Postgraduate Students

Angela Findlay

'Beyond the School Gates’: Vocational Guidance in twentieth century New Zealand.

I am investigating the history of vocational guidance in New Zealand from the 1920s through to 1978. I am looking at how gender and race informed the ways in which young New Zealanders were moulded into ‘ideal citizens’. The sixty years from 1920 saw enormous societal change in New Zealand and I want to examine the affect this had on vocational guidance. One of my overarching questions is, why did the Education Department initiate vocational guidance in schools and how did prescribed advice change over time? I want to use vocational guidance as a lens to examine both gender roles and socially accepted divisions between Maori and Pakeha. Previous historiography in this area has focussed solely on either education or work and my proposal is to examine the interface between the two within a structured, social history framework.

Supervisors: Professor Barbara Brookes and Dr Mark Seymour.