Changing Hearts and Minds: Transformative Praxis From Participating in the Poutama Pounamu Blended Learning

• In Event: Respectful Relationships for Collaborative and Sustainable Educational Communities

Abstract

Objectives or purposes:

This presentation exemplifies how participation in the Poutama Pounamu Blended Learning (PPBL) changed the hearts and minds of veteran educators in five state schools in Aotearoa. State schools have been the very settings where teachers have struggled to ensure indigenous Māori learners can safely participate and indeed flourish as Māori, with their potential nurtured and realized. This research highlights the obstacles and challenges faced by these educators as they attempted to decolonize their practice and contexts in the hopes of achieving equity, excellence and belonging for Māori students.

Perspective(s) or theoretical framework:

Educators in this research suggest that the specific PLD they received promoted an indigenized, evidence-based, transformative education reform which changed their lives and the lives of many of those with whom they shared professional and personal relationships. The cultural relationships for responsive pedagogy that was modelled throughout the PPBL was found to have empowered and liberated Māori, and non-Māori participants alike. This pedagogy was effective in changing hearts and minds and importantly, by using it themselves, educators were able to nurture pathways towards greater educational freedom and success for Māori learners.

Methods, techniques, or modes of inquiry:

Culturally responsive methodologies were used in this study as a socially responsible alternative to research frameworks imposed on subjects. Open ended questions were posed during interviews as conversations. Because the primacy of relationships informed the entire study, transcripts were returned to the participants for annotation and confirmation. Data were analyzed using thematic analysis with the voices of participants honored and amplified using grounded theory. Data was then presented in a collaborative story with verbatim text woven together to emphasize the perspectives, views, beliefs, and experiences of the participants within their found poems.

Data sources, evidence, objects, materials or the equivalent for theoretical or methodological papers/presentations:

Participants’ voices provide a qualitative picture of educators’ changing beliefs, knowledge, cultural relationships and praxis as they are extended through their participation in the PPBL. Their experiences, presented through collaborative stories and found poems, provide important implications for other educators who are concerned with supporting the wellbeing of Māori learners across the learning pathway in Aotearoa-New Zealand.

Results and/or substantiated conclusions or warrants for arguments/point of view:

This research found that the indigenous and critical curriculum, pedagogy, and leadership of PPBL has much to contribute towards a more equitable education system. Rather than offering resources and a list of ‘to-dos’ to indigenize spaces, PPBL worked on educators’ hearts and minds to promote the raising of consciousness and the initiation of active resistance to an inequitable status quo.

Scientific or scholarly significance of the study or work:

For these educators, PPBL provided a means to own and spread transformative practices by providing critical experiences that subsequently saw them adopting a more holistic and humanizing praxis. These actions promoted higher determinants of success for themselves, their students, and their communities. This created greater levels of equity, excellence and wellbeing for educators and learners in Aotearoa-New Zealand. Properly recontextualized, it could work for educators and learners in other parts of the world where indigenous people have been marginalized through processes of colonization.

Author

• Carma Maisey, University of Waikato