A little knowledge let loose on an untrained mind: Jim Allen as Educator
Reading Room: A Journal of Art and Culture. 06, 2013, 158-167. Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki
Between 1952 and 1960 Jim Allen worked for the Art and Craft branch of the Department of Education; first in the Far North as a Field Officer, under Gordon Tovey’s Northern Maori Project, an experimental art education initiative, and then from 1956 as Liaison Organiser, Auckland, Although he was not a trained teacher, education was to become a significant focus for the next several years as he moved from working with primary and secondary schools on to tertiary education, becoming a important figure in arts education in New Zealand and Australia. The first step was connecting with the schools in the Far North as part of Tovey’s experimental scheme, and most significantly with Elwyn Richardson at Oruaiti School. For Richardson, the experimentation lay in the integration of all areas of the curriculum. This was put into practice though the creation of a learning environment that went against the formal teaching style of the time where the approach would involve rote learning, copying from the blackboard, and lessons limited to one area at a time delivered in a prescribed order. Richardson dispensed with the prescriptive curriculum dictated to the teacher to deliver to the children, and the ‘local environment became the text book’ as he based education in the real and felt experience of the children.[1]
In 1952 Allen had just returned from London after completing his formal education at the Royal College of Art and needed a job; most of the offers were ‘mainly church work. The kind of criteria for which they were looking for was something I couldn’t accept. They were wanting Madonnas carved with tears and things like that, so I didn’t know what I was doing.’[2] In Wellington on Lambton Quay Allen bumped into Dick Sealy, ‘who’d been a student, another returned service person from Canterbury’ and Sealy took him to meet Gordon Tovey. ‘I met Gordon and he did one of those far away stares, obviously thinking what he was going to do with him, if he was going to do anything with me at all.’[3] Tovey, whose ‘charismatic style of leadership inspired a national network of specialists who transformed drab schools into environments ablaze with life and colour’, had been appointed as Supervisor of Arts and Crafts for the Department of Education in 1946.[4] By the time Allen came along Tovey had artists such as Fred Graham, Ralph Hotere, Katerina Mataira, and Muru Walters working as art advisors, so he had begun to implement plans to get artists into schools. This meeting with Tovey set Allen on the path of educator.
In Allen’s archive there is a copy of the 1957 issue of Viewpoint, the New Zealand Art Teachers Association annual publication. Allen contributed an article called ‘So You Want to Play With Clay’. He writes ‘there is no surer bridge between adults and adolescents than mud.’[5] The article is upbeat and wryly observant of the challenges that children working with clay placed on some; there are ‘those who won’t have it at any price, those who hover on the brink of equating it with the awful consequences with a volatile third form and the enthusiasts…’[6] Allen goes on to describe his first encounter with an ‘enthusiast and one, in particular, who shall be nameless but who, being responsible for my conversion, has made certain of his place in the next world if the principals of a muddied trail of post-primary schools are to be believed.’[7] This unnamed enthusiast is no doubt Elwyn Richardson who Allen describes as greeting him ‘with a happy grin’.[8] The abundant energy of the students harnessed to dig and work the clay to prepare it for use is apparent in the writing, and their enthusiasm for the work is clear. Elsewhere Allen has spoken of the serious fun he and Richardson had working with the children. In an Art New Zealand interview with Wystan Curnow and Robert Leonard in 2000 he described the decision of his and Richardson’s to bring imaginative, spontaneous play into the classroom, how they ‘deliberately set out to re-examine each teaching situation in these terms…Art making was linked to the three Rs and vice versa with amazing results. It was an exploding chain reaction.’[9]
Underpinning Allen’s approach was the fact that he was not a trained teacher, and yet in this role he was working in a teaching environment supporting both teachers and students. Allen was well aware of this. While he had ‘a great deal of curiosity about education’ he had discovered at about the age of 25 when faced with filling in for a sick teacher’s Standard One class that he had ‘none of repertoire teachers draw upon’.[10] This was a quick lesson in the ‘gulf between’ trained teachers and those not trained to teach.[11] In a letter from the archive written to a researcher Allen says, ‘As an untrained teacher I was both advantaged and disadvantaged to fulfill this task. As I wasn’t equipped to teach per se I spent a lot of time observing children particularly at play in break periods. From this observation I believed that if means could be found to bring the imagination play and initiative displayed in the playground into the classroom amazing results could be achieved’[12] Allen and Richardson shared an interest in exploring the possibilities that art and craft presented for teaching and student engagement in general.
On the 4th of August 1953 Allen wrote to Tovey to give him a report of his activities and findings since being in Northland. Allen begins the letter with a relaxed ‘Dick has passed on that you would like some report on how things are going up here.’[13] He proceeds to list the activities that have been undertaken and starting with pottery, which ‘has been the most successful activity’,[14] he expands on each of the activities: pottery, stick figure, fabric printing, lino cuts, bark and wire, wood carving, pumice carving, modeling, stone carving, and includes discussion on how both the teachers and students are responding. The eight-page letter ends with the conclusion that excepting Richardson at Oruaiti and Simpson of Te Kao District High School, the ‘creative activities have had no special significance for teachers, they continue to regard art in all respects as a separate activity and I think will continue to do so until they get some conscious direction from Dept. and Inspection’.[15]
Other letters Allen wrote during his time in the Far North included letters to Tovey and others requesting tools and materials and giving estimates of cost, accompanying packages of students’ screen printed textiles Allen sent to Tovey and others as examples, and mileage both done and estimated most often to the Public Service garage. A letter to Tovey dated 18 August 1953 declares he has done 2,790 miles ‘at the time of writing with the addition of a probable 300 miles’ in his Public Service garage vehicle expected to be done by the end of term.[16] All these letters, preserved as carbon copies in a letter-writing book housed at the E. H. McCormack Research Library as part of Allen’s archive, give an inkling of the distance Allen traveled and the ground he covered in his role as Field Officer. In effect they communicate the general mobility that characterized Allen’s life at the time; expressed physically in kilometers driven, and philosophically in the expansion of Allen’s learning about approaches to teaching.
At the conclusion of his work as Liaison Organiser Art and Craft Branch in December 1960 Allen wrote a Report on the Teaching of Art and Craft in Post-Primary Schools to the District Senior Inspector. He says that he was ‘greatly concerned and disturbed by three factors in the teaching of this subject in our schools.’[17] First was the lack of adequate professional background and limited appreciation of the potential of creative activities; second, is the absence of understanding of the subject at secondary school level by principals, heads of schools and teachers of other subjects; and thirdly, pupil attitudes. For Allen ‘the root cause of these three problems…rests with the inadequate and extremely limited professional background and qualification obtained by teachers at the Canterbury University School of Fine Art and the Auckland University School of Fine Art, before entering the service.’[18] This lack of professional competence was a problem in the delivery of art at Secondary schools at the time, as well as in art school graduates who went on to teachers college. There was a lack of ‘fundamental… knowledge and absence of philosophic basis…’ so that it required the introduction of ‘professional studies along with those of immediate pedagogical concern.’[19] In his report Allen went on to call the ‘standards and philosophies’ that determine art teaching ‘derive from the art school background…which is openly acknowledged as being “academic Victorianism” in outlook.’[20]
It was also in 1960 that Allen began teaching at tertiary level when he joined the Elam School of Fine Arts.[21] Again it seems he arrived at, and contributed to, a time of change in art education. In 1997 correspondence with a researcher he writes, ‘When I first joined Elam (1960) senior staff made a concerted effort to prevent students from reading books and using the library. It was accepted that a little knowledge let loose on an untrained mind was a recipe for disaster. If uncontrolled it could only lead to argument and rejection of staff teaching.’[22] Once again Allen was faced with a rigid and joyless educational environment, one that seems to have been afraid of the consequences of creative and critical enquiry. By now Allen had formed an approach to teaching that embraced an explorative approach to making and doing, one that was equally encouraging of critical reflection through questioning and discussion. In the same 1997 correspondence he writes of two attitudes fundamental to him: ‘Attitude 1. Avoid the closed mind…. Attitude 2. Support and encourage and provide security towards developing confidence to step off into the unknown.’ He adds, from his personal experience that he ‘was well aware that teaching was a dangerous practice capable of closing minds as well as opening up the vision to limitless possibilities.’
In light of this Allen’s ‘personal teaching direction was to set up an active creative supportive environment’ one that was free from ridicule where ‘criticism was utilized as a constructive element. My own development paralleled that of the students – new media exploration and I guess developing a more thoughtful and reflective approach to what was going on, increasingly preoccupied with the dominance of conceptual concerns.’[23] This plus the updating of the Elam library holdings, with serials in particular must have galvanized the atmosphere at Elam.
By 1975, when American art critic and curator Lucy Lippard visited New Zealand at the time of the Auckland Art Gallery’s showing of Some Recent American Art a lot of the work being made was comparable, in that it was questioning the conditions of its own making, to the work of conceptual artists in America. In her response to her visit to New Zealand on the occasion of this exhibition written for the Auckland City Art Gallery Quarterly Lippard noted that she ‘was, rather condescendingly, amazed to discover how well-informed about, even familiar with this work [from the Some Recent American Art exhibition] were the New Zealand artists seeing it for the first time; much of the art being made in Auckland now either bypasses or is already extending the issues exposed here.’[24] A little knowledge and a supportive critical approach let loose on untrained minds spurred a richly productive time, one that is acknowledged as a significant period for art in New Zealand. For Allen it seems evident that his time in Oruaiti watching and contributing to Richarson’s own exploration of teaching that broke from the prescribed delivery was the catalyst for an approach to education that was open ended; ‘I think Oruaiti gave me the sense to recognise differences.’[25]
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[1] Narrator in The Song of the Bird, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WYMdmvinFIM
[2] Jim Allen, transcript from Interview with Jim Allen, Janita Craw and Victoria O’Sullivan – June 14, 2013, unpublished.
[3] Ibid
[4] Carol Henderson. 'Tovey, Arthur Gordon - Tovey, Arthur Gordon', from the Dictionary of New Zealand Biography. Te Ara - the Encyclopedia of New Zealand, updated 30-Oct-2012. URL: http://www.TeAra.govt.nz/en/biographies/5t17/tovey-arthur-gordon
[5] Jim Allen ‘So You Want to Play With Clay’, Viewpoint, New Zealand Art Teachers Association, 1957, unpaginated.
[6] - [8] Ibid
[9] Contact: Jim Allen talks to Wystan Curnow & Robert Leonard, Art New Zealand, Winter 2000, pp48-49.
[10] Jim Allen, transcript from Interview with Jim Allen
[11] Ibid
[12] Jim Allen letter to Bevan Mudie and Jon Brake, dated 4 September 1997,3.
[13] Jim Allen, letter to Gordon Tovey, 4 August 1953.
[14] - [15] Ibid
[16] Jim Allen, letter to Gordon Tovey, 4 August 1953
[17] Jim Allen, letter to Mr. A. Thom, 16 December, 1960.
[18] - [20] Ibid.
[21] Allen taught at Elam from 1960-76 and then at Sydney College of Arts from 1977-87 where he was the Founding Head of the School of Art.
[22] Allen, letter to Mudie and Brake, p.3.
[23] Allen letter to Mudie and Bevan, p.5.
[24] Lucy R. Lippard "Notes on seeing Some Recent American Art in New Zealand", Auckland City Art Gallery Quarterly: 59, 1975, 2-3.
[25] Allen, undated letter to Margaret MacDonald.