Sylvia Ashton-Warner (1908-84), a New Zealand teacher and writer, was well known internationally during her life-time. The first accounts of her theory to appear outside New Zealand were in the form of a novel, Spinster (1958). Translated into many languages, it was made into a Hollywood movie. Ashton-Warner’s non-fiction book about her teaching method, Teacher (1963) appeared in seventeen languages. Yet today, her 11 books are all out of print. 2008 marked the centennial of her birth, and a conference held to mark this brought together local and international literary and educational researchers, as well as former pupils, colleagues and family members. Overseas writers have portrayed Ashton-Warner as a solitary, persecuted campaigner for progressive education in a hostile environment. My aim in this paper is to challenge the impression that she was “in contradiction with the time and place in which she lived” (Clemens, 1996, 23). Ashton-Warner claimed her methods to have been rejected by New Zealand’s education authorities and publishers. In fact she had published an early draft of her teaching scheme in 1955-56 in eight installments in the New Zealand Educational Institute (teachers’ union) magazine, National Education. These first articles were highly recommended in New Zealand teachers’ colleges (Hood, 1988). Several years later, an edited, but almost identical, version of the scheme appeared in the U.S.A. as the first part of Teacher (McDonald, 2008; Middleton, 2006; Stead and Gottlieb, 2008). Sylvia Ashton-Warner herself, as have many of her readers, frequently claimed her educational ideas to be “in contradiction with the time and place in which she lived” (Clemens, 1996, 23). This paper takes a different view, namely that “an educational theory grows where it is planted, soaking up the nutrients in the local soil, turning to the local light” (Grumet,1988, 14), demonstrating how, as a teacher, an educational writer and a theorist, the persona Sylvia Ashton Warner was produced in, and not in spite of, New Zealand. Through archival research, it traces the influence of progressive (or “new” education), changing theories of culture and race in the Native School system, and relations between these during World War Two. Drawing on geographical theory (Bachelard, 2002), the second part “zooms in” on the schoolrooms, hills and sheds in which Sylvia Ashton Warner read, thought and wrote these texts, finding pathways connecting the reading-writing- thinking Sylvia on her bush-clad hilltops and inside her haunted shacks with wider metropolitan networks of educational thought.

To identify ideas available to Ashton-Warner in the settings in which she lived, taught, and wrote, it was necessary to explore a wide range of archival texts: academic, political, professional and popular. Educational theories flow between academic and wider public domains, infusing research reports, curriculum documents, teachers’ magazines, conference presentations, parliamentary debates and popular media. Politically mandated educational theories colour the gaze of authorities. As performative scripts, educational theories are enacted in everyday classroom settings. The spatial arrangements of classrooms, the activities and equipment in them, are “stagings”, or enactments, of theory. In the 1930s-50s academic publishing in New Zealand was minimal (Middleton, 2006) and intellectual engagements with educational ideas were expressed in teachers’ magazines, Inspectors Reports, conference proceedings, or policy documents. To uncover the intellectual context in which Ashton-Warner’s ideas formed, it was important to study multiple archival documents, including curricula, and reports of Ministers and Inspectors.

To locate Sylvia Ashton Warner as a New Zealand educational theorist, the “localisation in the spaces of our intimacy is more urgent than determination of dates” (Bachelard, 2002, 50). We create our “selves”, or identities, in particular social, geographical and cultural settings. Sylvia Henderson, a teacher in a Native School, dreamed and wrote her persona as Sylvia Ashton Warner, novelist and educational theorist, in, (and not in spite of), her isolated rural settings amongst Maori during the Second World War. The places in which she lived, dreamed, read, thought, loved, and wrote should not be seen as isolated cells or containers. There were flight-paths connecting the haunted hills, classrooms and houses with wider metropolitan networks of educational thought. Conceptualising Sylvia Ashton Warner as a New Zealand educational theorist, knowing her place, raises questions about “the spatiality of the production of knowledge itself” (Massey, 2005, 63).