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New South Wales
Seminars
Reports
Executive |
Reports
WEF
New South Wales is involved in the following interrelated projects:
- Histories of
Progressive Education and the role of WEF in Progressive Education
discourses and practice
The following article about the WEF NSW
Summer Schools may be accessed in full through the website link below.
Traversing Personal and Public
Boundaries: Discourses of Engagement in New Education 1930s-1980s
Margaret H. White
Australian Centre for Educational Studies
Macquarie University, Sydney
Abstract
Within the discourse of the New Education Fellowship (NEF) in Australia
in the mid-twentieth century, active engagement in creative recreation
and discussion of social and political issues was highly valued. Members
were exhorted to traverse personal boundaries by participating in
practical and creative arts. In this discourse, NEF Creative Arts Summer
Schools held in regional centres of New South Wales became a means of
re-creation of the self from passive observer to active participant.
Opportunities to envisage the perspectives of others through engagement
with public boundaries of race and ethnicity were created by encouraging
a diverse student population. These initiatives are shown to have taken
place in response to the circulation of new ideas and practices in an
international context. In the process of engaging as individuals in
mutual participation, students shaped their own experiences and the
community itself. This paper is concerned with articulating ways in
which new meanings were negotiated within networks that were engaged in
developing new ideas and practices in education. Some insights into
these networks are gained, particularly regarding the adoption of ideas
discussed at international conferences in local practices. The creation
of the Summer Schools is seen to have been an energetic response to a
number of interconnected ideas and circumstances. Education was extended
beyond the walls of institutions and the boundaries of conventional
schooling both literally and metaphorically. Relationships between
psychoanalysis and art were central to perceptions of freedom and
self-expression that came to be viewed as essential in the education of
self-controlled, democratic citizens. Wenger’s theory of Communities of
Practice assists in the analysis of interviews with former students and
staff of the Summer Schools which reveal ways that engagement in the
Summer schools shaped personal experiences and the NEF community itself.
Link to Full Text in Paedagogica Historica
http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/content~content=a769308436~db=all~order=page (Link
opens in new window).
- Constellations of Children’s Art
website
http://www.lib.mq.edu.au/ccap (Link
opens in new window).
This website developed from an International Exhibition of
Children’s Art at the 41st WEF conference in Sun City South Africa
in 2001.
One purpose of this on-line exhibition is to show a diversity of
contexts where children are involved in making art. In particular,
contrasts in cultural and teaching contexts significantly influence
children’s artmaking.
- Drawing Australia
WEF NSW supports Drawing Australia, a teaching, research and
community outreach project concerned with drawing as a way of
learning for people of all ages.
http://www.aces.mq.edu.au/drawingaustralia
(Link opens in new window).
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