Faculty of Education - Theses
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ItemImposed change and the transmutation of established career paradigms( 1994)Sikes (1985) suggests that although fundamental career patterns for teachers may be recognised, external influences more often imposed changes which disrupted womens' careers as teachers. Few studies have, however, been attempted in Australia. This study examines the impact of a particular imposed change on a specific group of senior women teachers and their resultant careers within/out the school. It looks specifically at the breaking of an established culture in a Catholic girls' school with the amalgamation of a neighbouring Catholic boys' school. The impact on the careers and lives of a group of senior female staff members from the former girls' school are examined. These teachers' stories were told to the author, who was also a colleague, in a series of confidential interviews and discussions. The stories raise important theoretical issues about the nature of womens' careers in teaching, but also critical questions about the rationality of models of institutional reconstruction that deny or ignore the unique qualities of individuals or groups of individuals, networks and connections that characterize educational life in that school.
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ItemThe story of Ellen O'Callaghan: an unmarried female, Irish Catholic teacher in the Victorian Education Department 1873-1904( 1990)This is a study of a randomly-selected, unmarried female teacher, Ellen O'Callaghan, who was recruited into the newly created Department of Education to realise the Victorian government's objective of mass elementary schooling. It traces her life as she worked successfully through an arduous pupil-teacher apprenticeship, became a teacher intent on performing her duties efficiently, improving her qualifications with further study and aspiring to senior teaching positions. The thesis examines the barriers she encountered to promotion and equitable remuneration on account of her gender. A key conclusion is that the progressive institutionalisation of schooling meant female teachers as a group were targeted, manipulated and exploited as the Department established greater control over the conditions of their employment.
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ItemThe life and veterinary contribution of Dr. Harold E. Albiston( 1992)This thesis examines the life and veterinary contribution of Dr Harold E. Albiston. Through his professional life can be traced the history of veterinary science in Victoria, from the horse doctor days of pre World War I to the re-establishment of the University of Melbourne Veterinary School in September 1962. Special attention is paid to the late 1920s which saw veterinary teaching cease at the end of 1927 and the University of Melbourne Veterinary School officially close in June 1928. Albiston, who was on the staff of the Veterinary School, witnessed this critical time in Victorian veterinary history. During the world-wide veterinary recession from 1920 to 1935, due to the declining influence of the horse, Albiston was one of the first veterinarians to appreciate that a new direction was necessary for the profession. While he was assistant-director, he upgraded the facilities of the Veterinary School, and encouraged research and diagnostic work on farm animals. As the day of the horse passed Albiston had built up the Veterinary School or the Veterinary Research Institute (VRI) as it became known in 1931, into an organisation of status serving the emerging livestock industries. The VRI was a unique establishment since it functioned as a normal university department, under the aegis of the University of Melbourne, yet performed diagnostic and research work for the Department of Agriculture. The VRI became an enlightened veterinary centre - a meeting place where veterinarians would visit, browse in the library and discuss problems with Harold Albiston or the VRI senior staff. It also became the centre of post graduate veterinary education in Victoria since all conferences, meetings and seminars were held there and for twenty-three years it was the home of the Australian Veterinary Journal (AVJ). The thesis also examines Albiston's research and diagnostic achievements before he was engulfed by administrative responsibilities. In 1927 he helped to solve black disease, or infectious necrotic hepatitis, which was costing the sheep industry millions of pounds. He also played a major role in diagnosing and eradicating the first Newcastle disease outbreak in Australia in 1930. In 1933 he was credited with giving the first post-graduate veterinary course in Australia when he gave a series of poultry lectures at the VRI. So successful was this venture that he gave a similar course on cattle diseases the following year. Harold Albiston has been the longest serving member of the faculty of veterinary science, the longest serving editor of the AVJ and the longest serving member of both the Veterinary and Zoological Boards of Victoria. His contribution came from his humanity and a dogged determination, at board, faculty or committee level to make the most effective use of his talents - his warmth, his lack of pomposity, his consultative ability and his capacity for hard work. In 1959 Harold Albiston was awarded the Gilruth Prize for meritorious service to veterinary science. In 1963 he was awarded the honour of Commander of the British Empire.
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ItemJohn Lawrence Tierney: his contribution to education in Australia( 1985)When John Lawrence Tierney retired from the service of the New South Wales Department of Education in June 1952, few outside his immediate circle knew his name. His forty-odd years of teaching had brought him none of the rewards which come to the most successful of that profession. He had, however, made a noteworthy contribution. For John Tierney was also "Brian James", whose short stories, marked by comic invention and acute observation (especially of idiosyncratic behaviour), had been widely acclaimed since first they began to appear in the Bulletin ten years earlier. In his fifties before he began to take his writing seriously, his earliest themes were of the land. Born and raised on a farm, he had always hankered after a return to the life he knew before teaching. From the very beginning his short stories were compared with those of Henry Lawson, and some eminent critics thought Tierney's surpassed them. A year before his retirement, his first novel, The Advancement of Spencer Button, was published. Two features made it remarkable: its construction (Norman Lindsay referred to it as "one of the few major novels in the country"), and its themes. It was the first Australian novel to take schoolteaching as its subject. Not only was it a full account of the growth and development of public education in New South Wales, from the Public Instruction Act of 1880 until the Second World War, but also it contained much detail on daily life in our schools. Moreover, it was unique in its presentation of the account from the teacher's point of view rather than from the student's. It explained, for the first time, the frustrations and tensions of "the system" of education that had evolved. It was a comic novel, but its purpose was serious. For Tierney, education was central to the health of society, and it was important that it should be properly examined and then made well. Most of his writing after this novel dealt with similar issues. Unfortunately, none of it ever reached its heights. His retirement did not bring him the peace and leisure he had hoped for. He found that much of the desire to write had evaporated. Other circumstances, too, had changed. Those who had advised and encouraged him earlier were less able to do so. The last ten years of his life produced little. In all, the output during his writing career had been comparatively meagre. For this and similar reasons, an accurate assessment of his contribution is not easy - and, in fact, will not be possible until history makes its final judgement on the literary merits of his writing. In the meantime, there are two aspects of his contribution which even the passing of time cannot deny: four decades of dedicated service to the youth of the nation, and a unique novel. These make him worthy of special attention.
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ItemSchool teacher in Victoria: the biography of Arthur John Hicks( 1981)Arthur John Hicks was born in 1893 and died in 1970. He was a full-time teacher in the service of the Education Department of Victoria for fifty years, from 1908 until 1958. He started his service as a Junior Teacher, but by 1958 had been training student teachers himself for a number of years. In the course of his fifty years' teaching, Arthur Hicks developed a positive response to the major events of the time, and to the ideas of the educational reformers. Both he and his wife became deeply involved in the activities of the rural communities in which they lived. Such a relationship was more difficult to achieve in the suburbs of Melbourne and Geelong. In the course of his career in country schools Hicks also attempted to increase community awareness of Victoria's education system. He also proved, as early as the 1920's, that it was possible to implement the new "child-centred activity" methods in rural schools. The school at which he had most success in this regard was Bright Higher Elementary School. It is reasonable to suggest that Arthur Hicks, despite the outbreak of the Second World War, never lost his optimistic belief that education could do much to improve human nature. It is equally reasonable to suggest that that optimism was under pressure by the mid-50's, when, for the first time, he was administering a large inner-city school, which had specific problems because of its migrant intake. While Hicks. was ageing, Australian society was undergoing quite radical change. Nevertheless, he had reached the top of his profession, whereas fifty years before he had been labelled as not showing "much promise". Although he was a very ordinary person in many ways, his life demonstrates what can be achieved through commitment to a task.