Children's school reading and curriculum innovation at the edge of Empire: The school paper in late nineteenth-century Australia
Abstract
Purpose
Using the example of a “school paper” titled The Children's Hour, developed in South Australia in the late nineteenth century, the purpose of this paper is to show the way that the colonial margins could act as sites of innovation in curriculum and pedagogy and not just as importers of ideas from the imperial centre.
Design/methodology/approach
The analysis on which the examination of The Children's Hour is based is a combination of Foucaultian discourse analysis and a genealogical approach to curriculum history which tracks different formations of techniques and programmes for shaping the human subject.
Findings
The Children's Hour (1889-1963), featured the innovative use of literature and other genres, and provided new ways to shape the identities of school students and teachers. School papers were strongly implicated in the discursive construction of both a global/imperial and local/Australian identities and represent an informative case of the ways in which teaching and learning practices have been highly mobile in the field of reading.
Originality/value
This research shows that the humble school reading text is an overlooked site for examining processes of the constitution of national identity and the citizen subject. It is also a reminder of the significance of communications technologies in the formation of, and struggles over, national/imperial imaginaries and that the school is an important site for studying these processes.
Keywords
Acknowledgements
The paper arises out of work on a number of historical research projects with Bill Green, Jo-Anne Reid and Annette Patterson and the author is indebted to their guidance and feedback. Data for the paper were taken, in part, from the research project “Teaching Reading in Australia”; a collaborative research project (DP0987648) between the University of South Australia, Charles Sturt University and the Queensland University of Technology. Melissa Stevenson also began the work of compiling the database of school papers for an earlier ARC Large Grant project, “Schooling Australia” (A00104036).
Citation
Anton Cormack, P. (2013), "Children's school reading and curriculum innovation at the edge of Empire: The school paper in late nineteenth-century Australia", History of Education Review, Vol. 42 No. 2, pp. 153-169. https://doi.org/10.1108/HER-06-2012-0018
Publisher
:Emerald Group Publishing Limited
Copyright © 2013, Emerald Group Publishing Limited