Purpose: This article explores the childhood, professional life and social activism of Alice Rigney (1942-2017) who became Australia's first Aboriginal woman principal in 1986. Design/methodology/approach: The article draws on interviews with Alice Rigney along with newspapers, education department correspondence and reports of relevant…

Focusing on the transnational circulation of ideas about suffrage and education, this article explores the work of suffragist Muriel Matters (1877-1969), and teacher educator Lillian de Lissa (1885-1967). It begins with Matters' and de Lissa's childhoods and education in post-suffrage Australia, and their initial work as an actress and…

This article focuses on Inspector Lydia Longmore and 29 infant mistresses who were leading South Australian infant schools in the interwar year era. During 1926/1927 Longmore and each infant mistress in the state school system were interviewed by a journalist about her career path and current role, and profiles of their work featured week by week…

This article explores commonalities in the lives and work of women head teachers in Malawian secondary schools and women principals in Australian Lutheran schools. In both Australia and Malawi women are under-represented in school leadership and often appointed to complex schools and communities. We commence with a brief discussion of Malawi and…

Although international definitions of early childhood repeatedly refer to a birth-8 age span, there are complex, institutional divides within this age range. This paper explores the divide between pre-compulsory and compulsory early childhood institutions. In countries such as Finland this divide is not such an issue because children do not begin…

Using a transnational framework, this paper focuses on four graduates of Gipsy Hill Training College (GHTC) for nursery school teachers in London, United Kingdom, in the early to mid-twentieth century. Firstly, I explore GHTC's progressive ideals and highlight ways in which its principal, Lillian de Lissa, encouraged students to "think…

This article explores teacher educator Lillian de Lissa's working life in the first half of the twentieth century. In 1944 the McNair report criticised residential colleges and their female staff as isolated and intellectually impoverished. However, in Australia and then as the foundation Principal of Gipsy Hill Training College, de Lissa was not…

British teacher education in the interwar years was a contested field, dominated numerically by women but regulated by the Board of Education. The traditional perception of women's residential training colleges was that they were autocratic and socially isolated. By focusing on Gipsy Hill Training College (GHTC), the first specialist training…

This article uses a historical lens to illuminate literacy teaching as it is constructed in two recent reports, "Teaching Reading" and "In Teachers' Hands". In surveying these texts alongside 19th-century sources, we show that an autonomous view of literacy has always held sway, along with a primary focus on reading. Parents'…

This paper highlights ways in which understandings about masculinity intersected with concepts of vocation, career and character in the life and work of an Australian teacher, Victor Pavia. Firstly, it outlines his vertical career path from teacher to headmaster and then inspector, made possible in a bureaucratised state school system that…

In early twentieth-century Australia, men managed coeducational state training colleges (equivalent to normal schools) but teacher education programmes for kindergartners were initiatives of the free kindergarten movement and firmly in women's hands. The Kindergarten Training College in Adelaide, South Australia, was established in 1907 with…

Argues that displaying the transnationalism idea opens the way to exploring the rotation of people and ideas beyond national boundaries. Focuses on educator/lecturer's, Harriet Christian Newcomb and Margaret Emily Hodge, who furthered the enfranchisement of women in Australia and New Zealand and the beginning of the British Dominions Woman…

Focuses on the diary and teaching career of William Cawthorne in an effort to explore the concepts of masculinity and professional identity present in South Australia during the mid-nineteenth century. Discusses the process of converting teaching into a profession that aimed for the middle-class and the presence of female teachers. (CMK)

In this article, the author focuses in what counted as a "good" teacher on the cusp of a significant change in the profile of the teaching workforce from single to married women. As Jackie Blount notes, single women had dominated state school systems numerically for the century preceding the Second World War but by the late 1940s the…

This paper discusses representations of women teachers' work in early twentieth-century state schools, especially well-qualified and experienced women who taught in the city of Adelaide, South Australia. While there is a range of discourses that could be applied to these members of the profession, the paper focuses on three discourses in…