Children of color had little to identify with and little incentive to learn from the sterile text or European urban illustrations of the available primers. She worked during a time when reading primers still depicted only white, middle- class children. Her methods strongly influenced many other teachers who found themselves in cross-cultural settings and who wished to avoid “colonizing” the children. In the most important of them, Teacher, she tells of her struggle to teach beginning reading to very young Maori children, who found the books and lessons used with white children incomprehensible and boring. Ashton-Warner wrote eleven books (1959-1979). New Zealand’s Sylvia Ashton-Warner exemplified the reflective teacher, studying the response of the children in her classroom to her work, and modifying it in turn so that their learning would be optimum.
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