Meeting with the Old Guard

Part 1:
On Friday afternoon, I had a tea party and invited Ruth Gamberg, Winnie Kwak and Meredith Hutchings, 3 of the 4 authors of the book "Learning and Loving it: Theme Studies in the Classroom", the book about my school. Heather B also came along, and we had lots of fun telling stories about the early days in the school. I taped the conversation, and here is what transpired.

When Winnie (W) first came to the school in 1980, it was run by an Education professor named Anthony Barton, who had been in charge since the early 70's. Anthony Barton wrote the whole syllabus, week by week, day by day. It contained the main ideas, suggestions as to what to teach and examples to use. Judith Newman was lecturing about the Whole Language approach, and Winnie took a course from her.  She learned about holistic learning, the theme approach and all about how kids learn. They need a context, and whole environment, “not just one little piece here, one little piece there, you learn everything, you grow up in this context. The theme approach seemed to be a completely natural approach, I didn’t know any better.”

When I asked her to describe Barton’s approach: She said, "It was called East to West…children were read to a lot, and when they started to write, it had to be really neat and tidy – kids had to think great thoughts, formulate them in their heads and then write them down perfectly”

One of Ruth’s first memories is that there was a coffin in the school, but she has no idea why.

Meredith said that Barton wanted to offer something different to the public school.  There were about 30 kids in 1980, and it was situated in a long building, since torn down, on corner of Oxford and Coburg. In the summer of 1980, the school moved  to the  Education  building right on the Quad. Parents/board were wanting a change – they wanted the children to learn something about their own environment. The Nova Scotia theme was born, Winnie was hired, and she and the other tteachers came up with a whole new curriculum. “This is your task, figure it out”. They came up with a programme and discussed it with the School committee. The first year was “something else” as they tried hard to fit in with the new view,  and had monthly meetings to report back to committee. They got lots of input, bounced back ideas, mistakes, and got advice. There was not much talk about methods of teaching. School committee consisted of parents, teachers and faculty (one from MSVU).

After a while the committee support changed to only organizational support, which is when Ruth became involved. She was assigned the School Committee as part of her departmental duties. 

At this point, the school had the full age range of age 5 to Olds. Tuition was minimal as  Dalhousie covered teachers' salaries then. The next year Gail Waddington started teaching, and another theme, "Living Things" was born. The themes were gradually developed year by year. Winnie loved Britain's  math programme, but was not really aware of theme approach being practiced there at that time. When Meredith (M) joined in October 1982 she felt like she was coming into something established; a rich atmosphere. There was lots of talk about holistic, integrated learning, but although similar things were happening in other places, DUS' theme approach was definitely homegrown.