-telling project that will address its Indigenous and settler-colonial history, other challenging aspects of its past, and their continuing legacies. The University’s Faculty of Medicine and Health (FMH) has been at the forefront of this work. FMH is Australia’s oldest medical faculty, whose history is deeply intertwined with that of the healthcare system across New South Wales and beyond, and which has been an important node in national and transnational networks of colonial science.
This presentation will report on FMH contributions towards the University of Sydney’s truth-telling work, focussing especially on themes of race and Indigeneity in the Faculty’s School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine (SPHTM, now the School of Public Health). Founded in 1930 as a Commonwealth entity within the University, the SPHTM was in its early years charged with improving settler public health, as well as with contributing to the administration of colonial territories in the Pacific, especially Papua New Guinea, through the provision of tropical medicine capacity. Within an explicit biopolitics of colonial whiteness, the SPHTM was initially little concerned with the health of First Nations Australians, with the ‘public’ in ‘public health’ constructed to exclude them. Research, and later teaching, on Indigenous health came into the School’s work in a scattered way from the 1950s, and then more systematically from the mid-1960s. The paper will chart changes in thinking about race and Indigeneity in the School up to the 1980s, when acceptance of principles of community control and self-determination transformed public health provision, and by which time significant institutional changes had altered the School’s status within the University and the ways it functioned. Bringing this history to light is just one early step in the University’s wider process of truth-telling and of considering the legacies of its past for the present.
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Ancestral Remains and the Donald Thomson Collection
Professor Marcia Langton AO (The University of Melbourne)
Anthropologist Donald F. Thomson held a deep regard for Aboriginal people and his collection at The University of Melbourne is exceptional in its quality and quantity. Nevertheless, the offence caused to Yolngu, in particular, by his collecting of ancestral remains and mortuary paraphernalia requires explanation.[1] Unlike the professor of anatomy Richard Berry, however, Thomson had no interest in eugenics, and unlike contemporaries at the University such as Frederic Wood Jones[2] and Sydney Sunderland,[3] he had no interest in studying Aboriginal remains exhumed from their graves for scientific research and or comparative anatomy. Thomson’s drive to record and collect the Aboriginal world he witnessed was also in keeping with a documentary salvage approach towards a culture he feared was under threat. He was concerned to document as fully as possible funerary practices. He wrote ‘If a man could but follow all that takes place when a yarkomrri (sic, yäkumirri) [important] man dies he would understand almost all of the culture of these people.’[4] In accordance with Victorian law, the human remains have been transferred to the Victorian Aboriginal Heritage Council for repatriation. In this paper, we discuss various implications of Thomson’s collecting of ancestral Yolngu remains.
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Rohan Long - Human remains and invisible collectors
Rohan Long (The University of Melbourne)
As part of the recently published book, Dhoombak Goobgoowana: A History of Indigenous Australia and the University of Melbourne - Volume 1: Truth, Rohan has been researching the interactions of the University’s museums with the Indigenous people of Australia. In the Anatomy Museum, Aboriginal bodies were collected, dissected, and displayed as part of race science and eugenics studies of the late 19th and early 20th century. In the Zoology Museum, Aboriginal collectors collected hundreds of animal specimens for academics but were rarely, if ever, acknowledged or recompensed for their work that significantly influenced zoological science in Australia and around the world.
Rohan Long is the curator of the Harry Brookes Allen Museum of Anatomy and Pathology in the Faculty of Medicine, Dentistry and Health Sciences at the University of Melbourne. He has been managing and curating biological museum collections at the University of Melbourne for over a decade, previously working as the collection manager of the Tiegs Zoology Museum from 2013 to 2018.
Schooling and Policy in Settler Colonial Contexts
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A Bush Calendar: How Victoria’s school children learned more about Australia’s plants a century ago, and what might be learned from that today
Dr Rosalie Triolo (Monash University)
Education ‘for’, ‘in’ and ‘about’ the Australian environment is far from a phenomenon borne of progressive mid-late Twentieth Century thinking. The ‘truth’ is that Victoria’s State school children a century ago were more likely than their peers of the present-day to know the parts of Australian plants and what the plants needed to survive across life cycles in different micro-environments. The paper also claims that children were encouraged to celebrate the plants’ uniqueness and beauty more than is the Victorian schooling experience now. Victoria’s Education Department recommended a number of Nature Study academics but also creative writers, poets, artists and photographers. While several will be named, Amy Mack was not only a favourite of the Department, she was recommended, read and respected more widely for being less the academic author and more the sensitive admirer and carer of the bush’s beauty. Her publications will be explored in the contexts of different approaches to environmental education and appreciation. Faced with the realities of an ever-diminishing Australian natural environment and ‘Climate Change’, how possible, desirable and effective could be a return to early Twentieth Century explicit teaching about Australian plants, their uniqueness and their beauty?
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Before ‘free, secular, compulsory’ and Port Phillip’s and Victoria’s schools
Dr Deborah Towns (The University of Melbourne)
This paper is an exploration of the cultural patterns and politics and the state of education in colonial Port Phillip and Victoria. It suggests that Victoria ‘The Education State’ today shows what leading educational researcher Dick Selleck called, ‘the presence of the past’. Neo-liberal economic strategies have placed all schools in an education market. Is this educational environment democratic and best for our children or the state?
In Victoria, before 1872’s pioneering legislation, known as ‘free, secular, compulsory’, many children were schooled according to the New South Wales 1836 Church Act, and consequently land grants and funds were provided to churches for schools in Port Phillip. Seven Public Schools were established on the main corners and streets of Melbourne, the first two opening in 1838. A small fee was charged though families could apply for special consideration.
Short lived schools were established for Aboriginal girls and boys in the 1830s. Government, teachers and religious leaders intended to put an end to Aboriginal children following the traditional education and training that the Woi Wurrung and Bunurong had provided for thousands of years to their families.
‘Settler’ girls were almost fifty per cent of the Public Schools’ students. However, many parents preferred to send their daughters to the privately owned ‘ladies’ schools. Other educational opportunities for boys and girls and men and women were Mechanics Institutes, that taught a wide range of subjects and charged fees. Other families utilised the many small schools usually run by single women or widows in their homes, disparagingly called ‘Dame Schools’.
In 1851, when Port Phillip became the colony of Victoria, Denominational schools taught 2,165 boys and 1,705 girls, National schools 151 boys and 134 girls, and there were 1,285 boys and 1,367 girls taught privately. There was wastage because of the government funded dual system.
This state of education was leading to the 1872 legislation which stopped government funding to non-government schools for almost a century. Then from the 1960s the federal government began altering the funding, administrative and curriculum environment of schooling that was previously a state matter.
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History of an ‘Aided School’ Policy in the State of Kerala: Contested Narratives through an Ethnographic Account
Ardra KS
This paper using ethnography follows the historical evolution of a 110-year-old village school to better understand the history of a postcolonial education policy reform that shaped the public school sector in Kerala, a southern state in India. Using the oral history narratives of three generations of villagers who lived and attended this village-aided school, this paper is an attempt to restitute the policy's life in a rural village-school ecosystem, thereby weaving a narrative of its own. Contexts play a role in the making of the policy’s trajectories. Here's how this school, like many others in the state, navigated its complex life. Initially, I will present the historical background of the education bill and what is called an ‘aided school’ in the state, which will be later followed by the ethnographic accounts of an aided school in the village to understand its progression through the years. Finally, a conclusion emphasising the historical narrative's call to make the school and system more just.
Background: The Kerala Education Bill of 1957, a significant policy milestone that the government introduced, was with the aim ‘to provide for the better organisation of general education’. The postcolonial reform in the education sector had its backlash due to the provisions of taking over schools established by individuals, trusts and religious organisations. The controversy that arose became a strike in the state, leading to deaths and mass protests in the streets with the contestation of the interests of religious organisations. Later, due to demands, schools ran with the support of grants had became recognised as ‘aided schools’ with their teachers and students enjoying all the benefits of a government school in the state. However, aided schools, which claimed to be minority institutions, made it possible to have the right to appoint teachers in their schools. Over the years, these schools have turned out to be places where employability is equated with power/caste/class. Kerala, the southern state in India known for its achievements in education and health services, with governments supporting and protecting policies considered to be equalisers in society, has grown out the aided sector policy into a system of unequal opportunities due to the social fabrics.
This postcolonial educational reform, along with the neoliberal reformations in the country, have influenced the school and the trajectory of this public policy, which is already entagled with religious and caste affiliations. This attempt to reinvent the past through ethnographic accounts that were left unspoken and undocumented carries the aim of repairing the system by creating just practices by making amendments.
Activism and Social Change in Education
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A Space to Debate issues of the day: a 1968 student union as a ‘sphere of free action’
Dr Frances Kelly (Waipapa Taumata Rau/University of Auckland, New Zealand)
In 1979 students at the University of Auckland held a forum on racism following the ‘haka party incident’, an encounter between Māori and engineering students provoked by students’ mocking performances of the haka. The site where the forum took place was the 1968 Student Union quadrangle. The design of this everyday space on campus was underpinned by pedagogical norms of its time, to foster students’ active participation in the commons. It bears traces of a pedagogical culture which valued student activism on campus, integral to perpetuating a healthy social democracy. This paper explores the idea that the student union quad, a space dedicated to critical discussion of ‘the issues of the day’ (Kendrick, 1969), created something resembling what British anarchist and planner Colin Ward (1973) described as a sphere of free action inside the university. According to Ward, the existence of such spheres is indicative of the possibility that a free society is not (or not just) a future state, when “capitalism and its waste, privilege and injustices” are done with, but rather “a mode of human organisation, rooted in the experience of everyday life, which operates side by side with... dominant authoritarian trends of our society” (p.11). Ward suggests it is possible to plan for conflict, to create spaces that enable people to encounter a diversity of views inherent in social life, giving responsibility for order to those involved. To explore the possibility that the Student Union quad was (and is) such a space, I draw on the work of historians who walk everyday environments looking for evidence of alternative political economies (Guldi, 2011), as well as analysing archival reports on the student union by architecture students from 1968 to 1969, and photographs of the forum and other events held in the university’s special collections.
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School strikes for segregation? Protesting school access for First Nations communities, 1900s-1960s
Dr Beth Marsden (Australian National University)
Schooling today, as in the past, is a central site of protest and struggle for First Nations self-determination and justice. First Nations’ leaders have repeatedly identified Australia’s schooling system as a root cause of failed social transformation. As scholars of contemporary Indigenous education have shown, the Australian school system continues to discriminate and disadvantage First Nations students. This paper examines historical protests over school access for First Nations students. It uses school protests to explore the range of clauses, policies and other mechanisms embedded in the development of formal school systems in Australia, which have worked to exclude and segregate Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children from state schooling. The first half of the twentieth century saw settler communities protest the attendance of First Nations students in every state and territory. These protests were often successful, especially when they included school strikes or boycotts. Yet, they were also regularly met by the protests of First Nations families, who contested exclusion and segregations, sometimes with successful outcomes. Focusing on protests and the importance of locality—influenced by settler economies, labour markets and land use—provides ways to interrogate claims of indiscriminate provision of schooling to all children in education legislation. This paper argues that examining contests over schooling can inspire new ways of understanding how historical conditions continue to shape and influence First Nations’ students schooling experiences.
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The New Christian Right, sex, and sexuality in schools: trans-national conservative networks of evidence and expertise, 1970s-1980s
Associate Professor Jessica Gerrard (The University of Melbourne)
Professor Helen Proctor (The University of Sydney)
Throughout the 1970s and 1980s a collection of commentators and advocates who can be collectively described as the New Christian Right emerged across an array of public fora to contest what they viewed as the dangers of sexual permissiveness. Rallying in particular around a fear of homosexuality, sexual promiscuity, and secular humanism, diverse New Christian Right activists and groups came together to campaign for the moral necessity of a Christian basis for Australia’s civic and social practices and institutions, notably schools. This paper explores the ways in which these groups generated evidence and networks of expertise in order to make their case. Drawing on extensive archival analysis of newsletters, media, campaign materials and other texts of this time, this paper demonstrates how, in constructing their description of, and argument against, a seeming progressive permissive new sexual culture, conservatives adopted a dual narrative. On the one hand, the New Christian Right affirmed a common-sense moral expertise of parents who at times developed grass-roots methods of generating evidence of the degradation of schooling. On the other hand, they affirmed an expertise underpinned by professional status, such as in academics, medical doctors and psychologists. This paper concludes by reflecting on how this history may help to understand contemporary conservative movements.
Memory, Testimony, and Archives
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The 1980 Education Act and the UK Treasury: From the Welfare State to the New Right in education
Professor Gary McCulloch (University College London)
A short paper published in 1985 observed that there existed ‘a mortal struggle between the Treasury and the education service, between the needs for economy and for educational advance; with the Treasury having the whip hand’ (Garner 1985, p. 63). This judgement was largely correct, although the Treasury’s interventions were ideological no less than economic, indeed a rival claim to tell the truth in public policy.
This paper traces the role of the Treasury with particular reference to the school meals service (SMS) from 1945 to its culmination with the 1980 Act. It then examines in more detail the debate between the education service and the Treasury in the passage of the 1980 Act. This legislation transferred the SMS and other services such as school transport from being a direct concern of the central government to being devolved to the local education authorities, with further changes leading to the Education Reform Act of 1988.
More broadly, the paper appraises the significance of the 1980 Act as a key transition point from the postwar Welfare State to the so-called ‘New Right’ of the 1980s, which moved aggressively to emphasise market forces in education in many countries in the western world. Sociologists have argued that national Treasury departments were at least partly responsible for this major ideological shift, for example in New Zealand and Australia as well as in the UK (e.g. Grace 1990). A generation later, it is now possible to assess this claim with the help of archival papers of the Treasury, the Prime Minister’s office and other government departments recently released for public scrutiny at the National Archives in London.
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The ‘regulation’ of alternative therapeutic schools in the UK
Assistant Professor Frederic Fovet (Thompson Rivers University, Canada)
Within a growing global push for the adoption of neoliberal values and indicators of success and quality assurance in public education, over the last three decades, the Thatcherian Utopia of national, centralized, quantitative, and standardized school inspection has often been hailed as a striking example of successful ‘market model’ regulation. The oversight process of the Office for Standards in Education, Children's Services and Skills (OFSTED) has, for many, established a precedent that evidences that quantifying educational efficiency is indeed a possibility. For many others, of course, at the opposite end of the theoretical spectrum, these thirty years of OFSTED regulation have on the contrary shown the dangers and excesses that such free-reign, business model policies quickly lead to. This year seems a particularly opportune occasion to examine the OFSTED process from a historical lens, and to examine its controversial legacy from the critical stance of painful ‘truth telling’, when the suicide of a school principal – as a result of negative OFSTED feedback – has caused public outrage (Adams, 2023) and triggered fierce debates within and around the ongoing Education Select Committee’s (ESC) Inquiry into the work of OFSTED, which culminated in the publication of its report: Ofsted’s Work with School (GoUK, 2024). There are many aspects of the work of OFSTED at large that would represent rich material for analysis within the parameters of this conference’s objective of ‘truth telling’, but none is more striking than the impact this body has had on the sustainability of the record number of small, alternative therapeutic school communities the UK numbered only half a century ago. This session offers an analysis of archival records collected at the Planned Environment Therapy Archives and Special Collections, located at the Mulberry Bush School Third Space in Gloucestershire (Mulberry Bush School, 2024). The session examines the dichotomy that exists between (i) the construction of the public discourse – and the political motivation surrounding these complex ambiguous constructs - related to the OFSTED inspection process, and (ii) the reality of its impact on the century-long tradition and commitment of the UK to the role of therapeutic communities as alternative placements for children experiencing a ‘lack of fit’ with mainstream provisions. The paper unpacks difficult ‘truths’, ones that were perhaps left out or overlooked by the recent Ofsted’s Work with School, as they relate to the lives of youth, voiceless and marginalized, and the fragile communities that addressed their needs.
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Food for Thought: Rewriting the History of School Meals in Britain
Dr Heather Ellis (University of Sheffield, UK)
This presentation examines the role of testimony in truth-telling and reinterpreting the past, focusing on memories of school meals in England, Scotland, and Wales from the 1930s to the present. Drawing from over 100 participants, this project, funded by a research grant from the ESRC (Economic and Social Research Council), reveals the complexities of school meal history, highlighting how personal memories intersect with national policies, local practices, and changing societal views on childhood, nutrition, and welfare.
Challenging nostalgic narratives that depict school meals as either a golden age of nutritional reform or a relic of deprivation, these testimonies present a more nuanced picture, exposing regional variations, class disparities, and political shifts. The project also explores the growing ethnic and cultural diversity in post-war Britain, which strained the often inflexible school meal system. As the country’s population diversified, schools frequently failed to address the dietary and cultural needs of students from different backgrounds, resulting in exclusionary practices and, in some cases, overt racism. This failure to accommodate diverse student populations, and the accompanying rigidity of the system, has left lasting impressions on those who experienced it.
The oral histories collected through this research capture the emotional connections people have with school meals—whether of comfort, shame, or resilience—offering new insights into the role of state-provided food in schools, as reflected in the lived experiences of former students. These varied experiences challenge simple characterisations of the past and demonstrate the rich diversity of perspectives on a seemingly universal institution.
This paper engages directly with the conference’s theme of truth-telling by examining the friction between personal recollections and official accounts of school meal policies. It reflects on the methods needed to write this "new history," considering how historians of education can interpret conflicting perspectives within testimonies. What ethical concerns emerge when representing experiences closely tied to identity, emotion, and cultural heritage?
By focusing on school meals, this paper contributes to broader discussions about public histories, memory, cultural diversity, and emotional connection in educational policy.
Reformers and Reforms in School and University Histories
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From Underlings to Social Agents: The Teacher Self-Government Movement in 1910s New York City
Shannon Peters (The University of Melbourne)
In the early 1910s, New York City's highly centralised, bureaucratic high school system faced increasing public and professional scrutiny. Amid a torrent of seemingly relentless journalistic critique, the city commissioned a comprehensive inquiry by leading educational experts to assess the system’s shortcomings. As a rapidly expanding city with nearly five million people representing over fifty nationalities, New York’s education system was distinctly vast and complex. Nonetheless, much of the criticism echoed the concerns of progressive educators elsewhere, including the need for a more practical, flexible curriculum tailored to individual differences and a humanised teaching approach responsive to students’ own ideas and interests. However, a concurrent argument emerged from these debates and investigations in New York which has received much less attention in existing scholarship, namely, the call for an expanded role for the classroom teacher. A growing body of reformers, academics, and educators argued that a transformation of teachers’ subordinate social and economic position was necessary if progressive educational ideals were to be truly realised. This campaign to liberate and elevate the city’s teaching force serves as the focus of this research.
This paper traces the development of the teacher self-government movement, which was premised on the conviction that educators could not feasibly be expected to impart democratic ideals to the city’s diverse youth if teachers themselves were operating within an ostensibly ‘autocratic’ system. Within the activist climate of 1910s New York, Progressive Era debates around fitness for self-government were applied to the teaching profession itself, with reformers highlighting the need for a more democratic and participatory approach to education that enabled teachers to act as key agents of decision-making and change. Such arguments gained prominence in the wake of the controversial New York School Inquiry of 1912 and were bolstered by the advocacy of progressively-minded Board of Education commissioners. The paper likewise adopts a grassroots perspective to examine how a militant subset of the city’s teaching workforce, activists primarily of Jewish immigrant backgrounds with socialist and feminist sympathies, harnessed the ferment produced by this period of discontent to launch their own movement to democratise the city’s school system through a simultaneous industrial and pedagogical rebirth. -
‘Our working conditions are student learning conditions’: An analysis of the recent history of industrial action by Australian university workers
Dr Piper Rodd (Deakin University)
The past decade has been a turbulent and brutal one for those working in the Australian university sector. Ideological attacks, public defunding and privatising by stealth, unprecedented job cuts and losses and a trebling of workloads in real terms characterise this era. Collective bargaining for new enterprise agreements (EA) was delayed across the country, a response to the havoc wreaked in the sector by covid. This was a period that allowed university managements to erode working conditions, class sizes ballooning as faculties shed staff and online pedagogy was learnt on the spot. Widespread casualisation of the workforce contributed to a strongly felt resentment of university executives by workers across the sector.
This paper documents the industrial campaigns of the National Tertiary Education Union (NTEU) at universities in Victoria, the state with the highest union density in Australia, representing members across seven universities. Specifically, it examines the actions of Victorian university branches of the union fighting for new EAs in the bargaining period of 2021-2023. It situates the events of this period through a critical reflection of the history of industrial action by workers within the sector.
This paper analyses media coverage of union negotiations with the Victorian universities contextualising this public-facing narrative construction through a theoretical exploration of union history in the country. Drawing on empirical research documenting intersecting aspects of the Australian higher education sector’s workers conditions, I argue the historical narrative of this industrial campaign provides significant insight into the state of the sector. And I invoke Freire’s (1970) thesis of critical pedagogy to make sense of what I describe as the layers of oppression of university workers at this point in Australian educational history.
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Resolving Educational Epistemology to Defeat the Culture-History War
Dr Neville Buch
The paper is an accumulation of thinking for the last three decades and represented in the recent work of David W. Kim and Duncan Wright (2024, edited). The main issue is “the problem of schooling.” (Illich 1971 and Collins 1998)
None of this is new knowledge, which has been understood for well-over a half century, particularly as philosophy of educational anthropology, sociology and historiography (e.g., Voget 1960). Even in the early 21st century, educators still think and talk in the modes of 19th century evolutionists (Voget 1960:943): “As anthropologists groped their way forward to a distinctive reality for their discipline, selecting culture as their proper focus and domain, some claimed to have settled the issue of human nature and culture, but more often the issue was dispersed in immediate engagements, such as historicism, culturalism, and functionalism.” What many educators are wilfully ignorant of is “the rise of social interactionism and new linkages with sociology.”
The History of Education goes as far back as Rudolf Steiner (1886, 1892). Buch argues that the Australian education system suffered for three reasons: 1. An uncritical understanding of Anglo-American Major Belief-Doubt Systems (Buch 2023) due to the gutting of intellectual history courses and research programs in Australian universities; 2. An uncritical understanding of how ideological systems pervasively work in the Australian education system, something well-understood from the North American context (Giroux 1981, Aronowitz and Giroux 1985); and 3. An inability (to date) for Australian curriculum writers and authorities to critically and comprehensively understand and apply the global history in the educational histories (e.g., Watt 1981, Kolig 1995, Popkewitz 1997, Paul and Marfo 2001, Roberts 2015). There are several explanations for the state of affairs in the Australian educational curriculum and authorities. Kaaronen (2018) points to the neglected need to "Reframing Tacit Human–Nature Relations." Warnke (2015) points to confusions in “Philosophical Hermeneutics and the Politics of Memory.” A good example is the historical forgetfulness of today’s academics in “the problem of knowledge” discourses (as an example of the memory history, Fenstermacher and Sanger 1998).
The full paper will be the unpacking of the recent history of education, as stated above.
Indigenous Histories and Perspectives in Education
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Learning and unlearning our histories: opportunities for anti-racist and anti-colonial teaching and learning in the Aotearoa histories curriculum
Frank Wilson (Victoria University, New Zealand)
In 2019, Prime Minister, Jacinda Ardern announced the introduction of a new compulsory Aotearoa New Zealand histories curriculum designed to identify the knowledge that cannot be left to chance. The ANZH curriculum has had mixed reception, with many pleased that it uncovers histories that have been silenced, while a small but vocal minority believe it separates New Zealanders into victims and villains. The New Zealand Government has recently retracted the gazetted curriculum to ‘rebalance’ it as demanded by this minority. It has been shown that settler societies are in a constant dialectic where mechanisms of colonial control continue to pull the population towards a state of racial comfort that absolves the dominant group of Indigenous oppression. In educational contexts, these colonial structures operate at both the policy level and the classroom level, limiting how curricula can be enacted for decolonial purposes.
I conducted a focused ethnography in three diverse primary classrooms with Pākehā teachers grappling with teaching content they had not learned in their own education. Contrary to the stated intention of the curriculum, I found that it has not given teachers clarity about what and how they should be teaching as it does not explicitly provide opportunities for exploration of race and racism as historical and contemporary phenomena. The teachers in this study were required to unlearn their understanding of Aotearoa histories and often did not see implicit opportunities to address race and colonisation with their students.
My research provided evidence that, even for teachers who want to teach previously silenced histories, a rebalancing of the curriculum is required. However, rather than pandering to Settler discomfort, the aim of such rebalancing should be informed by Māori aspirations and make explicit the concepts and content young people need to be transformational and decolonial citizens of Aotearoa to ensure that learning about Aotearoa histories is not left to chance.
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Indigenous Voice in the History of Indian Education: The Potawatomi & the Treaty of 1846
Issac O. Akande (Charles Darwin University)
This paper focuses on an often-overlooked period of American Indian educational history pertaining to religious operated missionary schools prior to 1875 with the purpose of highlighting Indigenous (American Indian) voice in the negotiating of specific educational
parameters into the Potawatomi Treaty of 1846, thus granting them agency in the educational enterprise as opposed to being portrayed as just passive recipients of education. Unlike the heavily researched era of federally administered American Indian boarding schools, that have detailed student records (grades, disciplinary reports, and student letters to and from parents and officials), earlier mission schools often did not keep such detailed records of their native
students. Consequently, for those researching mission schools and looking to Indigenise their historical narrative by incorporating American Indian perspective, this archival limitation creates a considerable challenge related to the inclusion of “native voice,” as most of the surviving historical records were almost exclusively authored by Euro-American missionaries and government officials.With the above in mind, this paper will analyse the Potawatomi’s treaties, missionary journals, a government reports between 1830-1850, primarily from the Midwest Jesuit Archives and the Kansas State Historical Society, with the aim of highlighting the agency of the Pottawatomi ofCouncil Bluffs (Iowa) by including their voice and correspondence in the 1846 treaty negotiation. The Potawatomi had been promised an educational fund in their previous removal treaty and had expected to have a school built and funded within their reserve at Council Bluffs, but this was denied by the federal government for nearly a decade frustrating those Potawatomi.
This dispute led to the Potawatomi making specific educational demands during the treaty negotiations of 1845 and 1846 that resulted in a significant language change to the Treaty of 1846 that allowed for the Potawatomi to reclaim the discretionary power from the federal government pertaining to how and where their “education fund” would be spent. -
Vale Margaret Valadian (1936-2023): A purveyor of difficult truths
Adjunct Professor Kay Whitehead (University of South Australia)
Some years ago, Aboriginal educator, Peter Buckskin, reflected on Aboriginal people who had influenced him: ‘We say you can’t be what you can’t see. So I was lucky enough to be exposed from an early age, even undergraduate, to meet people like May O’Brien and Paul Hughes, Natascha McNamara, people like Margaret Valadian’ (quoted in Holt, 2016, 173).
This presentation reflects on the life and work of Margaret Valadian whose death in a Wollongong nursing home on December 23rd 2023 attracted few tributes compared with her public profile from the 1960s to the 1990s. Valadian devoted her life to education in its broadest sense. The presentation is concerned specifically with doing justice to Valadian’s work in relation to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander teachers and ‘teacher aides’ along with her penchant for articulating difficult truths about race and gender.
The first section focuses on Margaret’s childhood, work and politics until 1966 when she graduated from the University of Queensland with a Bachelor of Social Studies. The second section explores her participation in the first national conference on ‘Aborigines and education’ hosted by Monash University’s Centre for Research in Aboriginal Affairs in 1967, her postgraduate study in the United States and her profile as ‘a distinctive figure within the Aboriginal world.’
In 1974, the Whitlam government appointed Valadian as chair of the Aboriginal Consultative Group (ACG), being the first national voice on Indigenous education. Section three discusses the ACG’s foundational report, along with Valadian’s involvement in its successor, the National Aboriginal Education Committee, and the 1,000 qualified Aboriginal teachers by 1990 initiative.
The fourth section focuses on Valadian’s leadership in the 1977-78 Queensland Aboriginal and Islander Teacher Aide’ inservice program and investigation of their conditions of employment in Cape York where there was a mostly forgotten history of Aboriginal teachers in missions and settlements.
Between 1978 and 1990, Valadian and Natascha McNamara established and led the Aboriginal Training and Cultural Institute in Sydney for which they are well-known. They relocated to Wollongong in 1990 and the final section contemplates where and when Valadian was seen and heard in her remaining years.
Māori and Aboriginal Activists in Education: Historical Stories from Australia and Aotearoa, New Zealand
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Walter Page: Indigenous education advocacy, progressive ideas and ‘international understanding’
Professor Julie McLeod (The University of Melbourne)
Central to the imaginary of mid 20Th century progressivism was the ideal of international understanding, providing the foundation for cooperation and peaceful relations among nations. One prompt for this paper is the 1946 New Education Fellowship conference held in Australia, ‘Education for International Understanding’ (Best, 1948). Held soon after the end of WW2, the conference echoed many issues raised in the 1937 NEF conference in Australia – school curriculum to world affairs, teacher training, citizenship, psychology and mental testing, and the schoolchild. But hopes for international understanding to promote harmony in world affairs, and education’s pivotal role in this, were both more measured and urgent, with the impact of changing forms of national and colonial governance evident. Thematic sections included the role of the newly formed UNSECO, the effect of war on education, and a section on ‘Race, Colour and Creed’, which included papers on ‘Intercultural Democracy’, and ‘Education as it affects the Australian Aboriginal’. The latter was presented by Mr Walter Page, an Aboriginal man and activist for Aboriginal housing and education. At the crux of Page’s presentation was an argument warning conference participants not to be ‘misled into thinking we are a backward people. On the contrary…given a proper education we should be a progressive people and capable of taking our place in any community’ (p.111). Page’s plea captured and sought to counter influential ideas among progressives regarding (racially) differentiated capacities for education alongside commitments to humanitarian internationalism.
Advocacy for improving the education of Indigenous people was also a major focus of the Victorian Aboriginal Group, a local state-based group many of whose members were active in the NEF and other progressive associations at this time. The VAG was established to ‘help form a public conscience in favour of the just and enlightened treatment’ of the [Aboriginal] people under our charge’, and established an Education Fund to ‘provide aboriginal schools with books and aids to education’ (VAG Annual Report, 1946, 1). This paper examines advocacy for Aboriginal education as expressed by Page and the VAG as one route into analysing the uneasy intersections of progressive education and race, and for exploring the entanglements of international, transnational, colonial and imperial frameworks with national educational endeavours in settler-colonial Australia.
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Miraka (Mira) Szászy: An Educational Leader for Māori Women
Dr Julian Kusabs (The University of Melbourne)
Dame Miraka (Mira) Szászy (née Petricevich) was an influential teacher, executive member of the Māori Education Foundation, and President of the Māori Women’s Welfare League (Szászy et al., 1993). Education was not only a key pillar of Szászy’s activism but her emergence as a leader (Mulholland, 2022). She was academically successful and progressed to earn a teacher’s certificate at Auckland Teacher’s Training College, a Bachelor of Arts at Auckland University College, and a Diploma of Social Sciences through a fellowship at the University of Hawaii (Williams, 2018). This educational background equipped Szászy to act as an effective liaison between Māori communities, activist organisations, and the New Zealand Public Service (Szászy and Else, 1990). She applied her skills in alphabetic literacy and bureaucratic convention to serve Māori aspirations for social reform, especially regarding educational opportunities for Māori women (Kusabs, 2023). However, a formalised theoretical approach to such reform was a source of tension for Szászy who viewed Pākehā (European) feminism and masculine Māori political action as insufficient without intersectionality (Williams, 2018). Accordingly, Szászy pioneered her own approach to these complexities and asserted a place for feminine Māori leadership in schools, universities, and governmental departments (Walker, 2004). This paper explores how her story can provide insights for those who live in the complex educational intersections in which race, gender, and Indigeneity overlap (Te Awekotuku, 1991).
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Uncle Lionel Bamblett & transforming exclusionary systems through a community-centred, Koorie-led approach
Emily Dawson (The University of Melbourne)
This paper seeks to explore how Uncle Doctor Lionel Bamblett, a proud Wiradjuri / Yorta Yorta / Bangerang man, influenced change in education. It discusses his specific skills in leadership, negotiation, and standing strong in – and behind – unyielding Indigenous authority. Uncle Lionel’s activism demonstrates how a deep understanding of the complex enmeshments within systems of power is vital for radical resistance in education to occur (Macoun, 2016). This history illustrates how fixed binaries in the ways activism and self-determination are identified, historicised or debated can delimit our ability to identify necessary bureaucratic negotiations in education (Petray & Pendergrast, 2018). Utilising the tools of Foucault’s discourse analysis and theoretical reframing of genealogy, I seek to unsettle our ideas of ‘what is’ advocacy, but also our own applied orthodoxies in historiography (Steinman, 2020). Rather than romanticising activism of the past, or promoting a falsehood of the ‘ideal activist’ for the present, this paper highlights how one advocate for education brought about change through the collective work of a community-owned organisation. Drawing upon PhD oral history and archival research findings, I explore how Uncle Lionel navigated bureaucratic and political tides of state-coordinated education in order to bring about change.
Contesting Higher Education
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Standing tall to design the indigenous ways of being on/in time: Clocktowers in the colonial universities
Maria Ahmad (University of Auckland, New Zealand)
Public clock towers in the colonised lands can be viewed as a feature of colonial apparatus of disciplining and controlling the colonised societies (Thompson, 1967). A tall and central clock tower as a part of the architecture of the colonial universities in the colonised lands in addition to stamping the grandeur and supremacy of the empire also introduced a westernised universal linear view of time to the indigenous epistemic imaginary. For the colonised being it is also a reminder of its temporal positioning of being left behind as it reinstates the superior industrial morality of the colonising race as being punctual and industrious (Salamé, 2016). The temporal coloniality embodied in the western linear colonial imaginary of time makes being left behind the fault of the colonised self that is usually projected as being ‘lazy’ and ‘lethargic’ and make it run faster like the sweep hand of the clock that move faster but for rather insignificant gains as compared to the minutes and hour hands of the clock. Moreover, this colonial imaginary of time embodied in the object of the clock tower enables normalisation of the language of efficiency in relation to time in the modern higher education imaginary (Bennett & Burke, 2017). Adjunct with the language of efficiency, this imaginary also introduces the idea of utilisation and wastage of time in relation to certain academic activities; thus, enabling the disciplining of academic life. This western colonial imaginary of time being a universal quantifiable entity enables framing higher education qualifications in terms of spending a specific amount of time in doing specific activities to be a scholar. It underlines by the view that same amount of time invested in a learning activity would lead to same learning outcomes that can be demonstrated through another time bound activity. In this work, I argue that this imaginary of time that is in tension with the indigenous views of time is an important aspect of temporal coloniality shaping the onto-epistemic dynamics of the Westernised university in the colonial lands.
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(Re)making the ‘National’ in Taiwan’s allocation of student places (1980s-2000s)
Dr Ren-Hao Xu (The University of Western Australia)
Over the decades, national priority or national development has emerged as the primary driver shaping the ways universities are governed. In particular, the concept of being job-ready has been a ubiquitous policy discourse, orienting the allocation of publicly funded student places towards achieving greater – or more focused – economic performance, thereby enhancing national capability in global competition. While substantial studies have explored historical and contemporary mechanisms aimed at aligning the number of graduates with national demands, few have unsettled the commonplace assumption that the nation is a pre-existing entity, predominantly imagined as a national jurisdiction. Unlike the conventional policy studies that treat ‘national’ as a context for policies, this study critically analyses Taiwan’s evolving allocation of government-funded student places – designating universities to boost national development – to examine how ‘national’ development has been (re)constituted as ‘reality’ that sets limits on how student places can be allocated from the 1980s to the 2000s. Utilising Foucauldian scholarship, it delves into the governing technologies involved in the student place allocation and the rationalities underpinning those technologies that together make the national come into existence. The paper centres on the changing practices during Taiwan’s democratisation, focusing on the interactions between four component parts in the allocation of student places: the University Act; the Council for Economic Planning and Development; the Ministry of Education; and the Education Reform Committee. Methodologically, this study collected and analysed a considerable corpus of archival sources, such as policy documents, university submissions, newspapers, and public speeches by Parliament members. The primary aim of this study is to demonstrate how the notion of national development in Taiwan, and indeed the political arrangements that link universities with the provision of skilled graduates for the nation, are not simply the outcome of ‘government policy’. Rather, my analysis suggests that ‘the national’ is much more disjunctive and nebulous, constituted by a heterogeneous, emergent, and contested assemblage of policy ideas, practices, actors, and organisations.
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Contemplative approaches in Higher Education: examining the contributions of Arthur Zajonc
Dr Tao Bak (Deakin University)
In The Heart of Higher Education: A call to renewal (Palmer & Zajonc, 2010), physicist and champion of contemplative approaches in education Arthur Zajonc reflects on the divided life and his search for inner meaning for the outer activities he was involved in as a graduate student. He recalls being disillusioned and ready to drop out before a chance conversation with his physics professor, Ernst Katz, persuaded him that an academic life that embraced an experiential contemplative spirituality was possible. In addition to his subsequent accomplishments in the field of physics, Arthur Zajonc has played an important role in the significant uptake of contemplative pedagogies and approaches in Higher Education in recent years – a development he has referred to as a ‘quiet revolution’ in Higher Education.
This paper traces some of the key developments in the rise of contemplative approaches in Higher Education, including the establishment of the Centre for the Contemplative Mind in Society in 1997 and the Association for Contemplative Mind in Higher Education in 2010. The discussion builds on recent accounts of Mindfulness and Spirituality in education, with specific attention paid to Zajonc’s calls for a broadened epistemology and ontology within Higher Education. Boaventura de Sousa Santos’ (2007) notions of post-abbysal thinking and epistemological pluralism are drawn on, along with Foucault’s (1972) concept of discursive formations, to enable a discussion of these understandings and contributions as historically constituted. The question of whether Western contemplative knowledge traditions have been subject to similar epistemological exclusions as those identified by de Sousa Santos is raised, along with examination of the possibilities for an integrated participatory education, as outlined by Zajonc.
Student Support and the Making of Universities
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Universities, Students and Rebuilding Australia: the Commonwealth Reconstruction Training Scheme
Professor Kate Darian-Smith (University of Tasmania) - presenterDr Julia Horne (The University of Sydney)
Professor Stephen Garton (The University of Sydney)
In 1943, at the height of the Pacific War, the Commonwealth Reconstruction Training Scheme (CRTS) was established to fund the education and training of ex-service men and women. Under the Commonwealth Government’s ambitious program to rebuild Australia, it helped transform the idea of the ‘public university’ and renegotiate the place of universities as core to post-war recovery and national regeneration through the expansion of knowledge and expertise. A total of 275,000 ex-servicemen and women were enrolled through the CRTS scheme, and while the majority were trained in short courses in various trades, approximately 25,000 completed degree or diploma courses at Australia’s universities.
The six state universities at this time, as well as New England University College, Canberra University College and the new NSW University of Technology (later UNSW) all admitted CRTS students. Less well known than the GI Bill in the USA, the CRTS offered similar benefits. It was also more generous in its support than the equivalent scheme in Great Britain, which only funded the first 12 months of training. Its impact on Australian universities was significant: enrolments almost doubled from prewar years between 1945 until the early 1950s, and the state universities expanded with the influx of Commonwealth funding.
Under the CRTS, the Commonwealth for the first time injected substantial funds into universities to accommodate a vastly expanded student body drawn from a more diverse socio-economic and cultural cross-section of the population. This research project, funded by the Australia Research Council, has examined student records of the CRTS university graduates to develop a unique bibliographic database. Our aim is to write the first comprehensive history of the CRTS. This paper introduces i) the scope of CTRS scheme ii) its policy implications and legacies and iii) the experiences of CRTS-funded university students.
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In Search of the Commonwealth Scholarships: influences and themes
Associate Professor Gwilym Croucher (The University of Melbourne) - presenter
Dr James Waghorne (The University of Melbourne)
The Menzies Government’s introduction of Commonwealth Scholarships from 1951 both continued the idea of government support for university students and extended it in new ways. The scheme supported a substantial minority of the generation of students who attended Australian universities from this time. The number of scholarships offered, and the range of categories of students who benefited, expanded over these decades, until the scheme ended in 1974 when fees were abolished. For some students the influence of these scholarships was profound, particularly for those who relocated from regional areas to university centres, or those unable to rely on family support. For others they were less tangible, given automatically to the best-performing matriculating students, and part of the background to their education, but always an affirmation of their potential prospects.
Drawing on an oral history survey with former Commonwealth Scholarships Recipients, as well as the collection of existing interviews, this paper goes in search of the influence of ‘the Commonwealth’. It analysis the values these scholarships implanted in universities: about the reward for excellence, the importance of dedication to studies, and the meaning of personal autonomy both in terms of personal freedom and also in managing the constraints and temporary hardships they imposed. While these influences were sometimes underlying, we contend that the scholarships transformed the experience of going to University.
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Acronyms and identifiers: The many names of Australia’s international scholarships
Dr Anna Kent (Deakin University)
The Australian government’s first scholarship for international students was the South East Asian Scholarship, first created in 1948. The largest Australian government scheme is now called the Australia Awards. In the more than 70 years between the two, the scheme has changed it’s names more often and mor substantially than it has changed it’s shape. But these names do tell us something about how the Australian government has viewed international education, it’s role in the regions where these scholarships were offered, and what they think the name of a scholarship can impart.
This paper will provide a short history of Australian government development scholarships for international students since 1948. The names of the scholarships do provide us an opportunity to investigate the different schemes, the motivations behind them, and the diplomatic and colonial relationships they reveal.
The Australian government’s international scholarships are a long standing part of Australia’s aid program, and the international education sector. They are only part of the Australian government’s higher education scholarship history, but they do offer us an insight into policy approaches and the changing face of higher education in Australia as international students became a mainstay of the higher education student body.
Postwar Education: Global Perspectives on Values, Welfare, and Expertise
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How did Singapore promote Confucianism as civic and moral education during the 1980s through three different persons? An outlook from Goh Keng Swee, Wu Teh-yao, and Lau Wai-har
Kok Yin (Hercules) Chu (The University of Sydney)
Previous scholars often attributed the promotion of Confucianism in Singapore’s civic and moral education during the 1980s to the singular influence of Lee Kuan Yew. They linked up with his idea on “Asian Values”. However, this narrative overlooks the collaborative and pivotal roles played by the institutions and the 'Big Three ', who were actual practitioners of the policies. This paper aims to delve into the profound influence of these significant figures, Goh Keng Swee, Wu Teh-yao, and Lau Wai-har, in shaping and implementing these ideas, highlighting their collective impact.
- Goh Keng Swee (1918-2010), Singapore's former Deputy Prime Minister (1973-1984) and Minister of Education (1979-1984);
- Wu Teh Yao (1915-1994) was a political scientist and the former principal of Tunghai and Nanyang University, respectively. He was also the Chairman of the Committee for promoting Confucian Ethics in Singapore;
- Lai Wai Har (1925-2020), an educationalist who previously served as the Director of the Institute of Education (1976-1979) and the Director of “Confucian Ethics” subject at the Curriculum Development Institute of Singapore (CDIS)
Through researching the archives, conducting oral history interviews, and analysing the publications for the above persons, the paper aims to re-discover how their cooperation and interactions contributed to the movements and the dilemmas they faced, such as the problems with teachers’ training and public discontent. The three elites represent the views of a politician, a philosopher, and an educator in Singapore. Though three tried hard to indoctrinate and localise Confucian Ethics into the country, the paper stressed that promoting Confucianism in Singapore was doomed to fail due to complex reasons. However, the implicit concepts they introduced still resonate in the “Singaporean Values” today, underscoring the lasting impact of their work.
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‘The Blending of Cultures’: At the Intersection of Anthropology and Education in late colonial Papua New Guinea
Alexandra Frost (The University of Sydney)
This paper examines the role of applied anthropology in both formal and informal education policy in P&NG (1945-1950). Recent historiography of Australia’s post-war reconstruction period assesses the indispensable role of social scientists and intellectuals in colonial development.1 I explore this argument by examining two social scientists who worked in late-colonial P&NG, an ‘educationalist’ and ‘anthropologist’: William Groves the P&NG Director of Education, and Camilla Wedgwood the ‘Native Education’ lecturer, at the Australian School of Pacific Administration, which was responsible for training Australian teachers destined for P&NG.
I argue that education was perceived as an agent of change – a ‘useful’ mechanism for Indigenous ‘welfare and development’. Through both formal and informal policies, Groves and Wedgwood applied a scientific approach to colonial education – known in its most succinct form as the ‘blending of cultures.’
Yet, through careful analysis of Groves’ and Wedgwood’s papers, alongside Department of Territories’ files, it is evident that anthropology in late-colonial education constricted any scope for Indigenous agency.2 Cultural blending was an experimental framework for varied educational programs throughout the Territory, to ‘manage’ the contact between Indigenous and settler cultures. The blending of cultures, sought to determine the degree of ‘primitive culture’ versus ‘Western civilisation’ that would ultimately ‘blend’ to produce a ‘new’ culture. Ultimately this policy was detrimental; it placed the Indigenous Papuan and New Guinea people on a trajectory towards a ‘new’ indeterminate culture.
By answering the call for ‘truth telling’, in histories of education, I will reveal the negative implications of applied anthropology in education, when utilised by colonial powers, particularly in late-colonial development phases.
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The Second World War and its educational legacies: the case of the UK School Meals Service
Dr Heather Ellis (University of Sheffield)
Professor Gary McCulloch (University College London)
This paper will examine the formative development of the School Meals Service (SMS) in the UK during the Second World War, and the legacies of this emergent agency in the postwar years. In doing so, it will highlight the discrepancies between the myths surrounding this ‘social institution’ (Clark 1964) underpinning the Welfare State, and the realities of daily life for staff and pupils.
The Second World War and its educational legacies have attracted much attention from historians of education around the world e.g. McCulloch and Brewis 2016). Often these studies have reflected nostalgia and emphasised the attempt to build a better postwar world, in such a way that they may generate social memories neglecting lasting difficulties and privations of wartime and installing instead romantic myths about the past (Cubitt 2007, Ch 5).
The development of school meals has been relatively little studied, either in the UK or in other countries. In the UK, it is the early history from the legislative beginnings of the SMS in 1906 until the Second World War that has been explored in most depth (e.g.Durbach 2022). This paper will make use of archival documentary and oral sources to reconstruct the social history of the SMS in the changing conditions of the 1940s and 1950s, as part of a larger funded research study of the UK SMS. These show that schools were encouraged during the War to extend school feeding for patriotic reasons, with little choice of food offered and children’s tastes being manipulated to enforce this change. After the War, pupils continued to be provided with a traditional limited menu under the expanded SMS that was often unpopular.
Professor Warwick Anderson
Warwick Anderson is the Janet Dora Hine Professor of Politics, Governance and Ethics in the Discipline of Health and leader of the Politics, Governance and Ethics Theme with the Charles Perkins Centre. From 2012-17 Warwick Anderson was ARC Laureate Fellow in the Department of History and the Center for Values, Ethics and the Law in Medicine. Additionally, he has an affiliation with History and Philosophy of Science at Sydney and is a Professorial Fellow of the School of Population and Global Health at the University of Melbourne. In 2018-19 he was the Gough Whitlam and Malcolm Fraser Chair of Australian Studies at Harvard University, based in the Department of the History of Science.
Dr Matthew Keynes
Matthew is a non-Indigenous scholar working on unceded and sovereign Wurundjeri land. His research investigates the ways that education contributes to justice, peace, and social transformation by repairing historical injustices and legacies of violence. Matthew’s current major project is titled ‘Can schools reckon with historical injustice? An international, comparative study of education and truth commissions’ - and it examines how school communities in Australia and the Nordic states are negotiating expectations for truth-telling about their colonial pasts. In 2024, Matthew is the Humanities Research Centre Fellow in Australian Studies at the Australian National University.
Associate Professor Tamson Pietsch
Tamson is Associate Professor in Social and Political Sciences at the University of Technology Sydney and Director of the Australian Centre for Public History. Her work centres on the history and politics of knowledge and she is the author of Empire of Scholars: academic networks and the British academic world (Manchester 2013) and The Floating University: experience, empire and the politics of knowledge (Chicago, 2023).
Date | 11-13 December 2024 |
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Cost |
Full 3-day registration: $320 (incl GST) Full 3-day registration (student & concession rate): $180 (incl GST) One-day registration: $180 (incl GST) |
Registration | Click here to register |
Conference venue
Rooms 553 & 556, Level 5, Arts West (North Wing)
The University of Melbourne, Parkville 3010
Enquiries
If you have any queries about the registration process, please contact melbourne-cshe@unimelb.edu.au