Linda Chisholm – författare

How the story of how missonary schools adopted the Bantu education reforms gives insight into the ongoing legacy of the apartheid in the South African educational systemThe transition from apartheid to the post-apartheid era has highlighted questions about the past and the persistence of its influence in present-day South Africa. This is particularly so in education, where the past continues to play a decisive role in relation to inequality. Between Worlds: German Missionaries and the Transition from Mission to Bantu Education in South Africa scrutinises the experience of a hitherto unexplored German mission society, probing the complexities and paradoxes of social change in education. It raises challenging questions about the nature of mission education legacies. Linda Chisholm shows that the transition from mission to Bantu Education was far from seamless. Instead, past and present interpenetrated one another, with resistance and compliance cohabiting in a complex new social order. At the same time as missionaries complied with the new Bantu Education dictates, they sought to secure a role for themselves in the face of demands of local communities for secular state-controlled education. When the latter was implemented in a perverted form from the mid-1950s, one of its tools was textbooks in local languages developed by mission societies as part of a transnational project, with African participation. Introduced under the guise of expunging European control, Bantu Education merely served to reinforce such control. The response of local communities was an attempt to domesticate – and master – the 'foreign' body of the mission so as to create access to a larger world. This book focuses on the ensuing struggle, fought on many fronts, including medium of instruction and textbook content, with concomitant sub-texts relating to gender roles and sexuality. South Africa's educational history is to this day informed by networks of people and ideas crossing geographic and racial boundaries. The colonial legacy has inevitably involved cultural mixing and hybridisation – with, paradoxically, parallel pleas for purity. Chisholm explores how these ideas found expression in colliding and coalescing worlds, one African, the other European, caught between mission and apartheid education.

South Africa's transition to democracy has seen massive changes in the field of teacher education aimed at integrating its previously raced and gendered character. This book provides a comprehensive historical overview and relational understanding of the patterns of teacher preparation supporting South Africa's unequal formal education system. It shows how emerging patterns, policies and pedagogies were deeply entangled with the country's position within a broader international and colonial order as well as with dominant national political and economic social frameworks. Using rich archival and oral evidence, this book illuminates how successive policies restricted and enabled access to different institutions, while differentiated curricula prepared teachers to teach students intended to play different roles in a society marked by class, race and gender division. It explores the location and control of teacher provision for black and white teachers provided by mission societies and the state in colleges and universities. Post-apartheid governments sought to reverse entrenched racial legacies in education through closure of the colleges and incorporation of teacher preparation into universities, altered admission criteria and new curricula. These have resulted in new tensions which have arisen in relation to a world of competing pressures on universities and teachers. By shedding new light on these tensions from a historical perspective, this book will prove an invaluable resource for education leaders and researchers in the field of global and comparative education.