The Cultural, Didactic, and Physical Spaces of Mission Schools in the 19th Century

Nineteenth century Protestant Mission schools were dynamic spaces, constantly reacting and adapting to hierarchic and hegemonic demands, whether of political, religious or societal nature. They were also ideological spaces, which through their form and function, articulated notions of the ‘proper’ place of non-Europeans in colonial society. This article examines the interconnected cultural, didactic and physical ‘spaces’ of mission schools in which a variety of competing ideologies and expectations were negotiated. The general conclusions demonstrate both the uniformity of missionary spaces, and simultaneously reveal spaces where, and times when, these generalities became disrupted.Nineteenth century Protestant Mission schools were dynamic spaces, constantly reacting and adapting to hierarchic and hegemonic demands, whether of political, religious or societal nature. They were also ideological spaces, which through their form and function, articulated notions of the ‘proper’ place of non-Europeans in colonial society. This article examines the interconnected cultural, didactic and physical ‘spaces’ of mission schools in which a variety of competing ideologies and expectations were negotiated. The general conclusions demonstrate both the uniformity of missionary spaces, and simultaneously reveal spaces where, and times when, these generalities became disrupted

Who’s teaching science: meeting the demand for qualified science teachers in Australian secondary schools

Foreword Call to Action The data presented in this report highlight a number of serious problems that will inhibit the growth of Australia, both economically and culturally. It is imperative that all governments and education authorities implement rigorous workplace planning for teaching of science in schools as a matter of urgency, in order to remedy the current situation and prevent its reoccurrence. Such planning should be focused at the discipline level and not simply at the generic area of “science”. It must involve upgrading the discipline background of science teachers along with their pedagogical skills. It should be across sectors and states. Background: Previous commissioned surveys by the Australian Council of Deans of Science (ACDS) reported a continuing decline in enrolments in the enabling sciences and mathematics at the secondary and tertiary levels of education. Furthermore, it is recognised that very few science graduates are selecting a teaching career. The Council feared that the nation was entering a cycle with the only possible outcome being a dearth of graduates with qualifications in the enabling sciences and mathematics. Certainly there would be insufficient graduates skilled in science to support the development of a knowledgebased economy. Australia suffers from an absence of comprehensive data on the age profile of secondary school science teachers, their qualifications in the discipline areas they are required to teach and their views regarding the teaching profession. This lack of information hampered the review by Professor Kwong Lee Dow titled Australia’s Teachers: Australia’s Future which looked at, among other things, future workplace needs. The ACDS strongly believes that the future of science is too important for this paucity of data to continue. Hence it commissioned this report. Anecdotal evidence abounds concerning the number of teachers who are unqualified to teach science in particular discipline areas, but are required to do so for various reasons. The ACDS recognizes the enormous contribution of science and mathematics teachers in our schools – both at primary and secondary level. The ACDS sees this report as a basis for providing them with further support. The report should also further link science as taught at university with science as taught in the school sector

GloBil: Global Bible. British and German Bible Societies Translating Colonialism. 1800-1914

The Global Bible Project (GloBil) is a three year research project that aims to critically investigate British and German contribution to translating Christian scripture into languages of colonised people

Moravian Mission Education in the Nineteenth Century: Global Patterns and Local Manifestations at New Fairfield, Upper Canada

The renewed Moravian Church has placed great emphasis upon education, both for members of European background as well as members of the global Moravian mission. However, most of the research that has been undertaken on Moravian education has tended to focus upon eighteenth-century Euro-education at the expense of the nineteenth century as well as the mission field. This paper provides an overview of nineteenth century missionary education and charts some similarities and differences both within the mission field and also between these fields and European situations. It then examines the re-establishment of the New Fairfield mission school in Canada under the guidance of Adolf Hartmann. Schooling on the New Fairfield reserve was a site of tension between missionaries, mission inhabitants, governmental agents and other religious denominations. The Lenape amongst whom the Moravians worked were not passive recipients of missionary education, rather they took an active role in providing an alternative to the Moravian mission school, much to the chagrin of the missionaries involved. The re-establishment of a mission school was therefore a difficult task. The paper concludes that although education was a universally important aspect of the Moravian Church, the provision of education was not a simple process, rather it was contingent upon numerous factors that missionaries in the field were not always able to control

Collecting cultures for God: German Moravian missionaries and the British colony of Victoria, Australia, 1848-1908

© 2007 Dr. Felicity Ann JenszThe thesis focuses on six decades of German Moravian involvement in the British colony of Victoria, Australia, from the Moravian Church’s decision to send missionaries to the colony (then the Port Phillip District of New South Wales) in 1848, to the closure of the last Moravian mission in Victoria in 1908. The missionaries of the Moravian Church, which was known as the Brüdergemeine or Brüder-Unität in German, were heirs to a particular spiritual and cultural heritage, and brought to the colony a long and distinctive experience of evangelical missions. Their outreach was grounded in an emphasis on a lifelong commitment to conversion, and a special concern to bring Protestant Christianity and western ways of living and relating to peoples who appeared specially resistant to other denominational mission practices. Moravians prioritised humble living alongside their converts and sustained abroad as at home a distinct separation of church and state. They began their first mission station in Australia at Lake Boga in the north-west of Victoria with high hopes of sustaining their customary faith practices, and continued to work in distinctive ways in their expanding labours in the south-east of the colony. The Moravians were, however, ‘strangers in a strange land’, and it would prove to be not only their own pragmatic response to indigenous Victorians that shaped the fortunes of their mission. The Germans shaped their mission methods and goals to the demands of the governing authorities – not simply of distant British colonial officials, but, as the British swiftly granted a degree of self-government to the colonists, increasingly to a series of colonists’ regimes with their particular policies on the management of indigenous survivors. The mission objectives of German Moravians coincided in many ways with those of many humanitarian colonizers. They believed like other humanitarians that Aborigines were equal in the eyes of God, and that Christianity offered Aborigines the one true path to assuming their full humanity. Not only did the wider colonial community, however, sustain other narratives about Aborigines that dismayed the Germans, but colonial governments had other concerns – above all, saving money through swift assimilation of Aborigines into white society. Over a sixty-year period the Moravians found themselves transformed from evangelisers of indigenous people to keepers of institutions for a state government with little desire to continue funding indigenous affairs. Aborigines who did not leave the stations to make a life elsewhere found themselves subjected to mission surveillance and compulsion – a far cry from the original goals, and the continuing practices elsewhere in the world, of the respected Moravian Church

Colonial Agents:German Moravian Missionaries in the English-Speaking World

This article traces relationships between German-speaking missionaries and politics in the English-speaking world of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It particularly examines the relationship between Moravian missionaries and the colonial government in Victoria, Australia demonstrating how politics impinged upon missionary work

The Cultural, Didactic, and Physical Spaces of Mission Schools in the Nineteenth Century

Nineteenth century Protestant Mission schools were dynamic spaces, constantly reacting and adapting to hierarchic and hegemonic demands, whether of political, religious or societal nature. They were also ideological spaces, which through their form and function, articulated notions of the ‘proper’ place of non-Europeans in colonial society. This article examines the interconnected cultural, didactic and physical ‘spaces’ of mission schools in which a variety of competing ideologies and expectations were negotiated. The general conclusions demonstrate both the uniformity of missionary spaces, and simultaneously reveal spaces where, and times when, these generalities became disrupted