Afbeelding van de auteur.

Sylvia Ashton-Warner (1908–1984)

Auteur van Teacher

12+ Werken 512 Leden 10 Besprekingen Favoriet van 1 leden

Over de Auteur

Writer and educator, Sylvia Ashton-Warner was born in Stratford, New Zealand, on December 17, 1908. As a teacher of Maori children, she pioneered a pedagogy geared to their culture and interests. The methods were outlined in her autobiography, Teacher (1963). Ashton-Warner also taught at an toon meer experimental school in the United States and detailed her experiences in Spearpoint: Teacher in America. Her novels including Spinster, Incense to Idols, and Bell Call often feature strong women. Ashton-Warner died in 1984. (Bowker Author Biography) toon minder

Werken van Sylvia Ashton-Warner

Teacher (1963) 255 exemplaren
Spinster (1958) 132 exemplaren
Greenstone (1966) 29 exemplaren
Myself (1967) 24 exemplaren
Spearpoint: "Teacher" in America (1972) 19 exemplaren
I Passed This Way (1979) 16 exemplaren
Incense to Idols (1960) 15 exemplaren
Bell Call (1971) 10 exemplaren
Three (1971) 6 exemplaren
Stories From the River (1986) 4 exemplaren
Spinister 1 exemplaar

Gerelateerde werken

New World Writing 20 (1962) — Medewerker — 3 exemplaren

Tagged

Algemene kennis

Gangbare naam
Ashton-Warner, Sylvia
Geboortedatum
1908-12-17
Overlijdensdatum
1984-04-28
Geslacht
female
Nationaliteit
New Zealand
Geboorteplaats
Stratford, New Zealand
Plaats van overlijden
Tauranga, New Zealand
Woonplaatsen
Stratford, New Zealand (birth)
Tauranga, New Zealand
Aspen, Colorado, USA
Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
Opleiding
Auckland Teachers' Training College
Wairarapa College
Wellington Girls' College, Wellington, New Zealand
Beroepen
teacher
writer
poet
autobiographer
novelist
Prijzen en onderscheidingen
Order of the British Empire (Member)
Korte biografie
Sylvia Ashton-Warner was born in Stratford, New Zealand. Her parents were Francis Ashton Warner, an English immigrant with an aristocratic heritage but little else, and his wife Margaret Maxwell, a teacher. After her father's health deteriorated, her mother became the sole breadwinner of their large family and they moved frequently for her work at small rural schools. As a child, Sylvia dreamed of becoming a concert pianist. She attended Wellington Girls’ College and Wadestown School before passing the examination to enter Auckland Teachers’ Training College. In 1932, she married Keith Henderson, a fellow student, with whom she had three children. She spent many years teaching Maori children, often using pioneering educational techniques that she later described in her 1963 book Teacher and in her autobiography. Her first novel Spinster (1958), published in England, was listed by Time magazine as one of the top 10 books of the year, and was adapted into the 1961 film Two Loves (also known as The Spinster). Her own life story was adapted for the 1985 biographical film Sylvia! Other novels included Incense to Idols (1960), Bell Call (1965), Greenstone (1966) and Myself (1966). She published three volumes of autobiography beginning with I Passed This Way (1979), which won the 1980 New Zealand Book Award for nonfiction. She was awarded the Order of the British Empire in 1982.

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Besprekingen

The first words of Greenstone beautifully compose the scene: “The whare sits in the clearing among its ghosts and rains, memories of passion and Maori curses…”

For the Maori, whose history speaks of warrior spirit and victory, one of those curses is that they have experienced defeat and demoralization during the years before this tale begins. The “clearing” is sited along an ancestral river where whites live in “This Side,” Maori in “That Side,” names giving emphasis to Maori loss and hinting at confined freedom. Sylvia Ashton-Warner’s humorous and gentle yet sometimes violent novel is set at the time of her own childhood during WWI and shortly thereafter. It focuses on the Considines (“Puppa” and “Mumma”), a white couple with a plenitude of white children filling the land, and on their young granddaughter, Huia, who lives with them. Huia is unique among the children because she is great-granddaughter of the current rangatira (Maori chief) and will become “paramount chieftainess” of the river tribes” when he dies.

Huia’s name is that of a bird native to New Zealand that only recently had gone extinct. This, and Huia’s one-quarter Maori ancestry, help make the story seem a drama of modern influence contending with stressed or fading hereditary identity. Whenever Huia crosses the river she experiences “emotional racial transition.” Greenstone’s “greenstone” is a tiki symbolizing familial and tribal history and pride, to be a source of comfort and strength in challenge. Ashton-Warner is attentive to these themes, filling her book with Maori words (glossed at the end), plus songs and chants and tales, including some composed by Puppa. Huia feels great loyalty to Puppa but in no way doubts her heritage is Maori, a feeling that grows as she does.

By the end of Greenstone, Ashton-Warner makes us feel as though we have visited a place that had in it great beauty amidst inherited pain.
… (meer)
 
Gemarkeerd
dypaloh | Oct 8, 2019 |
"I'm enslaved in one vast love affair with seventy childen"
By sally tarbox on 17 Jan. 2014
Format: Paperback
Based on the author's own teaching experience in New Zealand, this novel follows Anna Vorontosov, committed but unconventional infant teacher in a mainly Maori school. Anna's personal life is a mess: she moons over former love Eugene, needs a glass of brandy to make it in to work, and feels a constant failure from the inspectors' visits and the low marks they award her. I found the first part of the book hard going, especially Anna's irritating relationship with new teacher Paul. It was only lifted by the episodes of classroom life and their humour:

"Miss Vontosov, can I leave the axe in here. Seven's brother is trying to chop my little sister's neck off."

As the book goes on, Anna finds a new interest in life, as she starts to develop 'Key Vocabulary' to get her Little Ones reading - words that pertain to things they love or fear, rather than the stilted and meaningless readers issued by the government. But will the inspectors recognise her genius?...
The book really began to take off for me at this point.
… (meer)
1 stem
Gemarkeerd
starbox | 3 andere besprekingen | Jul 10, 2016 |
Written in 1958, Spinster by Sylvia Ashton-Warner is the fictional account of a teacher who recognising that each person has their own personal key vocabulary is able to reach the Maori children in her school who previously had been dismissed as slow learners.

The book is based on Ashton Warner’s own career as a teacher in New Zealand and the reading scheme described is her own highly successful method of teaching reading for which she became internationally known.

As well as fiction, she wrote two autobiographies, had a biography written about her and a film made about her life in 1986.… (meer)
 
Gemarkeerd
ruthmarler | 3 andere besprekingen | Oct 25, 2015 |
Teacher by Sylvia Ashton-Warner is a treatise on teaching disadvantaged children based on a career of working with Maori children. I came across this book in my metadata cleanup at work.

Ashton-Warner describes in her book techniques she used to get reluctant readers, reading. Rather than using the same text book — text books in her case that were often imported from Great Britain — she customized her primers.

She had the radical (and I mean this in the revolutionary sense) idea of asking children which words they wanted to learn how to read and write. The sad thing is that the words many of the children chose were violent ones: ones associated with guns, domestic violence, alcohol, and the other ills that come with poverty and oppression.

For the older readers, Ashton-Warner encouraged her children to write their own stories. These were often done on the blackboard. The stories were then erased at the end of the week, allowing students to start fresh the next week.

But these reading and writing tips are only the first third of the book. The remainder is a mixture of her thoughts on teaching Maori children vs. white children. Unfortunately her observations fall into the idiotic cliches, and it appears despite her years of working with the Maori and learning their language, she never quite got to thinking of them as people — as neighbors, as equals.
… (meer)
1 stem
Gemarkeerd
pussreboots | 3 andere besprekingen | Jan 2, 2015 |

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Statistieken

Werken
12
Ook door
3
Leden
512
Populariteit
#48,444
Waardering
½ 3.7
Besprekingen
10
ISBNs
29
Favoriet
1

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