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Tanya Fitzgerald is a professor of Educational Leadership and Management at La Trobe University (Australia). She is the author of numerous books and articles on the history of women's education, and contemporary perspectives on leadership and policy in higher education, including Outsiders or Equals? A History of Women Professors at the University of New Zealand 1911–1961 (2009) and Travelling Towards a Mirage: Gender, Policy and Leadership in Higher Education (2010, with Jane Wilkinson). Her forthcoming book, Historical Portraits of Women Home Scientists: The University of New Zealand 1907–1947 (with Jenny Collins) will be published by Cambria Press. Tanya's current research projects include a study of women leaders in higher education and a historical study of women's professional organisations. She is the editor of History of Education Review and co-editor of the Journal of Educational Administration and History.

In this article I examine the role of ANZHES and its contribution to the development of the field over the past 40 years. Drawing on a range of theories, I argue that the annual exchange (or pilgrimage) of academics between Australia and New Zealand has been a vital component in the nurturing of our intellectual geographies and the formation of ANZHES as an intellectual community of scholars. And while ANZHES might well be borderless, there has been a gradual emergence of a border zone as academic work, academic knowledge and the Academy has been increasingly fractured, partitioned and dispersed. What then is the disciplinary territory that historians of education now occupy? How has the landscape of our work shifted and changed? To what extent might these connections be represented in ANZHES’ academic journal?

This book was written across a period of intense turmoil and change in higher education in Australia and England. We are deeply unsettled by these changes and wish to open up the discussion about what it means to be an academic and engage in academic work in the 21st century. Accordingly, each of the authors has nominated a theme or lens through which to examine the changes, tensions and uncertainties that have erupted in higher education. Thus, we offer this book as a constellation of ideas that traverse a number of aspects of our work and identities as academics. The overlap between these ideas is deliberate so that the multiple and complex challenges that underpin the higher education landscape can be examined.

In 1931, Virginia Woolf was invited to address members of the London and National Society for Women's Service about the employment of women. As a well-known literary figure as well as a woman intellectual, Woolf mused on her own biography and the risks she had to take to establish her own career. She used the metaphor of a room of one's own to underscore the challenges women faced to have a degree of freedom to shape their professional lives:You have won rooms of your own in the house hitherto exclusively owned by men, You are able, though not without great labour and effort to pay the rent … But this freedom is only a beginning; the room is your own, but it is still bare. (Woolf, 1974, chapter 27)

Teacher colleges played a significant role in the preparation of teachers for over 100 years in New Zealand. Teacher training colleges opened in the 1880s and served as the main institutions for teacher preparation. Toward the end of the twentieth century, the plight of teachers’ colleges once again fell victim to the ‘decline and demand cycle’ for teachers. Fueled by discussions regarding the extent teacher training should be “practically based in the classroom”, new government directions and policy priorities for the preparation of the teaching workforce were implemented. All teacher colleges experienced either staged amalgamations or ultimate closure. In the late 1970s and 1980s, the preparation of teachers entered a new phase as the responsibility shifted to the university sector, which included the training of kindergarten teachers. While the policy rhetoric imagined this to be an amalgamation, the reality was a process fraught with a number of anxieties, not the least of which were the intellectual shifts.

A range of educational reforms were implemented in the 1980s and 1990s. These reforms were underpinned by a fundamental assumption that education, in a similar way to any other service, can be traded as a commodity in the marketplace. This chapter identifies the shifting priorities of the state and explores the impacts of these educational reforms on the teaching profession. It traces the emergence of new forms of schools and schooling that are ostensibly part of the ongoing privatization of public education. Conclusions on future directions for both schools and the education of teachers are offered.

In this chapter we have broadly sketched the educational history of Aotearoa New Zealand to show that this historical backdrop offers a fascinating insight into contemporary debates. In the following chapters we adopt a thematic approach to the history of teacher preparation in Aotearoa New Zealand. We do not offer an institutional or chronological historical narrative, but rather, the chapters are interconnected as they re-trace, recall and re-tell this educational history. Our core thesis is that across the long history of teacher preparation these themes permeate the shifts and changes in educational policy and practice and that ruptures at particular historical moments are not unique. We draw on a number of historical examples to underscore the oftentimes personal impact of the wider policy environment and the educational stories of aspiring teachers. Importantly, we have documented the methodological approaches employed and the archival research that has influenced our reading of the materials.

This chapter traces the early beginnings of schools and schooling in Aotearoa New Zealand. We have drawn on archival evidence to identify shifting tensions between Māori and missionary, between Church and State and between local and national priorities. Despite its relative size, the history of New Zealand’s schools highlights their complex and competing origins. This educational landscape has been marked by emerging concerns and unresolved tensions regarding entry standards, academic and professional training, recruitment, and the knowledge, skills and dispositions a teacher ought to possess. There has been little consensus about how teachers should be prepared and where this training ought to occur. The absence of any uniform understanding or agreement about the effective professional training and preparation of teachers has induced a level of bureaucratization as competing interests sought to control the work of teachers.