Girls Becoming Teachers: An Historical Analysis of Western Austra ...

In Britain, the United States, Canada, and New Zealand, as well as in the eastern states of Australia, this lacuna has, in more recent times, generated a number of historical investigations seeking to reconstruct the cultural and personal in becoming and being a woman teacher.¹⁹ Nevertheless, apart from a recent publication, Becoming Teachers: Text and Testimonies, 1907–1950,²⁰ there is little investigation of the marrying of life histories of teachers with accounts of the institutional spaces in which they grew up.

The latter contribution to the history of teacher training examines the British student teacher scheme that operated from 1907 until 1926, when the government ceased centrally allocated funding. However, the local administration of education in Britain made it possible for some regions to maintain the scheme until the late 1940s. The student teacher was essentially a variant of the pupil teacher, an apprentice. Recruits were secondary school students who spent a transitional year working part of the week in a state primary or infants’ school, while still attending secondary school, and then matriculating at a training college.

Becoming Teachers is an important contribution to our understanding of both the political and personal currents that created the career trajectories of a group of teachers in a particular historical context. However, one reviewer of Becoming Teachers claimed the authors could have pursued a deeper analysis of teacher professionalism if they had employed ‘a more nuanced and sustained gender reading’.²¹ Hence, I saw a possibility that my research could extend and elaborate on the work because gender is a central theme of my investigation. In addition, I sought to create a more intertextual work by closely interweaving historical analysis with the personal narratives of participants. On this, it is noteworthy that in their book, Cunningham and Gardner presented oral testimonies in a section quite separate from the discussion of historical and political context. This separation can justifiably be seen as allowing readers to make their own assessments of the testimonies to the major arguments of the book.²² However, I considered that for the purpose of my thesis, my exposition would be more persuasive if it was constructed by developing more tightly woven connections between stories and historical analysis.

In the following section, I now give an account of the decisions made about my choice of investigative focus, the use of oral testimonies, and the selection of historical period.