Timeline….
1884 – Richmond Road Primary School first opened with Emma Fletcher as principal. She had the added distinction of being the first female principal in the Auckland Education Board area.
1903 – Manual training centre was opened at the school. This area is now used by the Samoan/English Ropu.
1934 – Honourable Michael Savage and the then Minister of education, Peter Fraser, opened the main part of the current school.
1960’s – The school gains international recognition for its innovative work in literacy education. The teaching methods that were developed have since become standard practice in New Zealand schools.
1970’s – The school began initiatives in bilingual units on Maori, Samoan and Cook Island Maori along with contributing preschools on site. These are Ritimana Kohanga Reo, A’oga Fa’a Samoa and Te Apii Reo Kuki Airani.
1976 – End of Form 1 and 2 as Ponsonby Intermediate is opened.
1984 – 100 years since school opened !
1996 – A French bilingual unit is established
1999 – Richmond Road School Banners
2000 – French as a Foreign Language introduced.
2009 – 125th Jubilee (School Production – The History of Richmond Road School, Thursday 24th September; Celebrations at school on Friday 25th September)
Hall Opening 2013
ANZAC Ceremony – 23rd April 2010
Lance Corporal George Charles Thompson
Good morning, my name is Benjamin McIntosh. Today, I would like to tell you more about Lance Corporal George Charles Thompson.
Mr. Thompson used to live just across the road from the school, at 4 Cockburn Street, and was a carpenter.
On the 19 January 1917, in Wellington, Mr. Thompson boarded the vessel called Ulimaroa. He was 30 years old. He was part of the Auckland Infantry Regiment.
Upon arrival in Plymouth, England, he was sent to France to fight the Germans.
He was killed in action during the Battle of the Somme in France on March, 27 1918. His name appears on the Grevillers Memorial of the British Cemetery in the Pas-de-Calais, France.
Unfortunately I was not able to find any of Mr. Thompson’s relatives living in the Grey Lynn area.
Lance Corporal Robert John Dowsing
My name is Leilani and I have been researching Robert John Dowsing, because he used to be a student at Richmond Road School.
Before he left for the war, he was an ironmonger. He left Wellington on the 15th of November 1916, for England. He died in Belgium only 6 months later and he was killed in action.
Robert was part of a unit called Auckland Infantry Regiment. He started in the army as a Private and he was a Lance Corporal when he died.
Lest we forget.
In 2006, former principal Hayley Read and acting principal Donal Mclean instigated a project sponsored through TLRI (Teaching & Learning Research Initiative).
Teaching & Learning Research Initiative
The project titled ‘Enhancing teachers beliefs, knowledge and practice about bilingualism and bilingual/immersion education through critical action research’ comprised of a partnership with a research associate team from the Faculty of Education, University of Auckland.
Project aims
The project aims to assist bilingual staff at Richmond Road School (RRS) to develop and apply critical research methods to identify, critically assess, and analyse existing strengths, gaps, and needs in bilingual/immersion, multicultural policy, and practice at RRS.
In particular, it aims to:
- Identify and critically assess/analyse teacher beliefs and knowledge about bilingualism and bilingual education.
- As teacher practitioners, working in bilingual classrooms at RRS, what are the current beliefs, philosophies, and theories about bilingualism, biliteracy, bilingual education, and education for diversity that underpin our current practice?
- Examine indicators of best practice in the research literature on bilingual education.
- What does research indentify as the key factors in the development of effective bilingual education programmes and/or teaching bilingual students in classrooms, particularly with respect to successfully achieving biliteracy (a key indicator of the academic success of bilingual students)?
- Develop understandings about the gap between the theory research and practice.
- To what extent do current teacher beliefs and practices match the research indicators of best practice highlighted in the relevant literature? To what extent scan RRS staff continue to build a critical community of practice that allows for greater shared, research-led understandings of, and alignment with, best practices in bilingual education? How might this form the basis for the review or revision of current programmes in order to further enhance the educational achievement of students in those programmes at RRS?
- Grow as practitioner researchers to develop research based teaching.
- As Māori, Pasifika, and Pākehā/Palagi practitioners working together in state bilingual education. How can we become critically empowered to reconceptualise our work and seek deeper understandings, explanations, generalisations, and theoretical development in order to gain autonomy over the research process and be able to use it for our own pedagogical aims and the academic, cultural, and linguistic imperatives of our communities and their children.
Project plan
The proposal is for a one-year, small-scale, practitioner-led pilot action research project involving selected members of the practitioner team, in partnership with educational researchers, investigating and addressing central issues in creating meaningful links between known research, school policy, and their own classroom practice in multicultural/bilingual education. An essential goal is also the building of teacher practitioner research capacity—a key hallmark of RRS historically. This will allow teachers with RRS to critically reconceptualise, examine, and theorise their own work, as well as (re)develop a critical community of practice within the school.
Partnerships involved
A unique feature of this project is the nature of the partnership and relationships between the research practitioners and the research associates.
The practitioner team comprises the principal and bilingual staff from Richmond Road School, in partnership with a research associate team from the Faculty of Education, University of Auckland. Professor Stephen May, from the School of Education, Waikato University, is the outside consultant for the project. Other partners are senior staff of The A’oga Fa’a Samoa and Māori and Pacifica elders associated with the school.
Both teams are equal members of the research, taking a full part in it. Both also make up the Project Advisory Committee, which is jointly chaired by the principal of the school and the lead liaison researcher, John McCaffery. This partnership is designed to mentor and empower RRS practitioners to develop further the expertise in undertaking their own ongoing research agenda and dissemination and sharing, as a central feature of their everyday work in the school and the Aoga (Kincheloe, 2003).
Expected outcomes
Expected outcomes of the project are to:
enhance teacher beliefs and knowledge about bilingualism and bilingual education
identify the indicators of best practice in the research literature on bilingual education
match research and theory with current practice
develop the bilingual teachers at Richmond Road School as practitioner researchers.
Publication
Download the full report from the attachment section below