Biography:

Ksenia Podvoiskaia is a PhD candidate in History at UChicago. She is a Canadian transplant and enjoys knitting, long walks to the Point, and hanging out with her cat, Pumpkin. Before returning to academia to study the history of teaching, she attended teacher's college at Queen's University in Kingston Ontario.  

Project Title: Inventing the Modern Schoolteacher: Teacher Training in the Early Nineteenth Century British Empire

Abstract:

Why did the British state assume responsibility for teacher training in Victorian Britain? My research examines nascent state interest in education policy in the first half of the 19th century and the emergence of the professionalized, modern schoolteacher. The shift from disparate and independent village schoolmasters to teaching networks with centralized training institutions has been neglected in historical scholarship. This is partly because it began a half-century before Britain’s major education act of 1870, and partly because reform was led initially by religiously motivated organizations rather than the state. I study the intellectual and institutional histories of these reforms, which focused on teachers as capable of transforming their students whether at home or abroad into ideal imperial subjects. Training colleges made teachers the first experiments in this pedagogical transformation. Moving between Ireland, the West Indies, and England, teacher training offers a window into the relationship between non-state actors, marginalized imperial populations, and eventually, the state. Reform and state involvement was mediated by political imperial objectives and differentiated along racial, class, and religious lines. The emergence of modern teaching in Britain occurred on a global scale, developing in colonial locales as much as in England itself. My archival research is grounded in the records of reformers and institutions mainly in Belfast, Dublin, London, and Edinburgh. Though they are centuries old debates, furor over what teachers are allowed to say in their classrooms, how public education shapes its young citizens, and who’s responsibility it is to impart education remain urgent concerns today.