Dr Nance Millar
Postgraduate Diploma of Education Studies in Pastoral Guidance 1982
Master of Education (Hons) 1989 – 1993
Strathfield Campus
Caring contributions continue
An abiding desire to see children escape poverty has kept ACU National graduate Dr Nance Millar, 80, educating, researching, writing and quietly lobbying for more than four decades.
Parental involvement in their children's education is the key to a better life, said Nance, a parent and grandparent herself, as well as a charity worker and multiple graduate.
"Hopefully one can make a difference," said Nance, who graduated with a PhD in Sociology from UNSW late in 2006.
Her thesis, "Through the looking glass" ... From comfort and conformity to challenge and collaboration: Changing parent involvement in the Catholic education of their children through the twentieth century, examines how closely, or otherwise, Catholic schools have assisted parents to fulfil religious and other education responsibilities in their role as the 'primary educators'.
"I stumbled on to my path in the pursuit of knowledge," Nance said. "My story might stimulate others to venture into that academic world."
Nance's involvement with ACU National began with a Postgraduate Diploma of Education Studies in Pastoral Guidance in 1980 at the Strathfield Campus, then a predecessor college of the University. Her focus at the time was on adolescent boys with problems in schools.
Throughout her life, Nance, who initially trained as a nurse, has been mindful of the needs of others. She has helped them, serving breakfasts to homeless people as a volunteer at Matthew Talbot hostel, working at a Kings Cross drug referral centre and helping out at women's refuges.
Sadly, she has witnessed poverty following families from one generation to the next.
"Many of those interviews were so traumatic. I met wonderful women whose parents were deprived in different ways, who would never have gone near their children's schools because they were just trying to survive. There was so much pain and abuse."
In her role with the Sydney Catholic Education Office, working as an educator in sexuality and human development and counselling young people and their families, Nance was often heartened to hear how students in need were often inspired by teachers who helped them find a better path.
"Most teachers have no real idea of the extent and significance of their influence."
Nance continues to lobby for units to be included in teacher training, to inform future teachers of their powerful roles as mentors, "how they can include these children in the fold, set them free and see them on their way, a better way ..."
Nance noticed with sadness that many women and children who left refuges settled in housing commission accommodation, where they too often formed relationships very similar to those they had had to flee, once again failing to ensure their children received an education.
"We really need to develop self-sufficient people," she said.
Nance's views caught the attention of the Vatican after she convened a National Family Life Education Conference and completed a Master of Arts (Education) at Macquarie University in 1988. The theme of the thesis was Parent Participation in Personal Development Education in Schools.
On the 20th Anniversary of Pope Paul VI's pronouncements reaffirming official condemnation of artificial birth control, Nance presented Hope is a passion for the possible at the Humanae Vitae Conference in Rome (1988), requesting a revision of the language of the document. She felt more emphasis needed to be placed on the nature of the marriage relationship.
"The key would seem to be sensitive communication and consideration based on mutual respect, as a prelude to sexual intimacy," she argued.
In other contributions, Nance helped developed three educational kits on Christian sexuality, widely used in Catholic schools in the 1980s.
She then completed a Master of Education (Pastoral Guidance) and Master of Education with honours in Pastoral Guidance at ACU National in 1995. Her honours thesis was "Voices crying in the wilderness": Families in poverty, an ethnographic study of the transmission of intergenerational patterns related to family poverty.
While she has been helping others, Nance has had her own challenges to face, experiencing the death of a baby soon after birth, and then partial facial paralysis and severe deafness, which still hampers her ability to communicate in person.
Never giving up, she threw herself into research and writing, producing her latest thesis in which she has interviewed cohorts from three generations of Catholic parents, and reviewed changing official Church positions on education. Her research spans the 1900s, finding a culture of "submission and compliance" as related to the parent role in the first 50 years, with the Church in authority and parents marginalised from their children's schools.
By the 1960s, "societal norms were gradually being eroded". "In secular educational documents the role of parents in the effective education of children was emphasised and Catholic parents became more questioning, a new perspective facilitated by their higher levels of education," she writes.
A "collaborative" view emerged, replacing blind trust with a need for improved communication between teachers and parents.
"The responsibility for the education (socialisation) of children lies with the parent and ... with the community whose agent is the school," she concluded.
Nance said she was glad to see parents now included on school board councils, on interview panels, and representing other parents in dealings with Catholic Education Offices, but felt more change was needed.
"I am still concerned about those on the fringe, because I think the child's life could be so different."
She would like to see pastoral strategies for parents also integrated in the teacher training program, so that teachers could reach out to marginalised parents, particularly Indigenous Australians, and "parents who are really struggling". Together, teachers and parents "can make a difference in their children's lives!" especially in recognising the complementary nature of their roles.
As for her own contributions: "It's like throwing a pebble in a pond," Nance said. "You never know how far the ripples will go."
Nance has also been a volunteer guide for 13 years in the Art Gallery of New South Wales, and she convened the St Mary's Cathedral 150 Years Religious Art Prize in 1971, the first to be held in the Crypt. It featured lunch time lectures by leading Art historians for visitors.
Nance said that along with her family, her cultural pursuits in art and music have provided the sustaining leaven for her sociological, pastoral interests and educational participation throughout her life.
