TRAVEL AWARDS FOR TEACHERS

Press, Volume CX, Issue 32321, 12 June 1970, Page 10

TRAVEL AWARDS FOR TEACHERS

(From Our Own Reporter/ WELLINGTON, June 11,

Two further travel awards to enable leading New Zealand teachers to study the latest developments in their special fields were announced today by the McKenzie Education Foundation.

They have been awarded to Mr M. Parsons, lecturer in the education of the deaf at Christchurch Teachers’ College, and to Dr P. Lewis, senior lecturer in child psychiatry at the University of Otago. Both men will leave in a few weeks to attend major international conferences.

Mr Parsons, who has received his training at the Universities of Canterbury and Manchester, and at Christchurch Teachers’ College, will attend an international congress on the education'of the deaf in Stockholm, to which he has been invited to give a special paper. Mr Parsons has already achieved considerable international recognition for his work with parents of deaf children, and a film which he helped to prepare, “A Deaf Child in the Family," has been awarded first placing ip three international Film Festivals.

Apart from his work in training teachers of deaf children, Mr Parsons is en gaged on research into the language and intellectual de velopment of deaf children He edits a professional journal and has been elected tc membership of the Interna tional Society of Audiologists On his way to Stockholm he will visit leading research and teaching institutions in the

United States, the Unitec) Kingdom, Scandinavia and later in Australia.

Dr Lewis, who is respon sible for the child psychiatric services of the Otago Hospital Board, will attend the seventh congress of the In : ternational Association for Child Psychiatry, in Jerusa lem.

In collaboration with the department of pediatrics and child health at the Univer sity of Otago Medical School he has established a children's development centre in Dunedin for young pre-school children.

He is also associated with the establishment of the firs! adolescent inpatient unit in the department of psychological medicine. Dr Lewis’s special interests lie in the development of psychiatric services associated with the family as a unit, and the major theme of the congress he will attend is “The child in his family.”