This workshop on “The Changing Face of Missionary Education,” is being held 3-4 July, 2014, at the Cluster of Excellence, Religion and Politics, WWU Münster, Germany.
The modern missionary movement was the predominant way by which Indigenous and non-European groups (such as emancipated slaves) were exposed to European forms of knowledge through providing formal and informal instruction, including educational institutions such as schools. At such sites, various forms of knowledge and culture were dynamically transferred and transformed between Euro-missionaries and pupils, as well as across other groups in classrooms that mixed cultures and ages, as well as religious, social and gender groups. This workshop focuses upon the role of Indigenes and non-Europeans working within schools run by missionaries, including day-schools, boarding schools and industrial schools. A central purpose of this workshop is to examine the ideological reasons for employing non-European teachers, and how such reasons reflected notions of moral and social progress in the colonies and back in the home-countries.
It will bring together scholars to discuss case studies of both individuals and various missionary groups in order to compare the possibilities available to, as well as limitations placed upon, these non-European teachers within missionary schools across locations colonized by Europeans. How were these people recruited and trained? How were they perceived by others around them, including those in the schools, on the stations, in the colonies, and in the home-countries of the missionary societies? How did changing political, social, and religious expectations affect their roles? What influences could or did they exert upon the curricula or the social structure of schools? What role could or did individual teachers play in the epistemological cleavage between children and parents that many missionary groups deemed necessary to create in the nineteenth century? What was their role in the missionary aim of ‘Civilizing and Christianizing’ the non-European other? In what ways did these teachers perceive themselves as part of a transnational religious or knowledge community? What was the role of government legislation? How did the teaching methods of non-European teachers vary from European teachers, and how is this to be understood in light of transforming cultural and social notions? These are just some of the questions the organizers wish to explore in this workshop examining the changing face of missionary education.
Please send an email to Dr Felicity Jensz (felicity.jenszATuni-muenster.de) including a PDF with a word proposal of up to 300 words (English or German), a short academic CV, and a list of publications no later than Friday 18 October, 2013. Some travel funding is available. A publication is planned.