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

In chapter 4, a substantial and largely theoretical one, I give an account of the schooling of my participants, which I juxtapose with an exegesis on prevailing discourses influencing the education of girls. I sought to understand the ways in which schools both reproduced and reworked gender regimes, thus creating potentially contradictory subject positions that were ‘appropriately feminine’ while simultaneously apparently gender neutral. In addition, I sifted the testimonies of my participants for recollections of any perceived tensions they experienced as a consequence of these discursive contradictions.

School experiences are also the focus of chapter 5, but in this instance, I have recounted what my participants remembered about the pleasures of school. Importantly, in terms of the storytellers’ growing awareness of what it meant to be a teacher, their testimonies on pleasures give many accounts of beloved teachers. These men and women were recalled as having the attributes of pedagogical skill as well as humour and a certain ‘style’, and, as such, constituted models of professionalism integral to the construction of the teacherly subject.

Chapters 6 and 7 are concerned with the initial formal step in becoming a teacher, namely, the monitorship. The Education Department required all trainee teachers to serve as monitors for two years prior to admission to Claremont Teachers’ College. Chapter 6 focuses on the policies and practices of the Education Department concerning recruitment and training of monitors. I trace the genesis of these from the pupil teacher and monitorial schemes developed by Lancaster and Bell in early nineteenth-century England and identify common themes in both locations. The chapter also teases out the gendered nature of the monitorial system by examining discourses that both replicated and reworked constructions of femininity in this initial phase of teacher training.

While chapter 6 has a policy-analysis orientation, chapter 7 returns to personal stories. It gives an account of the varied experiences of the participants as they completed their monitorships and details relationships with their pupils, mentors, communities, and the Education Department. I explore what the storytellers remembered about this transition to teaching, what they did, and how they evaluated its contribution to their professional development.