title: "I my own professor": Ashton-Warner as New Zealand educational theorist, 1940-60.

authors: Middleton, Sue

subjects: education

abstract: The invitation to contribute to this volume addressed me as a New Zealander who had written about how Sylvia Ashton-Warner's fantasies, theories, imagery, and life-history narratives threaded their way through my own. I had written of my youthful encounters with her work in Educating Feminists (Middleton 1993), in which I looked back on reading Spinster in 1960 at age thirteen and reflected on my teenage dreams of life as an artist and beatnik in Parisian cafes and garrets: confined to an Edwardian boarding school hostel in a provincial New Zealand town, I had plotted my escape to what Ashton-Warner described in Myself as "some bohemian studio on the Left Bank in Paris or over a bowl of wine in Italy, me all sophisticated and that, with dozens of lovers, paint everywhere and love and communion and sympathy and all that" (Myself, 212). When, in the early 1970s, I began secondary school teaching and read Teacher, that book built bridges between the frightening urgency of classroom survival, the enticing theories but alien classrooms described by American deschoolers and free-schoolers, and "what I believed myself to be when a girl on the long long road to school, a vagabond and an artist" (I Passed This Way, 307). As a young teacher I, too, had poured my impassioned soul into writing journals and poetry, painting, and playing the piano. Like Ashton-Warner, I had hoped that artistic self-expression could keep the mad woman in my attic at bay, for "asylums are full of artists who failed to say the things they must and famous tombs are full of those who did" (Incense to Idols, 169).

text: "I my own professor": Ashton-Warner as New Zealand educational theorist, 1940-60. The invitation to contribute to this volume addressed me as a New Zealander who had written about how Sylvia Ashton-Warner's fantasies, theories, imagery, and life-history narratives threaded their way through my own. I had written of my youthful encounters with her work in Educating Feminists (Middleton 1993), in which I looked back on reading Spinster in 1960 at age thirteen and reflected on my teenage dreams of life as an artist and beatnik in Parisian cafes and garrets: confined to an Edwardian boarding school hostel in a provincial New Zealand town, I had plotted my escape to what Ashton-Warner described in Myself as "some bohemian studio on the Left Bank in Paris or over a bowl of wine in Italy, me all sophisticated and that, with dozens of lovers, paint everywhere and love and communion and sympathy and all that" (Myself, 212). When, in the early 1970s, I began secondary school teaching and read Teacher, that book built bridges between the frightening urgency of classroom survival, the enticing theories but alien classrooms described by American deschoolers and free-schoolers, and "what I believed myself to be when a girl on the long long road to school, a vagabond and an artist" (I Passed This Way, 307). As a young teacher I, too, had poured my impassioned soul into writing journals and poetry, painting, and playing the piano. Like Ashton-Warner, I had hoped that artistic self-expression could keep the mad woman in my attic at bay, for "asylums are full of artists who failed to say the things they must and famous tombs are full of those who did" (Incense to Idols, 169).

year: 2006

title: Peer Processes and Adolescent Behaviour

authors: Pope, James George

subjects: deviancy training

abstract: While research suggests that peer influence can lead to increases in undesirable behaviours of adolescents, there has been little focus on the specific mechanisms of influence. A relatively small literature examining social interactions between peers has found that the discussion of rule breaking topics by pairs of boys relates to how much problem behaviour the boys engage in. This research is limited by its reliance on a set of similar samples from a North American population base. This thesis explored the relationship between social interaction and behaviour with sample from New Zealand Aotearoa. Nine pairs of Year 10 boys were recruited primarily from two high schools. A half-hour conversation was video taped for each pair. These conversations were coded on the basis of the nature of the talk between pairs of participants following the coding system proposed by Poe, Dishion, Griesler and Andrews (1990). The coded behaviours were analysed and compared to measures of previous rule breaking behaviours. The duration of rule breaking talk was found to correlate with the level of previous rule breaking behaviour. It was not clear whether the amount of rule breaking talk was related to the amount of laughter following it. Possible explanations are discussed. While generalisations from these results are limited by an unexpectedly small sample size, they show similarity to the previous research findings. The findings, the difficulties in recruitment to the research and the implications of these for future research are discussed.

text: Peer Processes and Adolescent Behaviour While research suggests that peer influence can lead to increases in undesirable behaviours of adolescents, there has been little focus on the specific mechanisms of influence. A relatively small literature examining social interactions between peers has found that the discussion of rule breaking topics by pairs of boys relates to how much problem behaviour the boys engage in. This research is limited by its reliance on a set of similar samples from a North American population base. This thesis explored the relationship between social interaction and behaviour with sample from New Zealand Aotearoa. Nine pairs of Year 10 boys were recruited primarily from two high schools. A half-hour conversation was video taped for each pair. These conversations were coded on the basis of the nature of the talk between pairs of participants following the coding system proposed by Poe, Dishion, Griesler and Andrews (1990). The coded behaviours were analysed and compared to measures of previous rule breaking behaviours. The duration of rule breaking talk was found to correlate with the level of previous rule breaking behaviour. It was not clear whether the amount of rule breaking talk was related to the amount of laughter following it. Possible explanations are discussed. While generalisations from these results are limited by an unexpectedly small sample size, they show similarity to the previous research findings. The findings, the difficulties in recruitment to the research and the implications of these for future research are discussed.

year: 2008

title: Reconnecting whānau: Pathways to recovery for Māori with bipolar disorder

authors: Waitoki, Waikaremoana

subjects: mental health

abstract: While Māori are known to experience a higher burden of mental health and addiction problems compared to non-Māori (Baxter, 2008), little exploratory research has been conducted into Māori experiences of bipolar affective disorder. Bipolar disorder is at times regarded as a “life sentence”, with little hope of recovery. The recovery- focused mental health literature, however, argues wellness is achievable for even the most intractable conditions (Lapsley, Nikora, & Black, 2002; Mental Health Commission, 2001). The aim of this research was to gather information about the experiences of Māori who were diagnosed with bipolar affective disorder. Interviews were conducted with 22 Māori wāhine (women) and tāne (men), and using thematic analyses, themes relevant to their life stories were uncovered. This research sought to contribute to the realisation of Māori potential by explicitly shifting from deficit- focused frameworks to a focus on systemic factors that influenced Māori wellbeing. Highlights were that whānau (participants) who were connected with friends, partners and family were motivated to achieve wellness and to stay well.

text: Reconnecting whānau: Pathways to recovery for Māori with bipolar disorder While Māori are known to experience a higher burden of mental health and addiction problems compared to non-Māori (Baxter, 2008), little exploratory research has been conducted into Māori experiences of bipolar affective disorder. Bipolar disorder is at times regarded as a “life sentence”, with little hope of recovery. The recovery- focused mental health literature, however, argues wellness is achievable for even the most intractable conditions (Lapsley, Nikora, & Black, 2002; Mental Health Commission, 2001). The aim of this research was to gather information about the experiences of Māori who were diagnosed with bipolar affective disorder. Interviews were conducted with 22 Māori wāhine (women) and tāne (men), and using thematic analyses, themes relevant to their life stories were uncovered. This research sought to contribute to the realisation of Māori potential by explicitly shifting from deficit- focused frameworks to a focus on systemic factors that influenced Māori wellbeing. Highlights were that whānau (participants) who were connected with friends, partners and family were motivated to achieve wellness and to stay well.

year: 2015