While working on the Teaching Reading in Australia project I had the opportunity to work in some of the best archives in Australia for the history of education. These archives are significant repositories of Australian history. Some don't get the attention they deserve, others are well recognised but their education collections are little known. In this, the first of a … [Read more...] about Significant Historic Australian Education Collections – Deakin University, Geelong
Teaching reading
Teaching Quality – Discovering the Teacher’s Role in Learning
The phrase 'teacher quality' is "judgmental, simplistic.. and undermining of real teacher professionalism", argued Melbourne high school English teacher, Peter Job, recently. The current debate about 'teacher quality' portrayed teachers as "static commodities like cars or vegetables", he observed. Instead of 'teacher quality', he advocated the discussion should be instead … [Read more...] about Teaching Quality – Discovering the Teacher’s Role in Learning
History of Teaching Children to Read
"The almost exclusively scientific orientation of current reading policy and pedagogy is profoundly limited", argues Professor of Education at Charles Sturt University, Bill Green. "It needs to be supplemented by a more critical, cultural, historical perspective. One which takes account of more than a so-called best practice or the singular method". Professor Green, along … [Read more...] about History of Teaching Children to Read
History Without the Book???
People worry about the ephemeral nature of information on the internet. Web pages are easy to create and just as easy to remove or alter. Many prefer to refer to a hard copy of a book because they believe that it will be accessible for longer than information found on the internet. But the book is not an inviolable object. It can be destroyed by disaster, carelessness and … [Read more...] about History Without the Book???
The Transformation of a Word
We all know that the meaning of words can change over time. Words such as gay and cool are used in ways not contemplated one hundred years ago. Historians need to be aware of this when reading old texts. In my research of the education debates in the Australasian colonies from the 1860s to 1914, I had to understand what the word 'secular' meant at the time. It is much more … [Read more...] about The Transformation of a Word
