Changing the shape of teaching

In Ms Richmond’s Grade 2 class of ’65, East Devonport Primary School, Wesley Imms got an education that set him on course for life.

His young teacher had just taken up her post in Tasmania after a sojourn in the UK, where she had soaked up some edgy educational thinking. The local schools superintendent happened to be absent, and with the principal on board, there was no one to thwart her then radical ambitions.

“She decided to turn the classroom into a ship for a year, and she sailed us around the world in the SS Discovery,” recalls Associate Professor Imms, from the Melbourne Graduate School of Education.

Day One the kids threw streamers out the windows as their parents waved them off. “I was the quartermaster – I had a little hat and used to ring the bell.” The purser would collect all the lunches as the pupils came aboard, passing them out when they weighed anchor for lunch. Lessons waited in every port.