The Faculty of Arts and Education Research Seminar Series

Event Details:

Date: Tuesday, 29 April 2025

Time: 5:00pm - Refreshements

5.30 pm - Lecture

Location: Seminar Room 265, Building 201, 10 Symonds Street, Auckland

Topic: Children without schools: Palmerston North’s 1942 Emergency Education Scheme

When the military took over schools in Palmerston North and Feilding in 1942, it provoked an educational experiment that had lasting effects on Aotearoa’s education system – even prompting an admiring report from an Australian Minister. Children took to the streets in an Emergency Education Scheme, making the town their classroom, replacing teacher-led education with self-governance, and forming connections with the community and to local sites. As it turns out, the military takeover couldn’t have happened in a better place. Palmerston North and Feilding were at the forefront of change in educational thought in the 1940s, which no doubt contributed to the success of the experiment. The new and innovative Intermediate School had just opened in Palmerston North, and Feilding was the home of the country’s first state-funded Community Centre, an experiment in community and adult education. This talk will outline how the forces of war combined with educational change were the catalyst for leading educational thinkers and practitioners to create something remarkable in the Manawatu community, and for Aotearoa New Zealand.

Presenters

• Dr Molly Mullen, Senior Lecturer, Critical Studies in Education

Dr Molly Mullen is a senior lecturer in applied theatre with over ten years’ experience producing theatre education, youth theatre and community arts projects in the UK and Aotearoa New Zealand. Her research examines the experiences of artists and arts organisations as they work towards social change within particular funding and policy contexts. Her creative-practice-based projects explore issues related to economies, ecologies, community and well-being.

• Dr Frances Kelly, Senior Lecturer, Critical Studies in Education

Dr Frances Kelly is a Senior Lecturer in Critical Studies in Education in the Faculty of Arts and Education at Waipapa Taumata Rau | University of Auckland. Frances’ research is primarily in the fields of higher education and the history of education. Her interests span spatial and material histories of schools and universities, mid-century educational experiments in education, education for participation in social democratic societies, school publications, and nature study in Aotearoa New Zealand.

• Dr Kirsten Locke, Associate Professor, Critical Studies in Education

Dr Kirsten Locke is Associate Professor at the School of Critical Studies in the Faculty of Arts and Education at Waipapa Taumata Rau | University of Auckland. Her work calls on the history of educational ideas and the philosophy and theory of education to provide insights about and challenges to orthodox thinking in education that spans compulsory and university contexts. Kirsten’s research work focuses on the unheard and the invisible in education. One strain of this thinking is in her focus on women’s voices in academia and the affective dimensions to the joys, sorrows, and mundanities of what it means to engage with the university. Another focus is on the historical and philosophical conceptual architecture of western philosophy and the role these concepts play in providing education as we know it, its character, contradictions, and energies.