Welby Ings
Pukeatua-raised author, designer, film director and AUT professor Welby Ings was near illiterate until 15 – now he goes to bed with poets and authors.
Welby Ings
“Every night, I am in an intimate relationship with something someone has written,” Ings said.
“It was difficult for me to undo the damage of being taught I was a ‘backward’ reader. It was hard to build confidence after years of being described as ‘falling behind’ and ‘failing’.”
Once expelled from Te Awamutu College, Ings was back in town earlier this month, educating others at the Continuing Education group.
Described as a disobedient thinker, Ings is a renowned speaker and educational reformer. He sees productive disobedience as behaviour that pushes our thinking and action into new and unconsidered realms.
Ings spoke about invisible intelligence; a subject he has recently written a book about.
Next month he leaves for a lecture tour of Spain, Poland, Germany and the United Kingdom, where he is speaking at conferences on the nature of thought.
“I was driving around the back streets [of Te Awamutu] here today and thinking, that this town gave me opportunities at a time when I didn’t see it,” Ings said.
“I left here expelled and angry. But I also encountered people who were helpful. I’m a happy man and I live a really great life – but I realise it’s a life enabled.”
In his talk, Ings covered topics including what it is to fall behind, the tension that exists inside schooling, neurodiversity, the nature of intelligence and creativity – and New Zealand’s “extraordinary” education system.
“I believe all people are neurodiverse. None of us think in the same way.”
He hoped his address might put an arm around people’s shoulders, acknowledging people with vastly difference intellects were in his audience.
Ings spoke about several different kinds of intelligence, non-linear thinking, embodied thinking, translative thinking and slow, reflective thought.
He has a deep respect for teachers.
Welby Ings returned to Te Awamutu to share his knowledge at Continuing Education. Photo: Jesse Wood
“Some people teach inside the system and sometimes people teach as grandparents and peers,” he said.
Ings also argued that literacy is poorly assessed in formal education.
“When I started teaching, I was in Otara, during the dawn raids. I had classes with six and seven year old kids.
“I had a ‘special’ class, of kids who were considered largely ‘illiterate’. But they weren’t illiterate. Many of them spoke three languages and they could pun between languages.
“If an idea couldn’t be expressed in one language they would jump sideways and explain it in another.”
Translation is one of the most complex literary skills we have, he said.
“These kids were displaying, in plain sight, the ability to translate, but [according to the system] it didn’t count. What counted was the ability to read and write English.”
Ings likens the complexity of teaching to being a “constant gardener”, a term he took from a movie of that name.
“In a garden there will be marigolds, daffodils, tomatoes and pumpkins and they will be trying to grow in the same soil at the same time,” Ings said.
“They are all different, they need different things and they develop at different times. They have diverse strengths and vulnerabilities, so they require different kinds of care.”
Ings argues that people should not be taught in standardised “single solution” systems like the science of reading phonics. They require multiple approaches.
Ings learned to read via the shapes of words. He sees them as blocks and recognises a spelling error because it doesn’t “look right”.
“But when you have an education system that reduces learning to standardised approaches, you limit the dexterity teachers need,” he said. “Complex learners rely on an educator with 50 tools in the toolbox, not one.”
Teaching is a complex profession, irrespective of the age of the people with whom you work.
“Be they children of five – or adults completing doctoral degrees. Your job is to understand how each individual thinks,” Ings said.
“You are not filling a head with content, you are growing skills; perceptively working with not one standardised mind, but 20 non-standardised minds.”
Welby Ings spoke at Continuing Education in Te Awamutu earlier this month. Photo: Jesse Wood
