Te Ara Tino Rangatiratanga: Our Pathway to Self-Determination

• In Event: Reclaiming Education: Youth Counternarratives in the Neoliberal Reform Era

Abstract

Purpose

This paper identifies how youth at Kia Aroha College view the school’s culturally relevant approach to education. Kia Aroha College’s goal was to reconnect parents and grandparents with their children’s learning by minimizing the significant disconnect between home, and school. It has restructured the school as an authentic whānau (extended family). Its approach integrates learning with students’ lives and realities, and that exposes social injustice and our system’s white spaces through a critical pedagogy underpinned by Maori values.
Theoretical Framework

Kaupapa Maori theory acknowledges the “different epistemological tradition which frames the way we see the world…the questions we ask and the solutions which we seek” (Smith, 1999, p. 187-188). The concept of whānau is central to Kaupapa Maori knowledge and its rationale is derived from the cultural principles, values, obligations and practices of this extended family structure (Fitzsimmons & Smith, 2000, p.36). Despite changes and influences over time, whānau is still essentially the foundation institution of Maori society and culture (Cunningham, Stevenson, & Tassell, 2005, p.21).

Methods and Data

Youth researchers used YPAR and a Kaupapa Maori approach to collect the stories and learning experiences of current and former students and family members to examine the relevance and importance of a whānau pedagogy to them. Questions also examined the loss of language and culture and the alienation of Maori from schooling in New Zealand.

Findings

This paper provides a counter-narrative to school reform rhetoric. Student and whānau stories attest to school engagement as well as academic and cultural competence. Youth researchers also drew on the findings of an 18 month study of the school by the New Zealand Families Commission in 2011 (O'Sullivan et al., 2011), where students explained:
We’re about whānau
Whether it’s your whānau kura (school whānau)
Or your whānau at home
Your up-north whānau (tribal whānau)
Or the whānau you never met
When you’re together, that’s whānau
That’s the connection
At Tupuranga, we’re treated like people.
This kura (school) is our haven; here, we feel safe
I leave my house, walk down the road
And I’m home again.

Significance

The Maori and Pasifika community of Kia Aroha College has struggled for more than two decades for educational sovereignty, as parents exercised their right, enshrined in New Zealand’s Education law, to shape the school to meet the linguistic and cultural needs of their children. Their actions grew the school from a two-year “Intermediate “ school, to a four-year middle school, and finally to a full secondary school. Each change was met with the same opposition from education authorities who intended to maintain the existing deficit-driven, “whitestream” (Denis, 1997; Grande, 2000) direction of school reform. Not only have decades of these reforms failed to give Maori students equitable academic outcomes, they have negated Maori knowledge and values and forced Maori students to compromise their cultural identity. Penetito (2002) refers to the burgeoning Maori renaissance in New Zealand as “the ultimate resistance of Maori against the existing system continuing its hegemony over Maori culture through education” (p. 93).

Author

• Ann Milne, Kia Aroha College