Looking Back from the Centre: A Snapshot of contemporary New Zealand Education

Citation

Kyle, N. (2011), "Looking Back from the Centre: A Snapshot of contemporary New Zealand Education", History of Education Review, Vol. 40 No. 1, pp. 96-97. https://doi.org/10.1108/08198691111140839

Looking Back from the Centre maps the history of educational studies over the last 80 years at Victoria University of Wellington. Kidman, an editor and contributor to the volume, pays tribute to the work of Victoria's first professors who established education as a field of tertiary scholarship as distinct from teacher training. In a very personal account she also writes, correctly, that there is no single field of knowledge that belongs to education and therein lies its strengths and its weaknesses. Thus, it has been a difficult and sometimes rocky academic journey as educational sociologists, historians, philosophers, psychologists, mathematicians, early childhood, Maori educationists, comparative education and Pacific educationists fought to establish education as a scholarly activity and also to mark out their own individual space as well. It has been a battle fought more frantically in the heat of the restructuring of tertiary education in the 1980s and 1990s, and the 2000s. And it was in this context that education studies at Victoria fought to retain relevance, research integrity and the right to be.

There is something to be said for writing a history, a record of a department with a long history that binds together the stories, the achievements, the hopes and the dreams of the many now distinguished scholars who make up past and current staff. Hugh Lauder, drawing on his stint as Dean of Education at Victoria, provides a useful overview of the research/policy process and its many outcomes. Gerald Grace and Martin Thrupp outline the “brazen attempt” by economists who planned to overturn the accepted notion of education as a public good toward education as a commodity; that is, as a market or a business. James Irving details the complex array of factors that impinge on Pacific education arguing there is no single blueprint but that it surely is in New Zealand's interests to collaborate with and assist more fully the Pacific countries with their educational endeavors.

Maori education and the shifting terrain of Maori scholarship is discussed within the continuing battle of the He Parekereke to establish itself as a forum for “new intellectual growth” within a Maori context. And as the authors note, “All of that, and the fact that we are still here.”

Early childhood education has made its way from early (1970s) part‐time appointments and tentative doctoral studies, to what can be considered today as well‐established scholarship and research and unambiguous university status. Early childhood and its changing status is ably examined by Carmen Dalli, Anne Meade and Helen May. Helen May's journey from junior school teacher and crèche worker to become the first professorial appointment in early childhood in a New Zealand university is both inspiring and of great historical interest. This is a fascinating account of how talent, enthusiasm, astuteness and a bent for negotiation at a high level has boosted the stocks of early childhood and the staff working in it.

There is a significant contribution on rural schooling from Ken Stevens mapping the changing face of the small school within the context of correspondence education and intranets. This is an eclectic range of writings covering areas of wide interest in the previous School of Education including contributions from staff who have left to work elsewhere. One quibble. As a non‐Maori and a non‐New Zealander I found I had limited entry at times into some writing as I occasionally found myself unsure whether the author/s were writing about previous structures/entities or when a change in name/school/faculty occurred or indeed what name was now current. This may have been a confusion peculiar to me but I would have welcomed a brief chart mapping out the structural changes to the Faculty/School/University as “disestablishment” approached.

An Australian Vice‐Chancellor once said to me (not without irony) “winners write history, don't they?” We were discussing the very same topics that are found in this collection: the merger of colleges of education into university faculties and the shift in tertiary education toward “user‐pays”; toward a business model and away from education as a social good. It is not just winners of course who write history. It is survivors. Those still left standing and able to, indeed wanting to remember the battle. In one sense perhaps the winners are the survivors. It is a moot point. In any case, Kidman puts it well when she writes:

[…] this is what it's about. Those people who came before us and those who will follow behind. These are the stories we tell. This is what we do.