Communicating with schools - Kara 150 years

From the Archives – Communicating with schools

[Kara Krusche, Project Manager, 150 years of public education in Victoria]

My name is Kara Krusche. I'm the project manager of 150 years of public education in Victoria. So what that means is commemorating the past, celebrating the present and imagining the future of education in Victoria.

We have been communicating with students in schools since the 1800s. We had an amazing publication called The School Paper which started in 1896 and went to 1969. That went out to every student in every school across the state. In a lot of households that was the only thing that households had to read. So it was a really important asset. It was one of the few things that went in houses at that time.

That publication was then replaced in 1969 with various school magazines that went out to students based on different grades. They all had a space theme. It was 1969 after all. So they had various names like Comet and Meteor, and a lot of those publications were still in print up to the 1990s and early 2000s.

So they were really fantastic ways of communicating with kids, of engaging kids in learning. They're really fantastic artifacts that show how we have changed in how we communicate with students, but how we haven't changed, how we still value that level of communication and engagement with students over time.

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