Fellowship launched in memory of Tony Holmes—a devoted teacher and educationist
A fellowship and two prizes have been established in honour of the late Tony Holmes who was a co-founder of Victoria University’s Institute for Early Childhood Studies.
Tony Holmes was many things—in his own words: a scientist, social scientist, and educationist—and the last of these by far the most important. He was passionate about education, and especially about early childhood education (ECE).
His wife, Emeritus Professor Janet Holmes, says the Fellowship and prizes will be awarded annually.
The Fellowship is for a practitioner with a project which will benefit ECE and will be based at Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington’s Faculty of Education for a period of up to three months.
The prizes are aimed at encouraging students, and especially Pasifika students, in ECE.
“It’s a chance to preserve the memory of Tony and is a fitting way to mark the first anniversary of his death this week.”
Janet says she first met Tony at Leeds University in 1965, and they were married four years later in 1969.
In 1970, she was offered a job in Aotearoa and Tony obtained a job at the Central Institute of Technology in Petone as a Chemistry teacher.
Tony enrolled for a Master of Science in Chemistry at the same time.
“After four years of teaching chemistry he was totally over it, and when I got pregnant, he immediately offered to give up work and look after our first son, ” Janet says.
While looking after his son he enrolled in a Sociology Honours degree which he greatly enjoyed, but he found his lifelong vocation when he enrolled his son at the Wilton Playcentre, Janet says.
“As a parent helper there he was welcomed with open arms—a man! And a scientist!
“On one occasion I remember he and the kids created a maze of tunnels with cardboard boxes which encompassed the whole playcentre—people used to say they knew when Tony was on duty simply by the time it took to clear up.”
This experience led Tony to a position as a playcentre supervisor, an early childhood teacher certificate, and a 12-week te reo Māori language immersion programme, before a job as a teacher educator at Wellington Teachers College kickstarted his very successful career in early childhood education.
“Tony was totally committed to early childhood education.
“He went to Scandinavia, the UK, and all over the USA and Canada studying indigenous peoples’ education. He came back full of ideas for informing his teaching and research.”
In 1994 when the Teachers College was absorbed into Victoria University of Wellington, Tony, alongside now Acting Dean of the Faculty of Education, Professor Carmen Dalli, launched the idea for an Institute for Early Childhood Studies.
“Tony and I wrote the proposal for the Institute together,” Professor Dalli says. “He was very forward thinking and from early on also wanted the Institute to be a virtual repository for resources—he had gone on a study visit just before we started planning the Institute proposal and came back with lots of ideas of what we should do.”
Emeritus Professor Helen May, the first New Zealand professorial Chair in Early Childhood Education at Victoria University Wellington and a good friend of Tony’s, says it was Tony who had the idea to develop a webpage for the Institute.
“It was 1995, I did not know what that even was!
“This was before the University even had a webpage—we were at the forefront.”
It is this same forward-thinking that Janet hopes the new Fellowship and prizes will both honour, and encourage.
“We hope that the Fellowship will allow the recipient time for research and reflection, leading to recommendations for pedagogical or policy changes that will benefit early childhood education and care in New Zealand. The overall goal is to promote ongoing study and research on the practice, organisation, and philosophy of early childhood education”.
The Fellowship is open to current practitioners with preference given to proposals in the field of nurturing language skills, including skills in more than one language, and especially te reo Māori and Pasifika languages.
We are incredibly grateful to Janet for her generous and thoughtful gift, and look forward to working alongside the Holmes family in honouring Tony’s memory.