Sylvia Ashton-Warner letters to Selma Wassermann

Selma Wassermann is professor emerita in the faculty of education at Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, Canada. She has taught in elementary schools in New York and California, as well as at Newark State College (Kean University) and Hofstra University. A recipient of the University Excellence in Teaching Award, she has published widely. Wasserman was a close friend of Sylvia Ashton-Warner, and worked with her at Simon Fraser University for a period of two years. They corresponded regularly until Warner's death in 1984.

Sylvia Constance Ashton-Warner (Sylvia Ashton-Warner was her chosen pen-name) was a New Zealand novelist, non-fiction writer, poet, pianist and leader in the field of childhood education. Her theories on child-based approaches to the teaching of reading and writing, are still acknowledged, debated and practiced internationally.

Warner was born on December 17, 1908, in Stratford, New Zealand. She was the daughter of Francis Ashton Warner, a bookkeeper, and Margaret Maxwell, a schoolteacher. Ashton-Warner was one of ten children. Sylvia attended Wairarapa College in Masterton, 1926–1927 and Auckland Teachers' Training College, 1928–1931. She chose teaching as a career partly because it was familiar to her from childhood days spent in her mother’s classroom, and partly because it gave her a chance to teach her passions of art and music. During most of her teaching career, Warner worked for the Native Schools programme teaching in schools in Horoera, Pipiriki, Waiomatatini and Omahu. During her time at these schools Warner developed her ideas on child-based or organic literacy teaching and her key vocabulary techniques. Warner's pedagogical approaches were heavily influenced by theories of psycho-analysis and social-psychology. Articles about her teaching frameworks were published first in the New Zealand journal existing at the time called Here and Now from 1952–55 and in New Zealand Listener .

In late 1970 she took up an invitation to establish a community school in Aspen, Colorado, where she spent a year. Her final book about education, Spearpoint: "teacher" in America, published in 1972 was her account of this experience. During 1972 and 1973 Ashton-Warner was employed at Vancouver’s Simon Fraser University, where she ran courses on her teaching methods. She wrote a book of short stories, O children of the world: songs and their stories (1974) and started her autobiography, I passed this way (1979).

Sylvia Ashton-Warner returned to Tauranga 1973. She was diagnosed with bowel cancer in 1981 and died at home on 28 April 1984. In 1989 Lynley Hood’s biography, Sylvia! which traces Ashton-Warner’s life and work, won first prize at the Goodman Fielder Wattie Book Awards.