Children's school reading and curriculum innovation at the edge of Empire

Abstract

Purpose – Using the example of a “school paper” titled The Children's Hour, developed in South Australia in the late nineteenth century, the purpose of this paper is to show the way that the colonial margins could act as sites of innovation in curriculum and pedagogy and not just as importers of ideas from the imperial centre. Design/methodology/approach – The analysis on which the examination of The Children's Hour is based is a combination of Foucaultian discourse analysis and a genealogical approach to curriculum history which tracks different formations of techniques and programmes for shaping the human subject. Findings – The Children's Hour (1889-1963), featured the innovative use of literature and other genres, and provided new ways to shape the identities of school students and teachers. School papers were strongly implicated in the discursive construction of both a global/imperial and local/Australian identities and represent an informative case of the ways in which teaching and learning practices have been highly mobile in the field of reading. Originality/value – This research shows that the humble school reading text is an overlooked site for examining processes of the constitution of national identity and the citizen subject. It is also a reminder of the significance of communications technologies in the formation of, and struggles over, national/imperial imaginaries and that the school is an important site for studying these processes.