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13489 results in Education, history, theory

Page 202 of 675

  • Chapter 6 - ‘Our Household Catalogue of Reference’: Ruskin's Lesson Photographs of 1875-76

  • from Section B - Libraries and the Arts
  • Edited by Valerie Purton
  • Book:
    John Ruskin and Nineteenth-Century Education
    Published by:
    Anthem Press
    Published online:
    25 July 2018
    Print publication:
    14 June 2018, pp 101-114

  • Summary

    Even the most ardent reader of Ruskin would probably admit that somewhere in the depths of the Library Edition is a piece of writing he or she has not looked at, and nowhere in Ruskin's writings would that be more likely than within Fors Clavigera, his ‘open letters to the Workmen and Labourers of Great Britain’ – workers, as in Ford Madox Brown's celebrated painting of Work, using brain as well as brawn – published not quite monthly between 1871 and 1884.

    Many of the ideas and principles underpinning the establishment of the Guild of St George first appeared in Fors, along with other notions of education, both theoretical and practical, in the widest sense of the term. Indeed, as early as Letter 4 (April 1871), Ruskin pronounced, ‘We have, it seems, now set our opening hearts much on this one point, that we will have education for all men and women now, and for all boys and girls that are to be. Nothing, indeed, can be more desirable, if only we determine also what kind of education we are to have.’ What follows is an examination of what might well now be called ‘distance learning’, in which Ruskin introduced, not for the only time, a pioneering technique, offering a commentary on four reproductions of ancient and Old Master works of art, made available to his readers as photographs – ‘Lesson Photographs’ as he termed them – which could be obtained from his agent (and former Working Men's College pupil) William Ward.

    A common theme is easily observed in these images, one that accords with a fundamental principle of the Guild, to be taught in its Museum, established in Sheffield only in 1875, and (at least as imagined by Ruskin) in its projected Schools – the sanctity of domestic harmony, centred here on the mother and child. In expanding this small footnote within Ruskin studies, a number of his typically idiosyncratic attitudes emerge, as so often in Fors, as he broadens what might seem like a random exercise in art history into thoughts on religion and society – ‘symbols of the laws of life’, as he put it. As always for Ruskin, art must earn its keep through meaning and moral.

  • Chapter 5 - ‘A Very Precious Book’: Ruskin's Exegesis of the Psalms in Rock Honeycomb and Fors Clavigera

  • from Section B - Libraries and the Arts
  • Edited by Valerie Purton
  • Book:
    John Ruskin and Nineteenth-Century Education
    Published by:
    Anthem Press
    Published online:
    25 July 2018
    Print publication:
    14 June 2018, pp 83-100

  • Summary

    The work of Ruskin's that focuses most clearly on books, on how to read, on what to read and how books should be disseminated is Sesame and Lilies (1865). The first of the three Sesame lectures, ‘Of Kings’ Treasuries’, concerns a project for the institution of public libraries that was finally to materialize ten years later in Bibliotheca Pastorum, one of the many collective and educational enterprises undertaken for the Guild of St George. In this chapter I will examine Ruskin's edition of the four classic volumes that comprise his ‘Shepherds’ Library’, concentrating particularly on Rock Honeycomb, an edition of a selection from the Sidney Psalter, and placing it within the context of his long- term interest in the Book of Psalms as a whole. Of the Holy Books, the Psalms, in which the Word is specifically and uniquely both a collective and a personal form of prayer, was a ‘very precious book’ for Ruskin. It repeatedly served him during the 1870s, a decade during which he was meditating on and testing his views on language, on poetry, on art and on man's wider spiritual search. I shall focus especially on his ideas on translation as a development of a hermeneutic approach he had practised in Sesame, as a means of bringing life to a text. I shall subsequently refer to some Fors Clavigera letters of the same years, where his method of reading the Psalms in depth is applied also to human experience and to his own life, and sense is clarified through a process of expansion that provokes searching reflection. Ruskin's massive and constant reference to the Bible and his application of Scripture to contemporary life have been recently explored by Zoe Bennett, who convincingly classes Ruskin as one of the leading ‘Practical Theologians’. Bennett's perspective is particularly relevant to my reading of Ruskin's role for the Psalms in Fors Clavigera, as it is in these public letter– sermons that, in my view, these connections are most systematically and most innovatively made.

    The Shepherds’ Library Project

    Bibliotheca Pastorum is a collection of four books that Ruskin edited and published between 1876 and 1888.

  • Chapter 3 - ‘To Teach Them How to Dress’: Ruskin, Clothing and Lessons in Society

  • from Section A - Changing the World
  • Edited by Valerie Purton
  • Book:
    John Ruskin and Nineteenth-Century Education
    Published by:
    Anthem Press
    Published online:
    25 July 2018
    Print publication:
    14 June 2018, pp 49-68

  • Summary

    Like the Bible, which exerted a strong influence on him, John Ruskin's writing is substantial in volume, contains apparent contradictions, and is designed to change and improve lives by sharing knowledge, that is, by teaching. Steeped in biblical models, Ruskin understood the importance of parables and stories as a means to connect, to pass on a lesson, and thus to inspire. He was skilled at using vivid, and often deeply personal, narratives to speak directly to the diverse individuals who formed his many audiences. He knew the perception of a shared human moment, a common experience, could help others to glimpse and share his vision of a possible future; verbal vignettes, extended metaphors, anecdotes and parables drawing on specific moments of human experience became his dominant mode of expression and communication. This helped make him an exceptionally engaging educator. In the same way that the Bible can be mined for particularly apt verses to support an argument, so too Ruskin's often gleefully contradictory writing can be broken into the equivalent of verses and extracted to serve a point. This chapter focuses on just such a specific extracted element and uses it to present an argument: that Ruskin utilizes textiles to teach. References to cloth and clothing are scattered across his oeuvre and, in his hands, these allusions become a means of educating his audiences, so they might come to share and help to achieve his vision of a better society.

    Such pedagogical use of textiles as a recurring image employed to connect on an intellectual and emotional level is in keeping with his biblical model. The first recorded parable offered by Jesus – and one of the few to appear in all three synoptic gospels – is offered in the Gospel of Matthew as: ‘No man putteth a piece of new cloth unto an old garment, for that which is put in to fill it up taketh from the garment, and the rent is made worse.’ The lesson is simple, and it is easily understood: if a piece of new fabric is used to patch a hole, it will soon tear from the stitches, making an even larger hole in the original fabric.

  • Foreword

  • Edited by Valerie Purton
  • Book:
    John Ruskin and Nineteenth-Century Education
    Published by:
    Anthem Press
    Published online:
    25 July 2018
    Print publication:
    14 June 2018, pp ix-xii

  • Summary

    Dinah Birch is one of the world's best Ruskin scholars. She is also an exceptional educator, a teacher, writer, broadcaster and ally.

    Ruskin believed in scholarship as he helped the nineteenth century define it – the commitment of The Stones of Venice (1851– 53) or Modern Painters (1843– 60) – and he believed in reading alertly and scrupulously. ‘Of Kings’ Treasuries’ (1864) remains one of the most ambitious accounts of how books communicate in the whole period – think of the dazzling analysis of ‘Lycidas’. Dinah, in a different world from the Victorians, believes in these things, too.

    She is most associated with Ruskin, of course, from Ruskin's Myths (1988) onwards. That book, which began as the Oxford DPhil thesis, ‘Ruskin and the Greeks’, is one of the most lucid accounts of the whole of Ruskin's intellectual and personal maturation available. But she is a leading critic of the literature of the nineteenth century more generally. Editions of George Eliot, Anthony Trollope and Elizabeth Gaskell; essays on, among other topics, Keats, Tennyson, the Bronte sisters, nineteenth- century sentiment, the paradoxes of success, Toni Morrison; reviews in the Times Literary Supplement and the London Review of Books on a huge diversity of literary and biographical subjects. With both her range and her tact, Dinah was the ideal person to edit the seventh edition of The Oxford Companion to English Literature (2009), an enormous undertaking that was greeted with acclaim.

    Dinah reads literary works as the products of human lives: of ideas, ambitions, loves, disappointments, confusions and occasional absurdities. She reads as she listens and talks: verbal statements are the testimony of, and from, human existences. They are to be taken seriously. Little makes more sense to Dinah than the individuals who lie behind an imaginative creation. There is nothing flattening in that. On the contrary, her priority is with art as a version of a life, not as a mere statement of it. She is concerned with the play of creativity on real things, the play of real things on creativity. She doubts those who think art is only political assertion, only self- justification or only ‘theme’. It is transformation.

  • Chapter 7 - Ruskin, Music and the Health of the Nation

  • from Section B - Libraries and the Arts
  • Edited by Valerie Purton
  • Book:
    John Ruskin and Nineteenth-Century Education
    Published by:
    Anthem Press
    Published online:
    25 July 2018
    Print publication:
    14 June 2018, pp 115-128

  • Summary

    Music permeates Ruskin's work. He wrote about music throughout his life, frequently employing musical analogies, often of a semi- technical nature, to frame his thoughts on drawing, painting and architecture. He also made minor forays into composition and musical instrument design. As his ideas on art developed to encompass matters of life, society, ethics, economics and religion, his relationship with music also developed. While music never attained the same intellectual status as painting for Ruskin, remaining largely a sensuous experience, he recognized that it could, importantly, act as an agent of moral improvement. Ruskin's writings on education, informed as they were by his close sympathy for the teaching of Plato, recognized music specifically as one of the central requirements for the development of the healthy citizen. Ruskin increasingly saw not just the communication and reception of music as processes that might lift the spirits and ennoble the mind, but also the act of performing – specifically singing – as something that exercised both mind and body in beneficial synchrony, noting that ‘Music is […] in her health, the teacher of perfect order’. Ruskin's views on the values of singing mirrored the rapid growth of amateur choirs in England, together with the introduction of new ways of teaching music and singing to the lower classes. Such developments laid the foundations for the infrastructure of civic art music – orchestras, choirs, concert halls and music conservatories – still evident in British society. I will argue in this chapter that Ruskin's engagement, in thought and in writing, with music's practice, manifestation and meaning, provides a valuable insight into Victorian perceptions of the role of music in society.

    In Ruskin Relics (1903), W. G. Collingwood recounts Ruskin's musical studies while he was an undergraduate at Oxford, where he learnt both the piano and singing. His music books of the time remain, the annotations from his music master and from Ruskin himself attesting to his encounters with arias by Bellini, Donizetti and Mozart, together with piano fingering exercises and studies. Later on, he continued his tuition with the organist, composer and writer, George Frederick West (1812– 1897), who also helped Ruskin pursue his interests as a composer. Ruskin was doubtless a demanding pupil, ‘disputatious to the last degree’, as George Tremaine noted in his Musical Times article of 1950, ‘Ruskin as Music Critic’.

John Ruskin and Nineteenth-Century Education
  • Edited by Valerie Purton
  • Published by:
    Anthem Press
    Published online:
    25 July 2018
    Print publication:
    14 June 2018
  • An art historian, cultural critic and political theorist, John Ruskin was, above all, a great educator. The inspiration behind William Morris, Leo Tolstoy, Marcel Proust and Mahatma Gandhi, Ruskin’s influence can be felt increasingly in every sphere education today. John Ruskin and Nineteenth-Century Education brings together top international Ruskin scholars, exploring Ruskin’s many-faceted writings, pointing to some of the key educational issues raised by his work, and concluding with a powerful rereading of his ecological writing and apocalyptic vision of the earth’s future. In anticipation of the bicentennial of Ruskin’s birth in 2019, this volume makes a fresh and significant contribution to Victorian studies in the twenty-first century. It is dedicated to Dinah Birch, a much-loved Victorian specialist and authority on John Ruskin.

  • Chapter 8 - Ruskin and the Fantastic

  • from Section B - Libraries and the Arts
  • Edited by Valerie Purton
  • Book:
    John Ruskin and Nineteenth-Century Education
    Published by:
    Anthem Press
    Published online:
    25 July 2018
    Print publication:
    14 June 2018, pp 129-146

  • Summary

    I lay awake half (no, a quarter) of last night, thinking of the hundred things I want to say to you […]. Well, of the thousand things – it was nearer a thousand than a hundred – ‘[…] No. 4 of the thousand. Do you ever see blue sky? And when you do, do you like it? No. 5. Is a witches’ ride on a broomstick the only chivalry you think it desirable to remind the glorious nineteenth century of? No. 6. Do you believe in Fairies?’

    (XXXVII.307– 8)

    Ruskin wrote to Kate Greenaway with these bizarre queries in January 1880: her answer is not, I think, known. Ruskin's own answer to question No. 6 is known, however. In Modern Painters, he admitted that as a child he ‘partly believed in ghosts and fairies’ (III.336). Belief, he wrote in his lecture on ‘Fairy- Land’, is what you have when you do not have sufficient evidence. Once the man who did not believe in the power of nitroglycerine had been blown out of the house, he did not believe that nitroglycerine was dangerous, he knew it (XXXIII.333).

    This chapter is largely about Ruskin's own fairy tale, The King of the Golden River, and it ends discussing the role Ruskin ascribed to fairy tales in a child's education. But I will start by pointing out that fairies and fairy- land played a significant part in his imagination right through his adult life. Fairies and fairy- land coloured his view of landscape: the Meuse, for instance, excelled in ‘that romantic and picturesque fairy beauty’ (II.349); Mont Blanc ‘seemed in another world, in fairy- land’ (II.381). He notes in Modern Painters that he does not feel ‘the old German fear’ in a pine- glade, but ‘a more solemn tone of the fairy enchantment that haunts our English meadows, so that I have always called the prettiest pine- glade in Chamouni [sic], “Fairies’ Hollow” ‘ (V.106). Fairyland can be found in his art criticism, too. A medieval missal was ‘a fairy cathedral full of painted windows, bound together to carry in one's pocket’ (XXXV.491). He writes of the ‘fairy traceries’ of Giotto's Campanile in Florence, and the ‘fretted niche and fairy pediment’ of medieval buildings in Normandy (XII.311).

  • Chapter 1 - ‘An Enormous Difference between Knowledge and Education’: What Ruskin Can Teach Us

  • from Section A - Changing the World
  • Edited by Valerie Purton
  • Book:
    John Ruskin and Nineteenth-Century Education
    Published by:
    Anthem Press
    Published online:
    25 July 2018
    Print publication:
    14 June 2018, pp 13-30

  • Summary

    John Ruskin was above all a teacher. In addition to being the first Slade Professor of Art at Oxford, he gave art instruction at the Working Men's College in Red Lion Square; taught drawing by correspondence; and made his teaching more widely available through public lectures and his published books. Unusually for the period, he also showed a great interest in women's education and gave generously of his time and resources to a number of girls’ schools and teacher- training colleges, including Felsted House, Oxford, the girls’ high school in Cork, Somerville College, Oxford, Girton and Newnham Colleges, Cambridge and Whitelands Training College.

    Dinah Birch has written of Ruskin's belief that ‘The authority of the past could challenge the complacency of the present, providing models for alternative ideas and practices.’ Ruskin repeatedly looked to the practices and examples of the past, but not in a naively nostalgic way. As Stuart Eagles observes, ‘Ruskin understood that you could not recreate the past, because you could not recreate the conditions and circumstances prevailing in the past [.…] The lessons of the past, however, could be learned.’

    Ruskin was also keenly aware of the interdependence of all things, a principle that he called the ‘Law of Help’. ‘The system of the world is entirely one’, he maintained. ‘Small things and great are alike part of one mighty whole.’ This was as true of education as of art, nature or society; not only are the various branches of knowledge interrelated, he argued, but the wisest minds of the past commune with the present through their teachings. For Ruskin, these teachings are vital truths; they have helped to make us who we are and have the potential to guide us in shaping the future. ‘The right fulfilment of national power in art’, Ruskin wrote, ‘depends always on the direction of its aim by the experience of ages’. True education, he believed, must be similarly guided. Proust observed in the preface to his translation of Ruskin's Bible of Amiens that

    Ruskin lives in a sort of fraternal society with all the great minds of all times, and since he is interested in them only so far as they can answer eternal questions, there are for him neither ancients nor moderns, and he can speak of Herodotus as he would of a contemporary.

  • Introduction

  • Edited by Valerie Purton
  • Book:
    John Ruskin and Nineteenth-Century Education
    Published by:
    Anthem Press
    Published online:
    25 July 2018
    Print publication:
    14 June 2018, pp 1-10

  • Summary

    John Ruskin, whose bicentenary is celebrated in 2019, was an art historian, cultural critic and political theorist who was also, and perhaps most importantly, a great educator. Ruskin was the inspiration behind such influential figures as William Morris, Leo Tolstoy, Marcel Proust and Mahatma Gandhi, and his influence can be felt in many spheres of education today, for example in debates about the importance of creativity, about grammar schools and social mobility, about further education, the crucial social role of libraries, environmental issues, the role of crafts as well as academic learning, the importance of fantasy literature and the education of women. The present collection brings together ten international Ruskin scholars to explore what he actually said about education in his many- faceted writings. The varied approaches taken by the writers suggest that, as Francis O'Gorman writes in his Foreword, ‘There is no obligation for Ruskin's readers to agree with him’. The tones of the chapters shift between the celebratory and the astringent, as the writers assess from very different perspectives the nature of their subject's achievements. The essays are grouped for convenience under three headings: Section A: Changing the World; Section B: Libraries and the Arts; and Section C: Christianity and Apocalypse. These headings alone suggest the astonishing breadth of Ruskin's engagement with his own society and with the wider world. The book is dedicated to Dinah Birch, a much- loved Victorian specialist and authority on Ruskin, whose work has helped make John Ruskin a fresh and significant presence in the twenty- first century.

    The Cambridge Inaugural Address

    In 1858 a school of art was set up in Sidney Street, Cambridge. Its aim, according to a contemporary poster preserved in the Anglia Ruskin University Library, was ‘to teach the citizens of Cambridge to apply practical skills with a sense of beauty’, and John Ruskin, then in his late thirties, was invited to give the Inaugural Address on 29 October. Already renowned as a critic of art and architecture, author of The Seven Lamps of Architecture and The Stones of Venice, Ruskin had also, since October 1854, been teaching at the newly opened Working Men's College in London.

  • Chapter 9 - Ruskin's Many-Sided Soulfulness

  • from Section C - Christianity and Apocalypse
  • Edited by Valerie Purton
  • Book:
    John Ruskin and Nineteenth-Century Education
    Published by:
    Anthem Press
    Published online:
    25 July 2018
    Print publication:
    14 June 2018, pp 149-168

  • Summary

    Virginia Woolf really could not place Ruskin: she saw him as a sad figure who had undoubtedly been an impressive prose stylist but one whom advanced art critics and economists in her set had left far behind. Yet she had to acknowledge what she called ‘a force which is not to be suppressed by a whole pyramid of faults’, and goes on to say: ‘That is why perhaps people in his lifetime got into the habit of calling him Master. He was possessed by a spirit of enthusiasm which compels those who are without it either to attack or applaud; but beneath its influence they cannot remain merely passive.’ She describes the critical prestige accorded similarly magisterial figures who were set apart:

    There can be no doubt that they liked their great men to be isolated from the rest of the world […] Accordingly, the great man of that age had much temptation to withdraw to his pinnacle and become a prophet, denouncing a generation from whose normal activities he was secluded.

    Recognizing a deference to that high ground, involving almost the courting of his moral censure, she comments that Ruskin's contemporaries submitted to a ‘scolding’. Why did the civic fathers of such industrial powerhouses as Manchester, Bradford and Sheffield solicit his predictable scourging in public lectures? Woolf admits, ‘Even now the straight free lashing of Fors Clavigera seems to descend far too often for our comfort upon the skin of our own backs.’ Aspects of his evangelicalism appalled her, but a lingering assumption of some kind of authority, driven by belief and purpose, attached uneasily to his ambiguously marginalizing and empowering prophetic role.

    Perhaps it was necessary to identify authority figures against whom the Bloomsburyites’ rebellious modernity could define itself. But whatever sense of admiring compunction Woolf still harboured it was not disturbed by any conscious residue of shared Christian values. She had no more regard for Ruskin's religious imagination than had Lytton Strachey for Cardinal Manning's.

  • Chapter 2 - ‘Souls of Good Quality’: Ruskin, Tolstoy and Education

  • from Section A - Changing the World
  • Edited by Valerie Purton
  • Book:
    John Ruskin and Nineteenth-Century Education
    Published by:
    Anthem Press
    Published online:
    25 July 2018
    Print publication:
    14 June 2018, pp 31-48

  • Summary

    ‘Education’, Ruskin wrote, is ‘leading human souls to what is best, and making what is best out of them’. For Tolstoy, who keenly admired Ruskin, it was ‘the development of a human soul, and […] making out of the younger generation the best men possible’. The similarities are obvious. For both of these literary giants of the nineteenth century, education was about the individual, and about the inner life. They sought not to make ‘a carpenter an artist’ – nor a peasant a landowner – ‘but to [make] him happier as a carpenter’ or as a peasant: nurturing ‘Souls’, in other words, ‘of a good quality’. What ‘makes men happiest in themselves’, Ruskin wrote, ‘also makes them most serviceable to others’. Education is key to the life of any healthy community. It should provide the glue that holds society together.

    This chapter seeks to establish which of Ruskin's views on education Tolstoy most strongly endorsed. It explores the central elements of Tolstoy's educational research, ideals, classroom practices and publications in order to compare his approach to educational questions with Ruskin's. It is a study of affinity rather than influence, one that highlights significant reasons for Tolstoy's admiration of Ruskin and demonstrates how two uncompromisingly independent thinkers living in very different countries came to challenge educational orthodoxies in strikingly similar terms.

    Ruskin and Tolstoy rejected nearly all the commonly stated purposes and widely accepted methodologies of the mainstream educationists of their day, and disregarded traditional classroom practices, embracing instead innovative and experimental approaches to teaching in the schools they planned or taught at. It is remarkable the extent to which they ploughed their own furrows, approaching matters that interested them – including education, though not limited to that subject alone – unencumbered by received opinion or orthodoxies. Neither rejected – still less, accepted – convention for the sake of it. They were fundamentalists in the truest sense: they sought to drill down to the roots of everything they studied.

    Both Ruskin and Tolstoy devised plans for ideal schools in which competitive examinations would play no part. Both taught children – Tolstoy in his own schools on his estate at Yasnaya Polyana, and Ruskin at the girls’ school at Winnington Hall in Cheshire.

  • Chapter 4 - Mad Governess or Wise Counsellor? Sesame and Lilies Revisited

  • from Section A - Changing the World
  • Edited by Valerie Purton
  • Book:
    John Ruskin and Nineteenth-Century Education
    Published by:
    Anthem Press
    Published online:
    25 July 2018
    Print publication:
    14 June 2018, pp 69-80

  • Summary

    This chapter begins, unusually for me, with an autobiographical anecdote that concerns my old school. Some little while ago I was invited to the annual Founder's Day, and as the invitation was insistent, I duly presented at 10 a.m. in the school hall, to find a seat with my name on it. Much of the programme was familiar, a rather uncanny sensation after so many years, but then members of the upper sixth performed a drama written by themselves, which enacted episodes from the story of the Pre- Raphaelite Brotherhood, involving John Everett Millais, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Elizabeth Siddal, John Ruskin et al. I knew then why I had been invited. As an alumna who has written extensively about this group and their art and, being a connoisseur of dramatizations and retellings of the PRB's now near- legendary events, I enjoyed the somewhat tongue- in- cheek presentation by these stylish young women.

    More followed in the speech by the head teacher. I recalled that in my day the then head was a historian and annually pulled out of the past some aspect of the school's founding – by none other than the redoubtable Frances Mary Buss, this being North London Collegiate School, and she being immortalized alongside Dorothea Beale, the formidable founder of Cheltenham Ladies College:

  • Miss Buss and Miss Beale

  • Cupid's darts do not feel;

  • How different from us,

  • Miss Beale and Miss Buss.

    • On this particular Founder's Day at NLCS the historical theme was art, Frances Buss's father having been an unsuccessful artist who taught drawing at her new school, opened in 1850, and through whom she had artistic acquaintances. In the school archive is the record of a visit by Millais, who happened upon a student practising the harp; and also a letter to school governor Annie Ridley from John Ruskin, in which he wrote: ‘I am much interested in what you tell me of the school and of the feelings with which it has been founded’, adding, ‘I might perhaps be able to come and see what you are doing and to hear how I could promote it.’

  • Chapter 2 - Pre-service teacher identities and the social construction of childhood

  • from Part 1 - Applying Poststructuralism(s)
    • By Son Truong, Senior Lecturer in Health and Physical Education in the School of Education, and is a member of the Sustainability Research Team in the Centre for Educational Research
  • Edited in association with Tania Ferfolja, Western Sydney University, Criss Jones Diaz, Western Sydney University, Jacqueline Ullman, Western Sydney University
  • Book:
    Understanding Sociological Theory for Educational Practices
    Published online:
    27 March 2019
    Print publication:
    04 June 2018, pp 25-41

  • Summary

    AUSTRALIAN PROFESSIONAL STANDARDS FOR TEACHERS

    Standard 1: Know students and how they learn

    This chapter encourages readers to think more critically about child development, and the importance of questioning the universality of particular truth claims. Contextualist approaches help us to understand the relations between culture and human development and to consider alternative perspectives and question taken-for-granted assumptions about human development.

    Standard 4: Create and maintain supportive and safe learning environments

    This chapter highlights the importance of deconstructing dominant images of childhood to create inclusive learning environments in diverse educational settings. In particular, inclusive play practices begin with the recognition that children's play is a culturally structured activity.

    I guess just always being ready to question yourself. Like why things are done the way they are and not making assumptions of where those actions or behaviours are coming from. And constantly being self-aware of where your values and beliefs are coming from versus theirs, I think is a major part of working in a cross-cultural experience. Yeah, just trying your best to understand the context and the situation that the children and the community members are living in so that what you do is relevant for their lives.

    (Sam, undergraduate student, reflecting on what it means to teach in a cross-cultural context)

    Introduction

    In the contemporary global context of social, cultural, technological, political and economic integration, schools have become increasingly complex and diverse settings. Many Western countries, including Australia, have continued to see an increase of new immigrants, particularly from non-European-heritage countries (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development [OECD], 2013). Within these culturally diverse societies, schools, and in particular teachers, are tasked with the challenge of not only fostering an environment of respect for diversity, but also nurturing a sense of global citizenship through their teaching. However, given these responsibilities, it is essential to consider how we as educators develop or question our own perspectives and how this informs our approach to teaching children in culturally diverse educational settings. Fundamental to this process is a critical awareness of our own constructions of childhood and culture.

    This chapter examines the experiences of a small group of undergraduate students from a Canadian university during an overseas cross-cultural service-learning placement in Thailand in relation to the ways in which the experience became a catalyst towards a more emergent understanding of childhood and culture.

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