Malcolm Vick

It's a difficult matter: historical perspectives on the enduring problem of the practicum in teacher preparation

Current reviews of teacher education pay considerable attention to problems associated with the practicum, and often claim to propose major changes in order to improve the quality of new graduates. Many of the problems they address concerning the practicum and its relation to the ‘theoretical’ component of programs are longstanding, and have been the focus of sustained critique and consequent ongoing modification. Between 1900 and 1950 teacher educators and administrators in England and Australia sought to develop programs that balanced and integrated theory and practice, supported by a range of teaching and administrative procedures. They identified a range of problems in staffing, curriculum and pedagogy, school placements and supervision, and explored a wide range of possible solutions to those problems from minor adjustments to substantial reconceptualisations of whole programs. However, many such solutions generated further problems of their own. The analysis of the history of the practicum in teacher preparation indicates how firmly contemporary proposals are embedded within the framework of assumptions and approaches that have shaped teacher education for over a century.

What Does a Teacher Look Like

This paper examines the construction of verbal and visual images of teachers and teaching in English‐language manuals of pedagogy from 1850 to the present. It arises from a number of interests arising from poststructural interests in reworking both Cartesian dualism and its implications for pedagogy. It examines manuals of teaching in the light of the notion of pedagogy as fully corporeal and performative, a concept which focuses attention on the reiterative (bodily) enactment of what have come to be established meaningful gestures, postures and actions. It argues that for the most part the verbal constructions of teachers and teaching in these texts offer a de‐corporealised, mentalistic account of teachers and teaching, but that in their margins they also construct the materials from which a more corporealised, performative account of teacher and teaching might be construed. Finally, it considers visual illustrations of teachers, and the extent to which they might offer a more thoroughly performative view of teaching. It concludes that this possibility is in fact contained by the pervasiveness of the dualist discourses in which they are framed.

Australian Teacher Education 1900-1950: Conspicuous and Inconspicuous International Networks

Australian historiography has often portrayed Australian education as dependent and isolated. Starting from Foucault’ s notion of power as capillary, this paper traces two ways in which Australian teacher training in the first half of the twentieth century was tied into international networks. It documents some conspicuous links between key institutions and individuals. It also explores the way referencing of ‘overseas’ ideas and practice by teachers’ college staff as normative constituted an internationalized discursive network. It argues that through these two types of network relations, Australian teacher education was not isolated but firmly and bilaterally tied to British and North American education.

Picturing the history of teacher education: photographs and methodology

Pictures are routinely identified as possible sources for researching history yet they are widely either neglected or underused. This article explores the use of pictorial materials, in particular photographs, in historical analysis. It describes some common, or standard, uses of photographs in historical writing, and critically discusses them. It identifies and examines methodological and ethical issues in using photographs as evidence. And it draws on a current project which is using a rich body of photographs as an integral part of its analysis of the history of one educational institution to explore these issues

Place (Material, Metaphorical, Symbolic) in Education History: The Townsville College of Advanced Education Library Resource Centre, 1974-1981

Place is material, conceptual and symbolic. Physically, the Library at Townsville College of Advanced Education was central, visible and distinctive. Internally, it provided a dramatically different environment from other college buildings. It functioned as the (metaphorical) ‘hub’ of the external studies programme and, when the college was under threat, it formed a symbolic rallying point.

'Home and away': constructions of 'people' and 'place' in the world in history curricula in Australia, 1850-2000

Education history, especially in Australia, has been slow to respond to the spatial turn in the social sciences. Analysis of school history syllabuses and materials in Australia from 1850 to the present demonstrates that understandings of Australia and Australian identities were formed around notions of place, ethnicity and race, and metaphors of family, kinship and home as well as concepts of nation.