The thick of it

Professor and film-maker Welby Ings reaches out to kids who, like him, were classed as dumb.

- MICHELE HEWITSON

When Welby Ings was growing up he was told he couldn't read. He was told he was thick. So of course he came to believe he was thick. His second book, Invisible Intelligence: Why your child might not be failing, has just been published.

He's a professor of design at the Auckland University of Technology who is also a filmmaker, graphic artist, researcher and writer of many academic papers, most on design pedagogy. He built his own house, down to the carved door handles, in the bush in Auckland's Waitākere Ranges.

So, yeah, he must be thick as one of his planks, eh?

You might be forgiven for thinking, at first glance, that his book is a self-help book. And it sort of is. The author portrait on the back is of him with his forefinger to his brow, looking at a sheaf of papers.

After talking to him for a while I thought he might, in that picture, be pretending to be a pseud. He likes tricks. But he says the only cheat is that the snap was taken in 2018. He likes it because it shows him in a moment of being stuck, concentrating on what he should be doing as a director of his film Sparrow. He likes the idea, I think, of a picture of him being stuck on the back of a book about kids getting stuck with labels. Such as thick.

Here's a conundrum: he has written a book that's critical of the education system and he is an educator so part of that system.

“Yeah, and that’s part of the reason the book has been written. Sometimes I've sat in my office and looked out the window and despaired. And sometimes I've failed people really badly who were trusting me. And yes, I'm part of something and I am not an ideal, I'm flawed, so I can only try to get it right. That's why I said the book’s not a manifesto. I think anyone who starts writing a manifesto, you should take 40 paces backwards from them. But to think rationally and compassionately about the strengths and limitations of something, then I think that's useful.”