Welby Ings - Disobedient Teaching: Surviving and Creating Change in Education

It is late at night. Outside you can hear the hum of commuters as they make their exodus from the city. Their tyres swish through a black skin of water still clinging to the street. I am sitting here unsure how to begin talking about productive disobedience and how it re-forms the world in which we live.

In my office the light is dim. On the walls there are small objects eclectic scavengings, the detritus of many journeys. These are gifts I have been given because students across 40 years of teaching have known of my penchant for the unusual and neglected. They are poignant things: an old felt heart stuffed with lavender, a Julia Kristeva voodoo doll, a broken bicycle lamp brought back from the ferocity of a Soviet winter, and flowers now drained of colour, grown delicate and brittle with age. Among these objects there are two photographs, and perhaps we might begin by talking about these.

The first shows a boy. He is 10 years old. It was taken in the 1960s. In this picture he sits at a regulation wooden school desk looking up at the camera. The pencil poised in his hand is not his own, nor is the book in which he is pretending to write. Behind him, artfully arranged on the wall, are some paintings of mushrooms, but these are not his either.

The boys father and mother were shearing contractors who worked the woolsheds of Ngaroma, Arohena, Puahue and Parawera places most people have never heard of. At the time the photo was taken he couldnt read or write. In fact he wouldnt be able to do these things until he was 14. He was destined to live out his years in school at the bottom of the class. When he left primary school he would receive a certificate for being the bin monitor. Four years later he would be expelled from college. Although he would eventually enter teacher training, he would be suspended halfway through the programme. After his probation year of teaching he would be refused certification and he would resign. Although he would return to teaching, in subsequent years he would receive letters of admonishment from Education Boards and boards of governors. All of these were related to his propensity to break rules. There would be pickets outside one of the schools in which he taught and the protesters would demand his removal.

He would spend a lot of time fighting.

The second photo is a page torn out of Time magazine. It is of a man in his fifties who has just received an award. Hes a professor. In the years that follow this photograph he would be given medals for his research and teaching and his PhD students would become thought leaders who changed organisations around the world.

His trajectory would be a blaze of acknowledgement. Although he would go to the same teachers training college as the boy in the other photograph, he would graduate with distinction. Across his years in primary, intermediate and secondary teaching, educators would be ferried through his classrooms to watch the innovative approaches he took to developing learning. He would become one of the architects of the New Zealand technology curriculum, he would found an alternative school, and in 2004 he would be awarded the countrys first PhD in creative practice. Today he is an advisor on creativity to a range of international business and educational organisations. The films he has created have screened at Cannes and Berlin and have been shortlisted for the Oscars. In 2001, in recognition of his contribution to education, he was awarded the inaugural New Zealand Prime Ministers Supreme Award for Teaching Excellence.