Welby Ings

Welby Ings’ teaching experience in South Auckland nearly 50 years ago taught him a lot about the way we measure intelligence — and literacy, too.

Now a professor of narrative design and the author of a new book called Invisible Intelligence, he writes about how and why those measures too often miss the mark.

In July 1977, a small letter arrived. It was written in pencil on refill paper. It was from James, a seven-year-old student I had taught at Mayfield Primary School in Ōtara during the Dawn Raids.

I had resigned from teaching a few weeks earlier and moved back to the family farm. My exit had been accompanied by a florid letter of resignation to the South Auckland Education Board, explaining — in indelicate terms — why the teaching profession had become untenable.

I suspect it ended up in the bin.

But I still have James’s letter. It became my conscience. It reminded me not to walk away from something I should be fixing. He asked me to come back . . . and I didn’t.

James was one of 28 kids in my class. They were wonderful, culturally diverse children who had been corralled into the bottom stream and given to me as the teacher who had got into trouble the year before for arguing with the senior district inspector.

Among other things, in James’s class I taught reading — not as a one-hour allocated subject but as an integrated part of using and understanding language. Every few months, there was a mandatory test where we were expected to “measure” each child on their reading progress. Everybody in the junior school sat the test, and the process was supervised by the senior teacher whose job it was to collate the results.

I didn’t like the test. It measured English word recognition, and the kids had already learned to be scared of it. But I did what I was told because I thought I was powerless to question. I submitted my assessments, and the next day, the senior teacher arrived in my class and delivered her affront in a hiss of indignation.

It seems that James and a few other children had gained better marks than her students (who had been gleaned from the “top” tier of the population). She knew the children in Room 3 were “poor” readers, and she told me she wouldn’t send falsified grades to the principal. With a harrumph, she rounded up five of the kids, lined them up on the seats outside her classroom, and, one by one, took each of them inside to put things to rights.

The reading tests were about 10 minutes long, and when she returned to my classroom, she handed me the grades. James’s assessment had dropped. He was good at reading (including the pictures), but a senior teacher had tested him, and it turned out he wasn’t.

I took the mark sheet with the scratched-out grade and watched her as she walked out the door. Then, ashamed and defeated, I went over to the couch and sat down beside him. He was crying. He said: “Oku ‘ikai ke u vale.” (I’m not stupid.)

My heart felt like lead. “You are a wonderful reader,” I said. “You help me with my spelling.” (It was true. He used to delight in correcting me, so there was a bit of staged theatre in the teaching.)

But it wasn’t enough.

Of course it wasn’t. Many years later, when I remember this incident, I still feel ashamed. I know that I should have stood up for him because something was systemically wrong. But I only came to understand what it was in retrospect.

You see, James understood the world in two languages — Tongan and English. They wove through his everyday literacy. He and other bilingual kids joked, punned and translated, connecting and playing with meaning on the hoof. Although translation is among the most challenging of literacy skills, his extraordinary ability was not factored into the formal ways that New Zealand schools measured literacy.

James and a classmate at Mayfield Primary School in Ōtara, in 1977. (Photo supplied)

James’s letter to Welby: “All you were was a lovely lovely gentle man.”

Even today, it is still the child with a tight monolingual skill set who gets lauded in the formal assessments. This is because literacy, as it is tested in schools, doesn’t really mean literacy at all. What it means is learning to read and write in English, the language of the dominant culture.

The word literacy in our education system carves off only a corner of the deeper definition provided by UNESCO, which describes it as “the ability to identify, understand, interpret, create, communicate and compute, using printed and written materials associated with varying contexts”.

I can’t understand why our current framing of literacy is still so culturally selective. Aotearoa New Zealand is a country with three official languages, but we factor only one into our assessments.

To be literate in this country is not to be English. It is to be a New Zealander.

Helping people to develop literacy involves appreciating the unique nature of who we are. This does not mean removing readers for junior children because they don’t fit the phonetic framework and sequencing for decoding English words. If we are to teach phonics in our country, then it should not be policing the perimeters of monolingualism.

Words like karanga, wharenui, hongi, karakia and kai are not foreign. They are part of the unique way that we speak with and about ourselves. Children read Māori place names every day, including the names of many of their schools. Most of our rivers, lakes and mountains are Māori words, and our organisations increasingly have their names in dual languages.

Literacy is complex and wonderful because cultures are complex and wonderful. Helping our children become literate requires more than a generic template that guards itself against disruption.

Structured literacy has much to recommend it. It can be used to develop skills like phonemic awareness, phonics and decoding. But people are neuro and culturally diverse. All people. We all make meaning differently.

We are not helped by inflamed debates in the court of public opinion that turn the complexity of learning into polarised camps that promote “structured” or “balanced” approaches to teaching reading. We are worth more than exclusive, mandated solutions.

Associate Professor Rebecca Jesson describes it like this: “Drawing from multiple knowledge systems means that teachers have access to a wider repertoire so that they can design the lessons for the children they are working with, depending on what those children need.”

In education, territorial fundamentalism is dangerous.

I know this because I didn’t learn to read until I was 15. My childhood was accompanied by “saviour solutions” and I failed, and failed, and failed . . .

In the end, any belief I had in my ability to understand written language died. I entered secondary school with something called an 8-year reading age. Why? Because I largely recognised words as shapes. I looked at ascenders and descenders — at forms rather than sounds. Even today, I identify a word that is incorrectly spelled because it doesn’t “look” right.

Over 50 years, I’ve taught students who ascertain meaning from written language in diverse ways. Some of them understand what’s written by connecting image and text in complex ways. Some of these kids grew up to be graphic novelists, filmmakers, editors, language revivalists, and directors of advertising agencies.

They were never “behind”, even though tests told them they were. They had different milestones on different roads. They developed skills in reading because wonderful teachers helped them, using a spectrum of sophisticated skills.

Those teachers exercised dexterity and agency, and they did not allow their tool boxes to be emptied and refilled with a single, externally resourced device that had little to do with the context in which children learned. They knew that a book about why dogs sniff bottoms, or a taniwha, or a bigger digger could be a source of strategically placed wonder, excitement and tenacity. They knew that passion, hope and a love of reading erupt beyond scientific method.

They understood teaching as an art.

Today, I have a wonderful life because of such teachers. I am a professor of narrative design. I write books and films, and I examine doctorates across the globe. Here in Aotearoa, three-quarters of my doctoral candidates are bilingual. Among these are gifted Māori and Pacific scholars who think inside and across languages. They are creative thinkers whose literacy extends to imagery and sound — and this enables them to orchestrate extraordinary levels of translative intelligence.

Invisible Intelligence is Welby Ing’s second book.

We live in a country that is nourished by two proud trajectories of scholarship: western thought and mātauranga Māori.

Broadly, the western tradition positions scientific thinking at the apex of cultural evolution. Institutionally, knowledge in this system tends to be formatted into discrete disciplines, and complex problem-solving gravitates towards such systematic approaches.

Conversely, mātauranga Māori understands knowledge and learning as holistic and dynamic. It encompasses wisdom, understanding, spirituality, cultural practices, and values. These two traditions are not binaries. They are taonga. We are blessed as a people to have the agency of both. What is born from their synergy warrants respect.

By the time a child leaves compulsory education in Aotearoa at 16, they have spent two-thirds of their life inside formal education. We must be sure that they leave the school gates with their dignity and complexity intact.

They need to feel empowered because they’ve experienced their diversity and uniqueness as something worthy of respect and resourcing. This is because they will need to face an untemplated, culturally dynamic future that requires dexterity and belief in their own intelligence.

Intelligence that has not been templated into something invisible.

Welby Ings is a best-selling writer and celebrated New Zealand filmmaker. Invisible Intelligence, just published, is the second book in a planned trilogy on creative thinking and educational reform. It follows Disobedient Teaching (Otago University Press, 2017).

Welby is a professor of narrative design at Auckland University of Technology. He is the recipient of the Prime Minister’s Award for Tertiary Teaching Excellence and the NZ Government Award for Sustained Tertiary Teaching Excellence. In 2013, he was awarded the inaugural AUT medal for his contribution to learning and research.

E-Tangata, 2025