Published online by Cambridge University Press: 14 December 2016
This dossier focusses on non-European teachers within mission schools in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, especially in the period of colonial control. These teachers were central to the missionary project and helped to disseminate both Christianity and Western knowledge across the globe. Local teachers, alongside other mission assistants and helpers, also helped translate, transmit, and transform both Western and local forms of knowledge and contributed to broader discourse about knowledge, yet the importance of their work has often been overshadowed by the work undertaken in examining missionary elites. This dossier, with its extended introduction and three case studies from Africa, the Danish West Indies, and Bolivia, sheds light on the roles of non-European mission teachers as well as their recruitment and training, their self-representations, and methodological as well as conceptual issues about how information on these often inconspicuous intermediaries of mission education can be retrieved from disparate sources.
Felicity Jensz received her PhD from the University of Melbourne, Australia and has worked in the Cluster of Excellence for Religion and Politics at the Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster, Germany since 2008. She is currently working on a book project on mission schooling in the British Empire.