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Alumni award for Penny Jamieson

Bishop Penny Jamieson is one of six outstanding alumni honoured by Victoria University.

Jenny Campbell  |  08 Jul 2015  |

A former Bishop of Dunedin, the Rt Rev Dr Penny Jamieson, was among six outstanding alumni honoured by Victoria University last month.

Others to receive distinguished alumni awards were: Ian Ferguson, MBE, international kayaker and businessman; Derek Handley, entrepreneur and former founding CEO of the B Team; Alan Isaac, CNZM, businessman and sports administrator; Helen Kedgley, curator of Pataka Art Museum;  and Tamati Kruger, Ngai Tuhoe, Maori advocate and  chief negotiator for Tuhoe- Te Urewera Treaty of Waitangi Settlement.

There were 20 nominations.

This was Victoria's sixth distinguished alumni evening. The programme included a dinner, musical items and speeches from the recipients.

Each received  a hand-carved paperweight made from Oamaru stone and decorated with glass from a stained-glass window that had been part of the historic Hunter building.

As a PhD student at Victoria in 1976, Penny Jamieson studied Tokelauan children who were learning English as their second language. I

She found that children whose parents used Tokelau in the home were fluently bilingual by age 7, with reading and writing skills that matched those of their monolingual peers. 

As  a result the then Inner City Ministry helped to establish a home tutor programme to teach English to refugees and immigrants, mainly women, who were unable to attend language classes.

Bishop Penny was the first woman in the world to be ordained as a diocesan bishop in the Anglican Church – on 29 June 1990.

Victoria’s Vice-Chancellor, Professor Grant Guilford, said she was a pioneer in every sense of the word.

In response Bishop Penny paid tribute to her PhD supervisor, Dr Graham Kennedy, for his width of vision and support for her PhD study of Tokelauans.

‘’This was my first  real engagement with New Zealand, as I had only recently arrived from England,’’ she said.

‘’I did not realise the implications of my thesis topic on bilingual education became the basis for affirming the Kohanga Reo movement.

‘’My work was arguably the last one done with the Tokelauan community by a palangi; from then on cultural groups did research with their own people.’’

Speaking for the nominators, Emeritus Professor Janet Holmes, of Victoria’s linguistics department, said they were delighted to see Penny Jamieson receive her award as she held the first PhD awarded from their department.

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