Search results

The purpose of this paper is to provide language and meaning to open up silence around traumatic boarding school memories through the symbolic aura (Nora 1989) surrounding key memory objects. The secondary aim is to illustrate to historians the importance of paying attention to interviewees’ discussion of material objects as clues to uncovering deeper, unexplored memories.

The approach draws on Vamik Volkan’s (2006) understanding of “linking objects” – significant objects preserved or created by traumatised people. Traumatic emotions become linked with loss and grief associated with the object, turning it into a tightly packed symbol whose significance is “bound up in the conscious and unconscious nuances of the relationship that preceded the loss” (Volkan, 2006, p. 255). The experiences of the two authors are examined as exemplars in this process.

The exemplars illustrate how complicated and long term the process of remembering and understanding is for those who experience boarding school trauma and the power of “linking objects” to open up memory surrounding it. The case studies also alert educational historians to how emotionally fraught revealing what happened can be and how long it may take to confront the events.

Linking objects have not previously been used in relationship to surfacing boarding school trauma. The paper is also unique in offering deep analysis of boarding school trauma undertaken by skilled educational researchers who incorporate reflections from their own experience informed by broad theory and pertinent psychological research.

It has been at least twenty years since I was first alerted to the notion that my interest in a research topic arises from my unconscious. More recently, feminist theorists have developed the insight by arguing that integration of experience is helpful in defining research questions, as a source of data, to test findings and, in the words of Jean Bethke Elshtain, in assisting them to be less removed from the ‘wellsprings’ of their own ‘thought and action’. My aim in this article is to reconnect my experience with constructions of teachers in Australian children’s literature and to explore ways in which they are imagined in the literature. In my initial foray into this topic, I used Maurice Saxby’s historical review of Australian children’s literature as a guide for data gathering. This linear, chronological approach, while probably a helpful place to start, is not one I can sustain with any passion. In this article, I am returning to my experience to find a starting point, acknowledging that history is a ‘process of intellectual production as well as discovery’

Researchers of the history of women teachers have included fiction, as well as memoirs and history, as an important part of that testimony. The aim of this article is to examine the novel, Anne of Avonlea (1925) by Lucy Maude Montgomery as both a source of information about the working life of a woman teacher and, due to the immense popularity of the book, as a shaper of how women understand and enact teaching. Anne is a young teacher in her first posting consisting of a rural Canadian one‐ teacher school. She struggles to resist using corporal punishment in favour of winning her students respect, stimulating their minds and finding a ‘genius’. However, the local community, fellow teachers and her students have different notions of how teachers should behave. Her beliefs are further undermined when in a fit of anger she succumbs to beating one her students. Her reflections on what drove her actions are realistic and contain warnings for contemporary teachers to appreciate the often fragile hold they have on their espoused educational philosophy. Another danger revealed is the unconscious leaking of the shadow side of the psyche in the necessary close but dangerous relationships between students and teacher thereby providing a complex view of what motivates young women to teach and how they approach their work.

Through a case study of the decision making that led to the writer becoming a teacher educator, the purpose of this paper is to contribute to historiography by exploring the complex process of surfacing and interpreting memory.

The methodology draws on the concepts of autobiographical memory and reflexivity, together with documentary and archival sources including newspapers and secondary sources.

The outcome reveals that the process of memory is complex. It illustrates that allowing the participant a wide scope to work with pivotal memories, which may include those referring to material objects, may lead to unexpected and compelling explanations that have the power to change thinking in regards to related aspects of educational history. In this particular case, the findings reveal the long-term impact of boarding school experience.

The paper expands the way in which educational historians may think about undertaking interviews by illustrating the need for investment of time and close attention to all memories, some of which may at first seem to be irrelevant. Additionally, while a significant amount of research had been published on the long-term impact of boarding school experience on students in the UK, a little critical historical work has been undertaken in regards to the Australian experience – this paper offers a unique contribution to the undertaking of that project.

Charlotte Brontë integrated her own and her sisters' traumatic boarding school experiences into her novel, Jane Eyre (1847) as a way of expressing her anger through autobiographical fiction. The aim is to link contemporary research into boarding school trauma to the relevant events, thereby identifying what she wrote as a testimony contributing to the long history of the problematic nature of boarding schools.

Autobiographical fiction is discussed as a form of testimony, placing Jane Eyre in that category. Recent research into the traumatic experiences of those whose parents chose to send them to boarding school is presented, leading to an argument that educational historians need to analyse experience rather than limiting their work to structure and planning. The traumatic events the Brontë sisters experienced at the Clergy Daughters' School are outlined as the basis for what is included in Jane Eyre at the fictional Lowood School. Specific traumatic events in the novel are then identified and contemporary research into boarding school trauma applied.

The findings reveal Charlotte's remarkable insight into the psychological impact on children being sent away to board at a time when understandings about trauma and boarding school trauma did not exist. An outcome of the analysis is that it places the novel within the field of the history of education as a testimony of boarding school life.

This is the first application of boarding school trauma research to the novel.

The articles published in this special edition were selected from papers offered by 82 participants at the second joint conference of the History of Education Society (UK) and the Australia and New Zealand History of Education Society. This conference was held at the University of Sydney from 8‐11 December 2008. The topic was Work! Work! Work!: Work and the History of Education! and presenters were invited to submit papers for publication on one of eight themes including: the work and play of the child; vocational education and preparing the young for work; the work and careers of teachers and administrators; and the work of teaching the young across colonial and national boundaries. These themes were built upon by two general symposia entitled: ‘A picture and a 1000 words’ where presenters, using the immediacy of the single image, offered briefer narratives to construct the notion of ‘work’ as a snapshot of different educational pasts. As such, the conference aim was to embrace many genres of history, to allow access for new scholars, whilst established writers could offer pathways for future individual and collaborative scholarship.