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The purpose of this paper is to explore representations of Aboriginal people, in particular children, in the Victorian government’s school reader The School Paper, from the end of the Second World War until its publication ceased in 1968. The author interrogates these representations within the framework of pedagogies of citizenship training and the development of national identity, to reveal the role Aboriginal people and their culture were accorded within the “imagined community” of Australian nationhood and its heritage and history.

The paper draws on the rich material available in the Victorian Department of Education’s school reader, The School Paper, from 1946 to 1968 (when the publication ceased), and on the Department’s annual reports. These are read within the context of scholarship on race, education and citizenship formation in the post-war years.

State government policies of assimilation following the Second World War tied in with pedagogies and curricula regarding citizenship and belonging, which became a key focus of education departments following the Second World War. The informal pedagogies of The School Paper’s representations of Aboriginal children and their families, the author argues, excluded Aboriginal communities from understandings of Australian nationhood, and from conceptions of the ideal Australian citizen-in-formation. Instead, representations of Aboriginal people relegated them to the outdoors in ways that racialised Australian spaces: Aboriginal cultures are portrayed as historical yet timeless, linked with the natural/native rather than civic/political environment.

This paper builds on scholarship on the relationship between education, reading pedagogies and citizenship formation in Australia in the post-war years to develop our knowledge of how conceptions of the ideal Australian citizen of the future – that is, Australian students – were inherently racialised. It makes a new contribution to scholarship on the assimilation project in Australia, through revealing the relationship between government policies towards Aboriginal people and the racial and cultural qualities being taught in Australian schools.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the ways in which the mobility of indigenous people in Victoria during the 1960s enabled them to resist the policy of assimilation as evident in the structures of schooling. It argues that the ideology of assimilation was pervasive in the Education Department’s approach to Aboriginal education and inherent in the curriculum it produced for use in state schools. This is central to the construction of the state of Victoria as being devoid of Aboriginal people, which contributes to a particularly Victorian perspective of Australia’s national identity in relation to indigenous people and culture.

This paper utilises the state school records of the Victorian Department of Education, as well as the curriculum documentation and resources the department produced. It also examines the records of the Aborigines Welfare Board.

The Victorian Education Department’s curriculum constructed a narrative of learning and schools which denied the presence of Aboriginal children in classrooms, and in the state of Victoria itself. These representations reflect the Department and the Victorian Government’s determination to deny the presence of Aboriginal children, a view more salient in Victoria than elsewhere in the nation due to the particularities of how Aboriginality was understood. Yet the mobility of Aboriginal students – illustrated in this paper through a case study – challenged both the representations of Aboriginal Victorians, and the school system itself.

This paper is inspired by the growing scholarship on Indigenous mobility in settler-colonial studies and offers a new perspective on assimilation in Victoria. It interrogates how curriculum intersected with the position of Aboriginal students in Victorian state schools, and how their position – which was often highly mobile – was influenced by the practices of assimilation, and by Aboriginal resistance and responses to assimilationist practices in their lives. This paper contributes to histories of assimilation, Aboriginal history and education in Victoria.

The purpose of this paper is to canvass debates arising from encounters between architectural and educational history and to introduce a themed section of four papers exploring aspects of the history of school design and the spatial arrangements of Australian schooling across the twentieth century.

This is an interpretive introductory essay that characterizes trends in historical and sociological studies of school space and materialities, and synthesizes the arguments and contributions of the four companion papers.

A case is made for greater exchange among educational, architectural and social historians and key insights and findings from the four papers concerning school space, design and educational ideas are summarized. Themes of community, citizenship and progressive education are highlighted.

The value of the paper lies in introducing the context and scholarly debates framing a collection of four papers that seek to open up new avenues for investigating the history of modern schooling through studying intersections between school space and design and educational purposes and aspiration.

The purpose of this paper is to explore philosophies of progressive education circulating in Australia in the period immediately following the expansion of secondary schools in the 1960s. It examines the rise of the alternative and community school movement of the 1970s, focusing on initiatives within the Victorian government school sector. It aims to better understand the realisation of progressive education in the design and spatial arrangements of schools, with specific reference to the re-making of school and community relations and new norms of the student-subject of alternative schooling.

It combines historical analysis of educational ideas and reforms, focusing largely on the ideas of practitioners and networks of educators, and is guided by an interest in the importance of school space and place in mediating educational change and aspirations. It draws on published writings and reports from teachers and commentators in the 1970s, publications from the Victorian Department of Education, media discussions, internal and published documentation on specific schools and oral history interviews with former teachers and principals who worked at alternative schools.

It shows the different realisation of radical aims in the set up of two schools, against a backdrop of wider innovations in state education, looking specifically at the imagined effects of re-arranging the physical and symbolic space of schooling.

Its value lies in offering the beginnings of a history of 1970s educational progressivism. It brings forward a focus on the spatial dimensions of radical schooling, and moves from characterisation of a mood of change to illuminate the complexities of these ideas in the contrasting ambitions and design of two signature community schools.

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.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the professional context of the educator and architects who designed and conceived Woodleigh School in Baxter, Victoria, Australia (1974-1979) and to identify common design threads in a series of schools designed by Daryl Jackson and Evan Walker in the 1970s.

The research was derived from academic and professional publications, film footage, interviews, archival searches and site visits. Standard analytical methods in architectural research are employed, including formal, planning and morphological analysis, to read building designs for meaning and intent. Books, people and buildings were examined to piece together the design “biography” of Woodleigh School, the identification of which forms the basis of the paper's argument.

Themes of loose fit, indeterminate planning, coupled with concepts of classroom as house, and school as town, and engagement with a landscape environment are drawn together under principal Michael Norman's favoured phrase that adolescents might experience “a slice of life”, preparing them for broader engagement with a world and a community outside school. The themes reflect changing aspirations for teenage education in the 1970s, indicating a free and experimental approach to the design of the school environment.

The paper considers, for the first time, the interconnected role of educator and architect as key protagonists in envisioning connections between space and pedagogy in the 1970s alternative school.