This article focuses on the work of three British Women Education Officers (WEOs) in Nigeria as the colony was preparing for independence. Well-qualified and progressive women teachers, Kathleen Player, Evelyn Clark (née Hyde), and Mary Hargrave (née Robinson), were appointed as WEOs in 1945, 1949, and 1950 respectively. I argue that the three…

Using a transnational framework, this paper focuses on four graduates of Gipsy Hill Training College (GHTC) for nursery school teachers in London, United Kingdom, in the early to mid-twentieth century. Firstly, I explore GHTC's progressive ideals and highlight ways in which its principal, Lillian de Lissa, encouraged students to "think…

In early twentieth-century Australia, men managed coeducational state training colleges (equivalent to normal schools) but teacher education programmes for kindergartners were initiatives of the free kindergarten movement and firmly in women's hands. The Kindergarten Training College in Adelaide, South Australia, was established in 1907 with…

This paper examines the grammar of schooling and educational innovations that were being promulgated transnationally in the 1920s and 1930s. First, the paper explores how some elements of the grammar of schooling such as age grading, year-long courses of study and annual employment contracts for teachers were mediated by local circumstances in…