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This paper focuses on the donation in 1888 of a Sèvres Vase to the Education Department of Victoria after the International Exhibition in Melbourne. Using the vase as its focus the paper reflects on what this donation may be able to tell us about the impact, primarily on education, of a series of International Exhibitions held both in Australia and internationally between 1851 and 1900. The life of the Sèvres vase highlights the potential of the Exhibitions for the exchange of ideas internationally, the influence of the International Exhibition movement on education and the links between a 19th-century gift and the teaching of Art in 1930s Melbourne.

The paper examines one object in relation to education in its wider historical context through a reading of the archival records relating to the Melbourne Teacher’s Training College and Melbourne High School.

The influence of the educational exhibits of the 1888 Centennial International Exhibition held in Melbourne are shown to have had an impact on the design of the Melbourne Teachers Training College.

This paper provides a new and original perspective on the Melbourne Teachers Training College and its foundation through its library and museum collections.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the development of vocational education for girls, focusing on how curriculum and pedagogy developed to accommodate changing expectations of the role of women in the workplace and the home in mid-twentieth century Australia. As well as describing how pedagogical changes were implemented through curriculum, it examines the way a modern approach to girls’ education was reflected in the built environment of the school site and through its interactions with its changing community.

The paper takes a case study approach, focusing on the example of the J.H. Boyd Domestic College which functioned as a single-sex school for girls from 1932 until its closure in 1985. Oral history testimony, private archives, photographs and government school records provide the material from which an understanding of the school is reconstructed.

This detailed examination of the history of J.H. Boyd Domestic College highlights the highly integrated nature of the school's environment with the surrounding community, which strengthened links between the girls and their community. It also demonstrates how important the school's buildings and facilities were to contemporary ideas about the teaching of girls in a vocational setting.

This is the first history of J.H. Boyd Domestic College to examine the intersections of gendered, classed ideas about pedagogy with ideas about the appropriate built environment for the teaching of domestic science. The contextualized approach sheds new light on domestic science education in Victoria and the unusually high quality of the learning spaces available for girls’ education.

In 1870, after a decade of vigorous public debate over the economic importance of technical and scientific learning for the colony’s development, the Industrial and Technological Museum was established in the city of Melbourne ‘as a means of public instruction’ for the people of Victoria. Founded in February 1870 and officially opened on 8 September 1870, the new public museum occupied the building erected at the rear of the Public Library for the 1866 International Exhibition. The Industrial and Technological Museum, later the Science Museum and now part of Museum Victoria, was directed by J. Cosmo Newbery and managed by a sectional committee of the Public Library, Museums, and National Gallery of Victoria Trust, which Parliament had incorporated and enlarged in December 1869.

The purpose of this paper is to establish the image and associated impression of atmosphere created by independent theatres at two fringe festivals namely, Edinburgh Fringe Festival and Melbourne Festival Fringe.

The paper contains a content analysis of promotional materials produced by the independent theatres for their involvement in their respective fringe festival.

The atmosphere created is of fringe festivals replete with serious experimental theatrical productions, with independent theatres being the home of alternative ideas and the performers being skilled in the production of the art form.

The atmosphere created by the independent theatres is similar to that projected by the fringe festival overall.

The paper highlights the importance of the fringe festival organisers establishing a strong working relationship with the managers of independent theatres to ensure the most appropriate promotional material is used to attract the desired target audience to the fringe festival.

This paper is of value as most festival‐related literature provides only a passing mention to atmosphere whereas this paper investigates atmosphere in more depth. The paper adds to the limited research on fringe festivals.

From the mid‐nineteenth to the early twentieth century universities and colleges were founded throughout Australia and New Zealand in the context of the expanding British Empire. This article provides an analytical framework to understand the engagement between changing ideas of higher education at the centre of Empire and within the settler societies in the Antipodes. Imperial influences remained significant, but so was locality in association with the role of the emerging state, while the idea of the public purpose of higher education helped to widen social access forming and sustaining the basis of middle class professions.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the design of state school buildings in Australia from the 1880s to the 1980s to establish common threads or similar concerns evident in their architecture at a national level.

The researcher compiled a significant data set of hundreds of state schools, derived from government, professional and other publications, archival searches and site visits. Standard analytical methods in architectural research are employed, including stylistic and morphological analysis, to read the designs for meaning and intent.

The data set was interrogated to draw out major themes in school design, the identification of which form the basis of the paper's argument. Four major themes, identifiable at a national level, are identified: school as house; school as civic; school as factory; and school as town. Each theme reflects a different chronological period, being approximately 1900-1920, 1920-1940, 1940-1960 and 1960-1980. The themes reflect the changing representation of aspiration for the school child and their engagement with wider society through the architecture of the school.

The paper considers, for the first time, the concerns of educational architecture over time in Australia on a consciously national, rather than state, level.

This chapter reports research conducted in Melbourne, Australia that is focused on the use of information and communication technologies (ICTs) in schools and families. The emphasis is on the relationship between technology, learning, culture and (dis)advantage. It is generally agreed that ICTs are associated with major social, cultural, pedagogical and lifestyle changes, although the nature of those changes is subject to conflicting norms and interpretations. In this chapter we adopt a critical, multi-disciplined, relational perspective in order to examine the influence of ICTs, in schools and homes, on a sample of students and their families.

To most minds libraries exist at the periphery of debates over education and educational reform. However, the purpose of this paper is to demonstrate how, in 1910, the Melbourne Public Library (now the State Library of Victoria) was central, rather than peripheral, to a conflict which focussed on the role of the library in education and how the library and its collection could best be organised to meet this purpose. It will be argued that libraries and the way they are organised act as indices of the dominant views about education and can be seen as social and educational artefacts. As artefacts they encapsulate community beliefs about how learning could best occur at a given time and what knowledge was esteemed, made available and to whom.

To illustrate this point of view and illuminate the broader issues, this paper will use a particular set of events and a particular group of protagonists in Australian history as a case study.

This case study illuminates conflicting ideas about the place of libraries and the organisation of their collections in early twentieth‐century society and demonstrates how these ideas continued to have an impact on the place of libraries in educational reform agendas in Australia in the following decades.

The argument reported as “the disaffection in the library” was both philosophical and practical and illuminated ongoing debates surrounding the place of the library in education. The outcome influenced the shape and place of libraries in Australia and demonstrates broader concerns at work in Federation Australia.

The paper casts a new light on the relationship between libraries and education and the place of libraries in the educational process. The network of influence in Federation Australia and the impact of this on the development of institutions and professions in Australia is also examined.

It has often been said that a great part of the strength of Aslib lies in the fact that it brings together those whose experience has been gained in many widely differing fields but who have a common interest in the means by which information may be collected and disseminated to the greatest advantage. Lists of its members have, therefore, a more than ordinary value since they present, in miniature, a cross‐section of institutions and individuals who share this special interest.