A social semiotic analysis of the discursive construction of teacher identity in the ‘book of rules and customs’ of the Australian Sisters of the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus

Up until the 1960s, Catholic schools throughout most of the English‐speaking world were dominated by members of religious teaching orders, including female religious. For over a century following their establishment in 1866, one of the most prominent female religious teaching orders in Australia was that of the Sisters of St Joseph of the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus. The first part of this paper contextualises the emergence of this particular religious order in terms of the development of Catholic education internationally and in Australia, and the associated ‘religious formation’ of nuns as teachers. Part two is centered on the most significant text used to guide the ‘religious formation’ of members of this order both as religious and as teachers, namely, that of their ‘rules and customs’. Drawing on an analytic approach based on a theory of social semiotics, it analyses both the sets of practices and the textual mechanisms through which the identity of members of the order as teachers was constructed.     

Catholic women educators’ discourse and educational measurement in the early twentieth century in the United States

ABSTRACT

In the early twentieth century in the United States, Roman Catholic schools grew in number and became increasingly regulated by state departments of education. This led to the increased influence of public school reform movements in Catholic schools. Some Catholic educators questioned these movements, while others embraced them. Educational measurement strategies, such as IQ and standardised testing, gained support from women religious orders and congregations, who made up the majority of the Catholic teaching force. For pragmatic reasons, they saw some value in the promises of modern educational science for teaching and learning. This practice, however, put them at odds with some of the beliefs and values of their Church. This study demonstrates how Catholic sister teachers attempted to shape the debate on the introduction and use of reform strategies like IQ and standardised testing. It also examines how Catholic sister teachers made use of Catholic beliefs and values to make arguments in favour of IQ and standardised testing in Catholic schools. Using agreed upon Catholic religious tenets and working within their gendered reality, Catholic sister teachers demonstrated how they tried to convince their colleagues, male and female, to come to an understanding around the use of educational measurement.     

Religious activism in a secular world: the rise and fall of the teaching congregations of the Catholic Church

In Europe, the nineteenth and twentieth centuries are characterised not only by processes of secularisation, but also by religious reactions to the perceived secularisation of society. In the Catholic Church, the rise of active congregations constitutes a prominent part of this reaction. With their work “in the world”, the members of the active congregations (brothers and sisters) had to represent and disseminate religious values in a modernising and secularising world. In the latter part of the nineteenth century, many of them became active in the field of education. Until well into the twentieth century, teaching sisters and teaching brothers were a customary feature in the system of Catholic education. This article provides a theory-driven historical–sociological and historical–educational analysis of this form of religious activism in the field of education. Overall, its focus is on mechanisms of social differentiation and inclusion in modern society at large, and on the opportunities and problems they create for fields such as religion and education. Empirically, the focus is on the rise and fall of the congregations of teaching brothers and teaching sisters in the Low Countries, especially Belgium.     

A tale of two schools: educating Catholic female deaf children in Ireland, 1846–1946

This paper discusses the contributions of the Dominican Sisters and Sisters of Mercy in running schools for female deaf children in Ireland during the period 1846 to 1946. The schools were established as part of an attempt to educate Catholics in the Catholic faith and provide literacy to female deaf children. In assuming the challenge of educating deaf girls, the sisters adopted a method of teaching and learning through signed language of which they had little prior knowledge. While the history of the schools is contextualised as a central narrative of this paper, the religious orders’ attempt to educate deaf children effectively is examined in the context of teacher role models and sign language pedagogy. This paper argues that the work of the Mercy and Dominican sisters should be recognised for its contribution to the education of female deaf children, whose needs would otherwise have been neglected.     

Catholic women teachers and Scottish education in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries

Catholics remained outside the Scottish educational system until 1918. The Church preferred mixed‐sex infant schools and either single‐sex schools or separate departments. In small towns and rural areas the schools were mixed‐sex. Women were considered naturally best suited to teach infants and girls, but even in boys' schools, female assistants were increasingly employed in the later Victorian period. Female religious orders were crucial for developing Catholic education in larger urban centres, but by 1918 only 4% of Scotland's Catholic schoolteachers were members of religious orders. Lay women quickly became numerically predominant in elementary education and were key to implementing the Church's strategy to enhance the respectability of a largely immigrant community through separate schools. It is the contention here that the part played by lay women in Catholic schooling needs to be considered to reflect more widely on the place of women in Scottish education.     

语用视角下英语教学话语有效性建构路径

英语教学话语有效性的实现是课堂教学成功的根本保证,从普遍语用学的有效性要求和认知语用学的可供性提取理论来看,英语教学话语有效性建构必须满足以下两个条件:一是提高认知式语言使用中的真实性、互动式语言使用中的恰当性、表现式语言使用中的真诚性;二是重视教学话语的主体间性,做好教学话语的可供性提取。     

The Christian Family as Mediator

The publication in 2011 of This is Our Faith (TIOF), the Catholic Church in Scotland's syllabus for religious education in Catholic schools, is a significant contribution to wider debates on the appropriate conceptual framework for religious education. Recent teaching of the Holy See has suggested that religious education in Catholic schools should adopt a scholastic shape and serve as a complement to catechesis. In TIOF, pedagogy, assessment issues and the relationship between cognitive and affective approaches to learning are merged in the context of a distinct faith tradition. TIOF's adoption of a catechetical vision of religious education shows how local churches can adapt Catholic teaching to their own circumstances.     

They came with a purpose: educational journeys of nineteenth-century Irish Dominican Sister Teachers

Irish Catholic teaching sisters were major actors in the development of education systems in New World countries such as the United States, Canada, South Africa, Australia and New Zealand. Immigrants themselves, they faced a number of key challenges as they sought to adapt Old World cultural and educational ideas to the education of the immigrant Irish in a new cultural, religious and educational context. A close examination of the wide range of sources available in private archives and elsewhere offers unique insights into the challenges facing 10 Irish Dominican Sister Teachers as they journeyed from Ireland to Dunedin to found primary and secondary schools in the young colony of New Zealand. This article examines their responses to their early experiences and the part they played in the development of a viable Catholic education system in nineteenth-century New Zealand.     

Catechesis and Religious Education in Canadian Catholic Schools

A key concept in contemporary Catholic educational discourse makes a distinction between religious education and catechesis. This distinction is based on the assumptions of faith commitment on the part of catechesis and the focus on cognitive outcomes on the part of religious education. Many official documents on Canadian Catholic school education, however, reflect an understanding that closely associated catechesis with religious education or fail to sufficiently distinguish between the two. The article argues that changes in contemporary culture make catechetical models of religious education problematic and that Catholic schools in Canada would be well served by an approach that emphasizes the educational goals of religious education. This is not to say that catechesis has no place in religious education but this is best achieved by making use of cognitive and effective outcomes in lesson planning and realizing that the school as a whole has many opportunities to foster catechesis.     

勃朗特姐妹的宗教人格

勃朗特姐妹作为维多利亚时期的代表女作家,其写作深受牧师家庭的宗教背景影响。她们的父亲帕特里克是英国国教牧师,他倡导的福音主义——自我心灵感受宗教的启示极大地影响了勃朗特姐妹的人格和创作。本文综述了勃朗特三姐妹对于宗教的不同心灵理解,正是对于宗教的追寻和探究,以及宗教对于她们的不同启示,使得三姐妹才思泉涌,在笔端中,澎湃着女性对于维多利亚体制宗教的批判,书写着女性对于宗教的个人心灵理解。     

PLANS FOR LEADERSHIP IN SUNDAY SCHOOL ADVANCE

There is a movement toward “corporatization” evident in Catholic hospitals, Catholic schools, and Catholic social service agencies taking up management structures and other features and behaviors employed by corporations. Many see these practices as threatening the identity and influence of religion as the profit concerns begin to take center stage. This development is assessed from two perspectives. The 19th-century shift in Catholic education was equally radical and raised no less conflicting values in religious identity. The story of Catholic healthcare's movement over the past 30 years from direct control and administration primarily by religious orders of women to mega health systems provides a parallel experience adjusting this Catholic ministry to the demands of the corporate world and re-expressing Catholic identity.     

2. RACE RELATIONS IN COLLEGE

Controversy surrounding a Catholic philosophy of education and the Catholic “identity” of institutions of higher learning reveals the vitality and the genuine liberality of contemporary Catholic higher education. Rather than being symptoms of political correctness or of a lost capacity to celebrate Catholic or any other particularity, these controversies reveal the openness and authenticity of Catholic higher education. They show the willingness of many leaders in Catholic higher education to let go of ecclesiastical sectarianism, of absolute claims inconsistent with God's universal love and availability, and of classicism, and to embrace a reverent religious pluralism, a historical perspective, and the sheer exhilaration of intellectual discourse which aims to be universal. Such openness is no more risky than the more narrow and triumphal perspectives it replaces, and is well worth the risks.     

The conception,construction, and maintenance of the identity of Roman Catholic female religious teachers: a historical case study from Ireland

Over the last three decades, there has been a burgeoning of research on teacher identity. While the various bodies of work produced are very valuable, further lines of enquiry need to be pursued in order to take account of the complexities involved. This paper on the conception, construction, and maintenance of the identity of Roman Catholic female religious teachers in Ireland from the mid-1930s to the mid-1960s is offered as one contribution. Being restricted to a particular time and place, it is a response to those who have emphasized the need to investigate teacher identity in different national contexts. Secondly, by focusing on female teaching religious, it highlights the importance of studying different ‘types’ of teachers other than those identified by age group, school subject, or grade level taught. Thirdly, it represents a shift in research framing away from the more usually utilized concepts of ‘personal identity,’ ‘social identity,’ ‘professional identity,’ and ‘the self.’ Documentary evidence and oral testimony indicate that the professional life of the female teaching religious was viewed by them as being integral to their religious vocation. This particular notion of vocation embodied a spiritual belief in being called by God, to work for God. Thus, it meant that the female teaching religious approached teaching, quite literally, with religious zeal. It also meant that their commitment was, first and foremost, to their religious life and that teaching, while deemed to be very important, was always in accord with and, where necessary took second place, to that life.     

The recruitment of religious as teachers: a case study from 1960s Australia

Historical expositions on the teaching religious in Catholic schools can be seen as constituting models aimed at promoting reflection on the possibility that teaching can be influenced by discourses of ‘vocation’ and ‘the giving of service’, every bit as much as it can be by ‘industrial’ and ‘labour’ perspectives. This paper is offered as one contribution to opening up debate on the matter. It provides an overview of the work of the teaching religious in the English‐speaking world from the middle of the 1850s to the latter half of the twentieth century. Particular practices adopted by the Church aimed at recruiting young males and females to join the ranks of the teaching religious are then outlined. Finally, a film entitled Profession in Christ, which was produced by the (Irish) Christian Brothers Order in Australia in the early 1960s for use by their special ‘recruiting agents’ as they traveled around Catholic schools ‘questing’ for recruits, is analysed.     

A social cognitive framework for examining the work of Catholic religious education teachers in Australian high schools

Religious education in Australian Catholic High Schools is the raison d’etre for the Catholic education system and religious education teachers are critical to this mission. This paper offers a framework for investigating the self-efficacy of religious education teachers.

We first describe the nature and context of religious education in Australian Catholic schools. We argue that the teaching of religious education presents a set of unique challenges to teachers, compared to teaching other disciplines in the curriculum. Next we review the extant literature on Social Cognitive Theory, and self-efficacy as it may apply in this context. Then we look at likely constructs that may impact upon teacher self-efficacy for teaching religious education: collective efficacy, teachers’ implicit theories about student ability and student faith, and the intrinsic spirituality of religious education teachers.

We present a theoretical framework for examining the self-efficacy of religious education teachers, and we argue for research in this area that has not been studied hitherto, making this a unique contribution to the field of the psychology of religion, and to practitioners.     

Elementary education and the practices of literacy in Catholic girls’ schools in early modern Germany

Girls’ schools in the early modern era were largely run by nuns and can therefore be distinguished as Catholic institutions of learning. These schools flourished in the Catholic parts of Europe since the turn of the seventeenth century. Despite their focus on religious education, elementary skills such as reading, writing and sometimes arithmetic were taught as well. Based on curricula, didactical methods and the texts used in class, the article analyses the practices of literacy in Catholic girls’ schools in seventeenth and eighteenth century Germany. As the intentions of school founders and teachers reveal, the acquisition of literacy by the female population was not an end in itself. It rather served the denominational, gender- and class-specific socialisation of the girls. Nevertheless, learning to read and write enabled the girls to participate in the literate culture of their times. The impact of schooling on female literacy can be measured by correlating literacy rates and data on school attendance. Compared to coeducational schools where girls often only learned to read, whereas the boys were also taught writing, girls’ schools proved to be the better alternative.     

试论僧尼道姑情爱在中晚明戏曲小说中的文学表现

宗教基本上都具有禁欲倾向。中晚明异端思想涌起，大胆肯定人欲价值和世俗生活的合理性。于是，在戏曲小说中对不危害他人的僧尼道姑的情爱行为予以宽容和同情。作品以僧尼道姑的人性，去揭露宗教禁欲主义的荒谬和愚昧。而淫僧恶尼的肆意淫乐，正是禁欲主义下的变态行为，是宗教禁欲下的情欲迷误。     

THE CHURCH AND THE COLLEGE STUDENT

Katharine Drexel was an important educator who taught profound lessons to the Roman Catholic Church and American society about the responsibility of privilege and the irresponsibility of prejudice. As a professed nun dedicated to the education of Black and Native Americans, she taught both intentionally and by example. Religious educators, seeking to educate for peace and justice, often point to Katharine's life work as an example of the application of Catholic social teaching. This article argues that Katharine's educational import in regards to Catholic social teaching goes much deeper than the concrete examples of her life's work. By studying Katharine's life, religious educators can illustrate the foundational attitudes and habits necessary for the principle of social justice to take root. This will be articulated in terms of underlying emphases found in aspects of Katharine's story: emphasis on totality, on clarity of vision and purpose, on evangelization, on family ethical formation, on moral education, and on Eucharistic spirituality. A corresponding action for religious educators will be suggested.     

Mobilising Mother Cabrini’s educational practice: the transnational context of the London school of the Missionary Sisters of the Sacred Heart of Jesus 1898–1911

A schoolteacher from Lombardy, Saint Frances Xavier Cabrini (1850–1917), founded the Institute of Missionary Sisters of the Sacred Heart of Jesus (MSC) in 1880. It was one of the 185 female religious institutes established in Italy in the nineteenth century. In the newly unified Italy, Cabrini found opportunities to formulate progressive Catholic educational practice, to establish an independent female congregation and to mobilise her educational practice to the United States to serve Italian migrants. She established a school in London in 1902. Cabrini’s letters and convent annals are used to trace the use of transnational networks in founding the school and to consider the impact of the transnational context on the school start-up. The concept of mobilising educational practice embraces both the geographical movement of people, goods and money and the formation of teaching sisters. By her death Cabrini had established 59 schools and orphanages in Europe and the Americas.     

人文之光在宗教情结中闪耀——自白诗代表人物罗伯特·洛厄尔及其宗教诗歌

主要从自白诗代表人物罗伯特.洛厄尔早期宗教信仰及其宗教诗歌两个方面探索诗人的人文性及其诗歌的人文性。洛厄尔在天主教信仰中调整自己的精神状态,从非人文性的世界观转变为人文性的世界观,并付诸诗歌实践。洛厄尔早期的诗歌具有浓郁的宗教气氛,借助宗教阐述诗人的人文观尤其是反战观。