Freeing Ourselves

TRANSGRESSIONS: CULTURAL STUDIES AND EDUCATION Volume 66 Series Editor: Shirley R. Steinberg, McGill University, Canada Founding Editor: Joe L. Kincheloe (1950–2008) The Paulo and Nita Freire International Project for Critical Pedagogy Editorial Board Jon Austin, University of Southern Queensland, Australia Norman Denzin, University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana, USA Rhonda Hammer, University of California Los Angeles, USA Nikos Metallinos, Concordia University, Canada Christine Quail, McMaster University, Canada Ki Wan Sung, Kyung Hee University, Seoul, Korea This book series is dedicated to the radical love and actions of Paulo Freire, Jesus “Pato” Gomez, and Joe L. Kincheloe.

TRANSGRESSIONS: CULTURAL STUDIES AND EDUCATION Cultural studies provides an analytical toolbox for both making sense of educational practice and extending the insights of educational professionals into their labors. In this context Transgressions: Cultural Studies and Education provides a collection of books in the domain that specify this assertion. Crafted for an audience of teachers, teacher educators, scholars and students of cultural studies and others interested in cultural studies and pedagogy, the series documents both the possibilities of and the controversies surrounding the intersection of cultural studies and education. The editors and the authors of this series do not assume that the interaction of cultural studies and education devalues other types of knowledge and analytical forms. Rather the intersection of these knowledge disciplines offers a rejuvenating, optimistic, and positive perspective on education and educational institutions. Some might describe its contribution as democratic, emancipatory, and transformative. The editors and authors maintain that cultural studies helps free educators from sterile, monolithic analyses that have for too long undermined efforts to think of educational practices by providing other words, new languages, and fresh metaphors. Operating in an interdisciplinary cosmos, Transgressions: Cultural Studies and Education is dedicated to exploring the ways cultural studies enhances the study and practice of education. With this in mind the series focuses in a non-exclusive way on popular culture as well as other dimensions of cultural studies including social theory, social justice and positionality, cultural dimensions of technological innovation, new media and media literacy, new forms of oppression emerging in an electronic hyperreality, and postcolonial global concerns. With these concerns in mind cultural studies scholars often argue that the realm of popular culture is the most powerful educational force in contemporary culture. Indeed, in the twenty-first century this pedagogical dynamic is sweeping through the entire world. Educators, they believe, must understand these emerging realities in order to gain an important voice in the pedagogical conversation. Without an understanding of cultural pedagogy’s (education that takes place outside of formal schooling) role in the shaping of individual identity–youth identity in particular–the role educators play in the lives of their students will continue to fade. Why do so many of our students feel that life is incomprehensible and devoid of meaning? What does it mean, teachers wonder, when young people are unable to describe their moods, their affective affiliation to the society around them. Meanings provided young people by mainstream institutions often do little to help them deal with their affective complexity, their difficulty negotiating the rift between meaning and affect. School knowledge and educational expectations seem as anachronistic as a ditto machine, not that learning ways of rational thought and making sense of the world are unimportant. But school knowledge and educational expectations often have little to offer students about making sense of the way they feel, the way their affective lives are shaped. In no way do we argue that analysis of the production of youth in an electronic mediated world demands some “touchy-feely” educational superficiality. What is needed in this context is a rigorous analysis of the interrelationship between pedagogy, popular culture, meaning making, and youth subjectivity. In an era marked by youth depression, violence, and suicide such insights become extremely important, even life saving. Pessimism about the future is the common sense of many contemporary youth with its concomitant feeling that no one can make a difference. If affective production can be shaped to reflect these perspectives, then it can be reshaped to lay the groundwork for optimism, passionate commitment, and transformative educational and political activity. In these ways cultural studies adds a dimension to the work of education unfilled by any other sub-discipline. This is what Transgressions: Cultural Studies and Education seeks to produce—literature on these issues that makes a difference. It seeks to publish studies that help those who work with young people, those individuals involved in the disciplines that study children and youth, and young people themselves improve their lives in these bizarre times.

Freeing Ourselves

Russell Bishop University of Waikato, New Zealand

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DEDICATION

This book is dedicated to my wife Rowan Bishop, for her constant support during the 20 years of work this book represents

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This work refers to Te Kotahitanga and He Kakano, which are research-based professional development programmes developed and run by the University of Waikato, the latter with the Whare Wananga o Awanuiarangi, under contract to the Ministry of Education of New Zealand. The Crown is the copyright owner of Te Kotahitanga and He Kakano. The views expressed in this book are that of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of the Crown.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction .............................................................................................................. ix 1. Freeing Ourselves from Neo-colonial Dominance in Research: A Kaupapa MƗori Approach to Creating Knowledge ...........................................1 2. Freeing Ourselves from Neo-colonial Domination in Public School Classrooms ..............................................................................................31 3. Freeing Schools and Education Systems from Neo-colonial Dominance ...........................................................................................................75 References ..............................................................................................................121 Index .......................................................................................................................131

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INTRODUCTION

FREEING OURSELVES An Indigenous Response to Neo-Colonial Dominance in Research, Classrooms, Schools and Education Systems

This then is the great humanistic and historical task of the oppressed: to liberate themselves and their oppressors as well. The oppressors, who oppress, exploit and rape by virtue of their power, cannot find in this power the strength to liberate either the oppressed or themselves. Only power that springs from the weakness of the oppressed will be sufficiently strong to free both (Freire, 1972, p. 21). This book draws together many previously published articles and book chapters that I have produced over the past 20 years of work in the field of indigenous education. This journey over time has led me from researching the impact of colonization on my mother’s MƗori family to an appreciation of just what researching in MƗori contexts involves. The lessons learnt here also appealed to me, as an ex-secondary school teacher, as being a means by which we could re-theorise the marginalization of MƗori students in mainstream classrooms. From this understanding we could develop a means whereby educators could reposition themselves discursively and create caring and learning relationships within mainstream classrooms that would see MƗori students benefitting from their participation in education. From these theoretical beginnings grew a large-scale classroom-based project that eventually developed into a comprehensive approach towards theory or principle-based education reform that is now being implemented, in two different forms, in 150 secondary schools in New Zealand1. I have included in the text the full references to the original works that this book draws together so that the interested reader can follow up on some of the topics raised here in more detail. However, what I have attempted to produce in this volume is not just a compilation of a series of papers, but rather a record of the development of a theoretical positioning that has grown into a project that has now begun to make a difference to MƗori students’ life chances. Fundamental to this theorising and practice were the understandings promoted by Paulo Freire forty years ago, that the answers to the conditions that oppressed peoples found themselves in was not to be found in the language or epistemologies of the oppressors, but rather in that of the oppressed. This realisation was confirmed when I understood that researching in MƗori contexts needed to be conducted dialogically within the world view and understandings of the people with whom I was working. This realisation also led me to understand how dialogue in its widest sense is crucial for developing a means whereby MƗori students would be able to participate successfully in education. ix

INTRODUCTION

I wish to acknowledge many of the people who have supported me in this work over the past 20 years. The early theorising of Graham Hingangaroa Smith who, in following Freire’s notions of the essential interaction of conscientisation, resistance and praxis, developed the first iterations of what has become known as Kaupapa MƗori research. Linda Tuhiwai Smith whose early work with decolonising methodologies was inspirational to developing my own understanding of how Kaupapa MƗori research and pedagogy might work. Ted Glynn and Keith Ballard took on the unenviable task of teaching me the craft of being an academic and worked with me for many years. Mere Berryman then took on the task of partnering much of the work over the past decade, which has included her co-authoring many papers and books. Now I am working with many schools, their leaders, teachers, students and communities and I can look back and see the genesis of the ideas in this book and I wish to thank them all for the part they have played in the development of the theorising and practice described in these pages. The Current Context The major challenge facing education in New Zealand today is the continuing social, economic and political disparities within our nation, primarily between the descendents of the European colonisers (PƗkehƗ) and the indigenous MƗori people. MƗori have higher levels of unemployment, are more likely to be employed in low paying employment, have much higher levels of incarceration, illness and poverty than do the rest of the population and are generally under-represented in the positive social and economic indicators of the society. These disparities are outcomes of a process of colonisation that removed MƗori control and power over their resource base, language and culture and promoted non-MƗori ways of making sense of the world. Given a different set of relationships, we could have seen MƗori people being full participants in the emerging economy and society of the new nation, instead of marginalised and minoritised, a process of colonisation that has resulted in MƗori being overrepresented in the negative indices of society, and under-represented in the positive (Bishop & Glynn, 1999; Walker, 1990). As Colin James (2008) wrote recently in a New Zealand Herald column under the title “Nation’s Duty to Protect Vulnerable”: Iwi and hapu were protected in theory by the Treaty of Waitangi. MƗori were made equal ‘subjects’ (citizens). In fact, they were largely dispossessed of their assets, their culture and their self-respect. It wasn’t genocide but it crushed morale. Hapu and whanau were less able to ensure their members’ welfare. In part the gang violence can be traced to that dispossession and demoralisation. In short, Governments here for 140 years failed the ‘responsibility to protect’ test for a large and distinguishable minority of our citizens. Only with the initiation of the Treaty of Waitangi process of truth and reconciliation and compensation a generation ago have governments recognised this past failure and attended to it … Rebuilding assets and morale is a multi-generation task … [and indicates] the paramount necessity [for the state] to invest well in our children … reversing the demoralisation of iwi is a demanding project, this responsibility to protect. x

INTRODUCTION

The necessity to invest well in our children was also the subject of a recent report to Parliament, entitled the Inquiry into Making the Schooling System Work for Every Child, by the Education and Science Committee of the House of Representatives (2008). In their report they point to the part education should play in addressing disparities in terms of the impact on MƗori as a people, and as people expected to contribute to the nation. They pointed out that because MƗori represent 28 percent of newborn New Zealanders, the increasing proportion of MƗori in the population means that unless “the gap between the performance of MƗori students and others is not addressed, the negative consequences for New Zealand will grow exponentially” (p. 10). Professor Mason Durie (1994) is quoted as saying that “until the disparity in MƗori achievement is corrected, MƗori will continue to feature disproportionately in indicators of poor outcomes, and will be a wasted resource for New Zealand ” (p. 10, emphasis added). In other words, impact on society is seen in there being a strong “connection between non-engagement with school and youth offending” (p. 11) and; [a]s employment becomes less labour-intensive, and more dependent on the use of technology, fewer jobs will be available for those who lack functional literacy and numeracy. The larger the group, the more difficult will it be for New Zealand to create and sustain a high-performing, internationally competitive economy (p. 11). The Education Counts website2 also identifies a substantial body of evidence that demonstrates that students who are not well served by the education system are heavily disadvantaged later in life, in terms of their earning and employment potential and their health and wellbeing. For example, those with higher levels of education are more likely to participate in the labour market, face lower risks of unemployment, have greater access to further training and receive higher earnings on average. Conversely, people with no formal school qualifications have unemployment rates far exceeding those with qualifications, and have the lowest median incomes: In 2006, the unemployment rate for those with a bachelor’s degree or higher was 2.1 percent; for those with another tertiary qualification 2.9 percent; with only a school qualification 4.1 percent; and with no qualification 5.2 percent … The median weekly income for those with bachelors’ and higher degrees was $785; for those with other tertiary qualifications it was $575; for those with school qualifications it was $335; and for those with no qualifications $310 (Education and Science Committee, 2008, pp. 10–11). The Education Counts website also contends that young people leaving school without any qualifications may have difficulty performing in the workforce and may face difficulties in terms of lifelong learning or returning to formal study in later years. They suggest that a considerable number of research studies show a strong connection between early school leavers and unemployment and/or lower incomes, which are in turn generally related to poverty and dependence on income support. In his submission to the Education and Science Committee (cited above), Judge Andrew Becroft, the Principal Youth Court Judge, estimated that up to 80 percent of offenders in the Youth Court are not attending school, either because they are not enrolled or because they are suspended or excluded. He continued by suggesting xi

INTRODUCTION

that between 25 and 30 percent of youth offending takes place between 9:00 a.m. and 3:00 p.m. Judge Becroft proposed that “[e]ngaging all young people of compulsory school age in education would reduce the crime rate among this group significantly” (p. 11). In terms of offending, the report noted that young MƗori offend at twice the rate of young Pasifika people and at four times the rate of young PƗkehƗ, and in the experience of Judge Becroft, failure at school contributes to the establishment of a vicious circle that leads to recidivist offending. The Ministry of Social Development also presented evidence that gaining stable employment helps young offenders to desist from offending, particularly if their jobs offer learning opportunities. However, “[s]tudents who fail at school clearly have less chance of obtaining such employment” (pp. 10–11). The educational disparities that afflict MƗori are stark. The overall academic achievement levels of MƗori students are low; more leave school without any qualifications than do their non-MƗori counterparts; their retention rate to age 17 is far less than that for non-MƗori; their rate of suspension from school is three to five times higher, depending on gender; they are over-represented in special education programmes for behavioural issues; they enrol in preschool programmes in lower proportions than other groups; they tend to be over-represented in low-stream education classes; they receive less academic feedback than do children of the majority culture; they are more likely than other students to be found in vocational curriculum streams; they leave school earlier, with fewer formal qualifications; and they enrol in tertiary education in lower proportions (Hood, 2008; Ministry of Education, 2005). Further, while these outcomes are most clearly exhibited in secondary schools, the foundations for these problems commence in the primary school years. Indeed there are indications (Crooks, Hamilton & Caygill, 2000; Wylie, Thompson & Lythe, 1999), that while there are achievement differentials evident on children entering primary school, it is by years 4 and 5 that these achievement differentials begin to stand out starkly. Despite the choice provided by MƗori-medium education in New Zealand,3 the vast majority of MƗori students attend public/mainstream schools and are taught by non-MƗori teachers who have problems relating to and addressing the educational needs of MƗori students (Bishop & Berryman, 2006). In addition, decades of educational reforms and policies such as integration, multiculturalism and biculturalism have failed to support teachers adequately to address systemic shortcomings and models of reform based on deficiencies of the home in terms of literacy resources, (Nash, 1993) and more recently, neurophilosophy claims about the deficiencies of the brain (Clark, 2006), have done little to alleviate the situation. These reforms have made very little difference for the large proportion of MƗori students who have attended mainstream schools since these educational disparities were first statistically identified over 50 years ago (Hunn, 1960). Addressing these educational disparities is a difficult, yet necessary, task for educators at all levels within our system. Most countries that have diverse ethnic student populations will attest to this fact, for this is where educational disparities really show themselves: among the marginalised and minoritised peoples within mainstream educational settings. xii

INTRODUCTION

Kaupapa MƗori Responses This book looks at three examples of how an indigenous people have freed themselves from neo-colonial oppression in a way that also suggests how other minoritised peoples can similarly liberate themselves. The book also highlights how such an approach has redirected the actions of the oppressors to discursively reposition themselves through an ongoing process of conscientisation in relation to the representations of MƗori as a minoritised group. While the book primarily focuses on addressing educational disparities in mainstream/public school settings, the first example examines an indigenous initiative in research within Aotearoa/New Zealand termed Kaupapa (agenda/philosophy) MƗori research. I commenced this project in 1990 as part of a group of people led by Graham and Linda Smith who were developing a means of wresting control over what constituted research into MƗori peoples’ lives away from the dominance of the traditional academy. This chapter has been through many versions but it is fundamental to the study of addressing educational disparities because if sensemaking and knowledge-producing processes remain in the control of the dominant group, what Scheurich and Young (1993) term epistemological racism is maintained; where the social history of the dominant group in society is used to produce solutions for those dominated. Hence the importance of firstly freeing ourselves of neocolonial dominance in research so that models of reform for the oppressed groups can be developed from within the epistemological frameworks of those groups, rather than from within the dominant. This chapter cites recent studies conducted within MƗori contexts to illustrate the process. This agenda for research is concerned with how research practice might realize MƗori desires for self-determination while addressing on-going research issues of Initiation, Benefits, Representation, Legitimacy and Accountability (IBRLA). This chapter suggests that it is the cultural aspirations, understandings and practices of MƗori people that implements and organizes the research process and positions researchers in such a way as to operationalise self-determination (agentic positioning and behaviour) for research participants. The cultural context positions the participants by constructing the story lines, and with them the cultural metaphors and images, as well as the ‘thinking as usual’, the talk/language through which research participation and researcher/researched relationships are constituted. Kaupapa MƗori research rejects outsider control over what constitutes the text’s call for authority and truth. A Kaupapa MƗori position therefore promotes what Lincoln and Denzin (1994) term an epistemological version of validity. Such an approach to validity locates the power within MƗori cultural practices where what is acceptable and what is not acceptable research, text and/or processes is determined and defined by the research community itself. The second example in this book addresses the situation in New Zealand where, despite decades of educational reform, there has been little if any shift in the educational disparities that afflict the large proportion of MƗori students who attend mainstream/public schools. This chapter considers how theories and models of reform that draw from relational discourses that are fundamental to indigenous people’s epistemologies may provide sufficient conditions for education reform. xiii

INTRODUCTION

I commenced this project in the late 1990s when considering how, from the theoretical position of Kaupapa MƗori research, and an examination of appropriate MƗori cultural metaphors used in MƗori medium schooling, I developed a model whereby educators could create learning contexts within their classrooms that would allow MƗori students to bring their own sense-making processes into the classroom, where what they knew was legitimate and not marginalised. This model suggested that teachers needed to develop pedagogic relationships and interactions: where power is shared between self-determining individuals within non-dominating relations of interdependence; where culture counts; where learning is interactive, dialogic and spirals; where participants are connected to one another through the establishment of a common vision for what constitutes excellence in educational outcomes. This pedagogy has since been developed further and termed a Culturally Responsive Pedagogy of Relations which is in Freirean terms a “Pedagogy of Hope”. I was then fortunate enough to attract funding that enabled me to examine what a culturally responsive pedagogy of relations might look like in practice. In 2001, we began a professional development project for teachers that eventually grew in to what is now called Te Kotahitanga, which is now a large-scale project that aims to improve the educational achievement of MƗori students in Mainstream/ Public Schools (Bishop et al., 2003, 2005). The project commenced in 2001, seeking to address the self determination of MƗori secondary school students by talking with them and other participants in their education about just what is involved in limiting and /or improving their educational achievement through an examination of the main influences on MƗori students’ educational achievement. The project sought to examine how a number of groups might address this issue and commenced with the gathering of a number of narratives of students’ classroom experiences and meanings by the process of collaborative storying (Bishop, 1996) from a range of engaged and non-engaged MƗori students (as defined by their schools), in five non-structurally modified mainstream secondary schools, These stories were also complemented by the gathering of stories of experience and meaning from those parenting these students, their principals and their teachers. Since then the project has grown to now being implemented in 50 secondary schools in New Zealand where there is evidence of very acceptable changes in the schooling experiences and outcomes for MƗori students (Bishop et al., 2007, 2009). It is clear from working with teachers’ attempts to address educational disparities in their own classrooms, that what is effective for MƗori is effective for other minoritised students. This understanding has major implications for what many educators are identifying as the most pressing problem facing us in education today. That is the interaction between increasingly diverse student populations and the associated persistent pattern of educational disparities affecting indigenous peoples and populations of colour, poverty, different abilities and new migrants. This problem is exacerbated by the continuing lack of diversity among the teaching force who demonstrate discursive positionings and pedagogic practices more appropriate to monocultural populations. The third example in the book is about developing a model for freeing public schools and the education system that supports them from neo-colonial dominance xiv

INTRODUCTION

by scaling up, that is extending and sustaining effective, indigenous/minoritisedbased education reform as opposed to education reform that is based on dominant group understandings. Scaling up such education reform has the potential to have a major impact on the disparities that exist in society because deepening and expanding the benefits of effective education reform programmes will change the status quo of historical, ongoing and seemingly immutable disparities. Nevertheless, I am not claiming that educational reform on its own can cure historical disparities; however, it is clear that educational reform can play a major part in a comprehensive approach to addressing social, economic and political disparities. Current approaches to scaling up educational reform have not worked for indigenous and other minoritised students. Most attempts are short term, poorly funded at the outset, and often abandoned before any real changes can be seen, soon to be replaced by some “bold new initiative”. In contrast, the model identified in this chapter suggests that educational reforms need to have built into them, from the very outset, those elements that will see them sustained in the original sites and spread to others. These elements will allow educational reforms to be scaled up with the confidence that the reform will not only be able to be sustained in existing and new sites, but that, above all, will work to reduce disparities and realise the potential of those students currently not well served by education. Put simply, educational reforms that can be sustained and extended can have an impact on educational and social disparities through increasing the educational opportunities for students previously denied these options, on a scale currently not available in most western countries. Again, I am fortunate, that with a group of colleagues, which this time includes those from another institution, Te Whare Wananga o Awanuiarangi, a MƗori tribal university, we have been able to attract sufficient funds to support one hundred secondary schools to implement this model as a means of moving their institutions towards being responsive to MƗori students’ learning needs. So overall, this book records the development of a means where, just as Paolo Freire predicted it should, educational reform has grown out of the power of the oppressed. It commenced by our initially wresting control over what constitutes research into MƗori peoples’ lives from the dominant groups. It then meant that we could use this control to establish professional development for teachers that makes sense to MƗori students and not just to the teachers ( although that happens as well) and then designing a model to expand this process to a large number of sites in New Zealand. NOTES 1 2 3

There are approximately 320 secondary schools in New Zealand. http://www.educationcounts.govt.nz/, retrieved 2007. Adrienne Alton-Lee (2008) provides us with evidence that students in MƗori-medium classrooms are achieving at higher rates than their contemporaries in mainstream schools.

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FREEING OURSELVES FROM NEO-COLONIAL DOMINATION IN RESEARCH A Kaupapa MƗori Approach to Creating Knowledge1

One of the challenges for MƗori researchers… has been to retrieve some spacefirst, some space to convince MƗori people of the value of research for MƗori; second, to convince the various, fragmented but powerful research communities of the need for greater MƗori involvement in research; and third, to develop approaches and ways of carrying out research which take into account, without being limited by, the legacies of previous research, and the parameters of both previous and current approaches. What is now referred to as Kaupapa MƗori approaches to research… is an attempt to retrieve that space and to achieve those general aims (Smith, 1999, p. 183). This chapter seeks to identify how issues of power including initiation, benefits, representation, legitimation and accountability, are addressed in practice within an indigenous Kaupapa MƗori approach in such a way as to promote the selfdetermination of the research participants. In addition, this chapter questions how such considerations may impact on the Western-trained and -positioned researcher. MƗori people, along with many other minoritised peoples, are concerned that educational researchers have been slow to acknowledge the importance of culture and cultural differences as key components in successful research practice and understandings. As a result, key research issues of power relations, initiation, benefits, representation, legitimisation, and accountability continue to be addressed in terms of the researchers’ own cultural agendas, concerns, and interests. This chapter seeks to identify how such domination can be addressed by both MƗori and non- MƗori educational researchers by their conscious participation within the cultural aspirations, preferences, and practices of the research participants. It is important to position this chapter within the growing body of literature that questions traditional approaches to researching on/with minoritised peoples by placing the culture of “an ethnic group at the center of the inquiry” (Tillman, 2002, p. 4). Notable among these are: Frances Rains, Jo-Ann Archibald and Donna Dehyle (2000) who in editing and introducing a special edition of the International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education (QSE) entitled, Through our Eyes and in Our Own Words-The Voices of Indigenous Scholars, featured examples of “American-Indian/ Native American intellectualism, culture, culture-based curriculum, and indigenous epistemologies and paradigms” (Tillman, 2002, p. 5). K. Tsianina Lomawaima’s (2000) analysis of the history of power struggles between academic researchers and 1

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those who they study identified how the history of scholarly research (including education) in Native America “has been deeply implicated in the larger history of the domination and oppression of Native American communities.” (p. 14) On a positive note however, she identified how the development of new research protocols by various tribes shows the way toward more respectful and responsible scholarship. Similarly, Verna Kirkness, Carl Urion and Jo-Anne Archibald in Canada and their work with the Canadian Journal of Native Education have brought issues of researching with respect to the fore. In addition, Donna Deyhle and Karen Swisher (1997) have examined the growth of self-determination approaches among indigenous peoples of North America. Others include African-American scholars, (LadsonBillings, 1995, 2000; Stanfield, 1994; Tillman, 2002), Chicana and Chicano scholars (Gonzalez, 2001; Moll, 1992; Reyes, Scribner & Scribner, 1999; and Villegas & Lucas, 2002) who are all calling for greater attention to power relations and the role of culture in the research process. However, while drawing on these and others to illustrate some of the arguments in this chapter, this discussion of culturally responsive research will focus on MƗori peoples’ experiences of research as an example of the wider argument. MƖORI PEOPLE’S CONCERNS ABOUT RESEARCH: ISSUES OF POWER

Despite the guarantees of the Treaty of Waitangi,2 the colonization of Aotearoa/ New Zealand through the subsequent neocolonial dominance of majority interests in social and educational research has continued. The result has been the development of a tradition of research3 into MƗori people’s lives that addresses concerns and interests of the predominately non-MƗori researchers’ own making, as defined and accountable in terms of the researchers’ own cultural world-view(s). Researchers in Aotearoa/New Zealand have developed a tradition of research that has perpetuated colonial power imbalances, thereby undervaluing and belittling MƗori knowledge and learning practices and processes in order to enhance those of the colonizers and adherents of neo-colonial paradigms. There has developed a social pathology research approach in Aotearoa/New Zealand that has implied in all phases of the research process, the “inability” of MƗori culture to cope with human problems and proposed that MƗori culture was and is inferior to that of the colonizers in human terms. Further, such practices have perpetuated an ideology of cultural superiority that precludes the development of power-sharing processes and the legitimization of diverse cultural epistemologies and cosmologies. Traditional non-MƗori research has misrepresented MƗori understandings and ways of knowing by simplifying, conglomerating, and commodifying MƗori knowledge for “consumption” by the colonisers. These processes have consequently misrepresented MƗori experiences, thereby denying MƗori authenticity and voice. Such research has displaced MƗori lived experiences and the meanings that these experiences have with the “authoritative” voice of the methodological “expert,” appropriating MƗori lived experience in terms defined and determined by the “expert.” Moreover, many misconstrued MƗori cultural practices and meanings are now part 2

FREEING OURSELVES FROM NEO-COLONIAL DOMINATION

of our everyday myths of Aotearoa/New Zealand, believed by MƗori and non-MƗori alike, and traditional social and educational research has contributed to this situation. As a result, MƗori people are deeply concerned about to whom researchers are accountable. Who has control over the initiation, procedures, evaluations, construction, and distribution of newly defined knowledge? Analyses by Bishop (1996, 1998a and 1998b) and Linda Tuhiwai Smith (1999) have identified that control over legitimisation and representation is maintained within the domain of the colonial and neocolonial paradigms and that locales of initiation and accountability are situated within Western cultural frameworks, thus precluding MƗori cultural forms and processes of initiation and accountability. Traditional research epistemologies have developed methods of initiating research and accessing research participants that are located within the cultural preferences and practices of the Western world as opposed to the cultural preferences and practices of MƗori people themselves. For example, the preoccupation with neutrality, objectivity, and distance by educational researchers has emphasized these concepts as criteria for authority, representation, and accountability and, thus, has distanced MƗori people from participation in the construction, validation, and legitimization of knowledge. As a result, MƗori people are increasingly becoming concerned about who will directly gain from the research. Traditionally, research has established an approach where the research has served to advance the interests, concerns, and methods of the researcher and to locate the benefits of the research at least in part with the researcher, other benefits being of lesser concern. The following table summarises these concerns noting that while Lincoln and Denzin (1994) identified two crises in qualitative research, that from this analysis of MƗori peoples’ concerns about research, it is clear that there are indeed five crises that affect indigenous peoples. Table 1. MƗori people’s concerns about research focuses on the locus of power over issues of initiation, benefits, representation, legitimacy and accountability being with the researcher Initiation

This concern focuses on how the research process begins, and whose concerns, interests and methods of approach determine/ define the outcomes. Traditional research has developed methods of initiating research and accessing research participants that are located within the cultural concerns, preferences and practices of the Western world.

Benefits

The question of benefits concerns who will directly gain from the research, and whether anyone will actually be disadvantaged. MƗori people are increasingly becoming concerned about this important political aspect because traditional research has established an approach to research where the benefits of the research serve to advance the interests, concerns and methods of the researcher and locates the benefits of the research at least in part with the researcher, others being of lesser concern.

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Table 1. (Continued) Representation

Whose research constitutes an adequate depiction of social reality? Traditional research has misrepresented, that is simplified/ conglomerated and commodified MƗori knowledge for ‘consumption’ by the colonisers and denied the authenticity of MƗori experiences and voice. Such research has displaced MƗori lived experiences with the ‘authoritative’ voice of the ‘expert’ voiced in terms defined/determined by the ‘expert’. Further, many misconstrued MƗori cultural practices and meanings are now part of our everyday myths of Aotearoa/New Zealand, believed by MƗori and non-MƗori alike.

Legitimacy

This issue concerns what authority we claim for our texts. Traditional research has undervalued and belittled MƗori knowledge and learning practices and processes in order to enhance those of the colonisers, and adherents of neo-colonial paradigms. Such research has developed a social pathology research approach that has focused on the “inability” of MƗori culture to cope with human problems, and proposed that MƗori culture was inferior to that of the colonisers in human terms. Such practices have perpetuated an ideology of cultural superiority that precludes the development of power sharing processes, and the legitimation of diversity of cultural epistemologies and cosmologies.

Accountability

This concern questions who are researchers answerable to? Who has control over the initiation, procedures, evaluations, text constructions and distribution of newly defined knowledge. Traditional research has claimed that all people have an inalienable right to utilise all knowledge, and maintained that research findings be expressed in term of criteria located within the epistemological framework of traditional research, thus creating locales of accountability that are situated within Western cultural frameworks.

Insiders/Outsiders: Who can Conduct Research in Indigenous Settings? The concerns about initiation, benefits, representation, legitimacy and accountability raise a number of questions about how research with MƗori and Indigenous peoples should be conducted, but perhaps initially it is important to consider, by whom that research should be conducted. One solution to this initial question might well be to take an essentialising position and suggest that cultural ‘insiders’ might well undertake research in a more sensitive and responsive manner than ‘outsiders’. As Merriam, Johnson-Bailey, Lee, Kee, Ntseane and Muhamad (2001) suggests it has “commonly been assumed that being an insider means easy access, the ability to ask more meaningful questions and read non-verbal cues, and most importantly be able to project a more truthful, authentic understanding of the culture under study” (p. 411). On the other hand, of course, there are also the concerns that insiders are accused of being inherently biased, too close to the culture to ask critical questions. 4

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Whatever the case, such understandings assume a homogeneity that is far from the reality of the diversity and complexity that characterises indigenous people’s lives, and the impact that age, class, gender education and colour among other variables might have upon the research relationship, albeit the researcher might consider themselves to be an ‘insider’. A number of studies by researchers who had initially considered themselves to be ‘insiders’(Brayboy & Deyhle, 2000; Johnson-Bailey, 1999; Merriam et al., 2001; Smith, 1999) attest to this problem. Further, as Linda Tuhiwai Smith (1999) argues, even Western trained indigenous researchers who are intimately involved with community members will typically employ research techniques and methodologies that will likely marginalise the communities’ contribution to the investigation. This suggests that indigenous researchers will not automatically conduct research in a culturally appropriate manner when researching their own communities. However, as Native American scholar, Karen Swisher (1998) argues, the dilemma remains, for despite developments in research that attempt to listen to the voices and the stories of the people and presenting them in ways “to encourage readers to see through a different lens…, much research still is presented from an outsiders perspective.” (p. 191) Nevertheless, despite the problems that indigenous researchers might well face, she argues that American Indian scholars need to become involved in leading research rather than being the subjects or consumers of research. She suggests that this will assist in keeping the control over the research in the hands of those involved. She cites (among other sources) a 1989 report of regional dialogues, Our Voices, Our Vision: American Indians Speak Out for Educational Excellence as an example of research that addressed the self-determination of the people involved because from the “conception of the dialogue format to formulation of data and publication, Indian people were in charge of and guided the project; and the voices and concerns of the people were clearly evident” (p. 192). Swisher (1998) argues that what is missing from the plethora of books, journals and articles produced by non-Indians about Indians is “the passion from within and the authority to ask new and different questions based on histories and experiences as indigenous people” (p. 193). Further, she argues that it more than just different ways of knowing, but rather it is “knowing that what we think is grounded in principles of sovereignty and self-determination; and that it has credibility” (p. 193). In this way, Swisher is clear that “Indian people also believe that they have the answers for improving Indian education and feel they must speak for themselves.” (p. 192). In other words, if we were to extrapolate this argument to other indigenous settings, we could see this as a call for the power of definition over issues of research; initiation, benefits, representation, legitimation and accountability being with indigenous peoples themselves. Swisher (1998) identifies that there is an attitude of ‘we can and must do it ourselves’, but it is clear that non-indigenous people must help, but not in the impositional ways of the past. Of course, this raises the question of just what are the new positions on offer to non-indigenous researchers and also for indigenous researchers for that matter. Margie Maaka at a recent NZARE conference clearly stated this position when she said that MƗori must be in control of the research agenda, must be the ones who set the parameters; however, 5

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others can participate at the invitation of the indigenous people. In other words, it is MƗori research by MƗori for MƗori with the help of invited others. Tillman (2002), addressed this issue when considering who should conduct research in African-American communities and suggests that it is not simply a matter of saying that the researcher must be African –American, but “[r]ather it is important to consider whether the researcher has the cultural knowledge to accurately interpret and validate the experiences of African-Americans within the context of the phenomenon under study” (p. 4). Jacobs-Huey (2002) and Smith (1999) emphasizes the power of critical reflexivity for native scholars. The former stating that “critical reflexivity in both writing and identification as a native researcher may act to resist charges of having played the ‘native card’ via a non-critical privileging of one’s insider status” (p. 799). The latter emphasising that “at a general level insider researchers have to have ways of thinking critically about their processes, their relationships and the quality and richness of their data and analysis. So to do outsiders…” (p. 137) Researchers such as Narayan (1993), Griffiths (1998) and Bridges (2001) explain that it is no longer useful to think of researchers as insiders or outsiders, but rather indigenous researchers might be positioned “in terms of shifting identifications amid a field of interpenetrating communities and power relations” (Narayan, 1993, p. 671). Narayan proposes that instead of trying to define insider or outsider status, what we must focus our attention on is the quality of relations with the people we seek to represent in our texts: are they viewed as mere fodder for professionally self-serving statements about a generalized Other, or are they accepted as subjects with voices, views, and dilemmas- people to whom we are bonded through ties of reciprocity…? (p. 672). This chapter suggests how these concerns and aspirations might be met. KAUPAPA MƖORI RESEARCH

Out of the discontent with traditional research and its disruption of MƗori life, an indigenous approach to research has emerged in Aotearoa/New Zealand. This approach, termed Kaupapa (agenda/philosophy) MƗori research, is challenging the dominance of the PƗkehƗ world-view in research. Kaupapa MƗori research emerged from within the wider ethnic revitalization movement that developed in New Zealand following the rapid MƗori urbanization of the post-Second World War period. This revitalization movement blossomed in the 1970s and 1980s with the intensifying of a political consciousness among MƗori communities. More recently, in the late 1980s and the early 1990s, this consciousness has featured the revitalization of MƗori cultural aspirations, preferences, and practices as a philosophical and productive educational stance and a resistance to the hegemony4 of the dominant discourse5. In effect therefore, Kaupapa MƗori presupposes positions that are committed to a critical analysis of the existing unequal power relations within our society, those structures that work to oppress MƗori people. These include rejection of hegemonic belittling, “MƗori can’t cope” discourses, together with a commitment to the power 6

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of conscientisation and politicization through struggle for wider community and social freedoms (Smith, 1997). There are a number of significant dimensions to Kaupapa MƗori research that set it apart from traditional research. One main focus of a Kaupapa MƗori approach to research is the operationalisation of self-determination (tino rangatiratanga) by MƗori people (Bishop, 1996; Durie, 1995, 1998; Smith, 1997; Smith, 1999; and Pihama, Cram & Walker, 2002). Self-determination in Durie’s (1995) terms “captures a sense of MƗori ownership and active control over the future” (p. 16). Such a position is consistent with the Treaty of Waitangi where MƗori people are able “to determine their own policies, to actively participate in the development and interpretation of the law, to assume responsibility for their own affairs and to plan for the needs of future generations” (Durie, 1995, p. 16). In addition, the promotion of self-determination has benefits beyond these aspects. A 10 year study of MƗori households conducted by Durie (1998), shows that the development of a secure identity offers MƗori people advantages in that a secure identity may: afford some protection against poor health; it is more likely to be associated with active educational participation and with positive employment profiles. The corollary is that reduced access to the MƗori resources, and the wider MƗori world, may be associated with cultural, social and economic disadvantage (pp. 58–59). Such an approach challenges the locus of power and control over the research issues of initiation, benefits, representation, legitimation, and accountability as outlined above, being located in another cultural frame of reference/world-view. Kaupapa MƗori is, therefore, challenging the dominance of traditional, individualistic research which primarily, at least in its present form, benefits the researchers and their agenda. In contrast, Kaupapa MƗori research is collectivistic and is oriented toward benefiting all the research participants and their collectively determined agendas, defining and acknowledging MƗori aspirations for research, while developing and implementing MƗori theoretical and methodological preferences and practices for research. Kaupapa MƗori is a discourse that has emerged and is legitimized from within the MƗori Community. MƗori educationalist, Graham Hingangaroa Smith (1992) describes Kaupapa MƗori as “the philosophy and practice of being and acting MƗori” (p. 1). It assumes the taken-for-granted social, political, historical, intellectual, and cultural legitimacy of MƗori people, in that it is an orientation in which “MƗori language, culture, knowledge and values are accepted in their own right” (p. 13). Linda Tuhiwai Smith (1999), another leading MƗori exponent of this approach, identifies that such naming provides a means whereby communities of the researched and the researchers can “engage in a dialogue about setting directions for the priorities, policies, and practices of research for, by, and with MƗori” (p. 183). One fundamental understanding of a Kaupapa MƗori approach to research is that it is the discursive practice that is Kaupapa MƗori that positions researchers in such a way as to operationalise self-determination in terms of agentic positioning and behaviour for research participants thus challenging the essentialising dichotomization of the insider/outsider debate by offering a discursive position for researchers, 7

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irrespective of ethnicity. This positioning occurs because the cultural aspirations, understandings, and practices of MƗori people implement and organize the research process. Further, the associated research issues of initiation, benefits, representation, legitimization, and accountability are addressed and understood in practice by practitioners of Kaupapa MƗori research within the cultural context of the research participants. Such understandings challenge traditional ways of defining, accessing, and constructing knowledge about indigenous peoples and the process of self-critique, sometimes termed paradigm shifting, that is used by Western scholars as a means of “cleansing” thought and attaining what becomes their version of the “truth.” Indigenous peoples are challenging this process because it maintains control over the research agenda within the cultural domain of the researchers or their institutions. A Kaupapa MƗori position is predicated on the understanding that MƗori means of accessing, defining, and protecting knowledge existed before European arrival in New Zealand. Such MƗori cultural processes were protected by the Treaty of Waitangi, subsequently marginalised, but have always been legitimate within MƗori cultural discourses. As with other Kaupapa MƗori initiatives in education, health, and welfare, Kaupapa MƗori research practice is, as Irwin (1994) explains, epistemologically based within MƗori cultural specificities, preferences, and practices. In Olssen’ s (1993) terms, MƗori initiatives are “epistemologically productive where in constructing a vision of the world and positioning people in relation to its classifications, it takes its shape from its interrelations with an infinitely proliferating series of other elements within a particular social field” (p. 4). However this is not to suggest that such an analysis promotes an essentialist view of MƗori where all MƗori must act in prescribed ways for MƗori are just as diverse a people as any other. One of the main outcomes of Durie’s (1998) longitudinal study of MƗori families, Te Hoe Nuku Roa, is the identification of this very diversity within MƗori peoples. To Pihama, Cram and Walker (2002) this means that Kaupapa MƗori analysis must take this diversity of MƗori peoples into account. They argue that Kaupapa MƗori analysis is for all MƗori, “not for select groups or individuals. Kaupapa MƗori is not owned by any group, nor can it be defined in ways that deny MƗori people access to its articulation” (p. 8). In other words, Kaupapa MƗori analysis must benefit MƗori peoples in principle and in practice in such a way that the current realities of marginalisation and the heritage of colonialism and neo-colonialism are addressed. Examples of Culturally Responsive Research Practices This analysis is based on a number of studies conducted by the author using Kaupapa MƗori research. The first study, Whakawhanaungatanga: Collaborative Research Stories. (Bishop, 1996, 1998b) was a collaborative meta-study of five projects that addressed MƗori agendas in research in order to ascertain the ways in which a group of researchers were addressing MƗori peoples’ concerns about research and what the researchers’ experiences of these projects meant to them individually. These experiences of the various researchers and their understandings of their 8

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experiences were investigated by co-constructing collaborative research stories. The objective was to engage in a process of critical reflection and build a discourse based on the formal and informal meetings that were part of each of the projects in order to connect epistemological questions to indigenous ways of knowing by way of descriptions of actual research projects. The meta-study examined how a group of researchers addressed the importance of devolving power and control in the research exercise in order to promote self-determination (tino Rangatiratanga) of MƗori people, i.e. to act as educational professionals in ways consistent with Article 2 of the Treaty of Waitangi. I talked with other researchers who had accepted the challenge of being repositioned by and within the discursive practice that is Kaupapa MƗori. The meta-study in effect sought to investigate my own position as a researcher within a co-joint reflection on shared experiences and co-joint construction of meanings about these experiences, a position where the stories of the other research participants merged with my own to create new stories. Such collaborative stories go beyond an approach that simply focuses on the cooperative sharing of experiences and focuses on connectedness, engagement, and involvement with the other research participants within the cultural world view/discursive practice within which they function. This study sought to identify what constitutes this engagement and what implications this has for promoting self-determination/agency/voice in the research participants by examining concepts of participatory and cultural consciousness and connectedness within MƗori discursive practice. The second study, Te Toi Huarewa: Effective Teachers and Learning in Total Immersion MƗori language Settings (Bishop, Berryman, & Richardson, 2002), sought to identify effective teaching and learning strategies, effective teaching and learning materials, and the ways in which teachers assess and monitor the effectiveness of their teaching in MƗori-medium reading and writing programs for students aged 5 to 9 years. Following a period of establishing relationships and developing a joint agenda for the research to identify what effective teachers do in their classrooms and why they teach in a particular manner, the researchers sought to operationalise Kaupapa MƗori concerns that the self determination of the research participants over issues of representation and legitimation be paramount. The strategy consisted of interviews and directed observations followed by facilitated teacher reflections on what had been observed by using stimulated recall interviews (Calderhead, 1981, p. 240). The stimulated recall interviews that followed the observation sessions focused on specific interactions observed in the classrooms. In the stimulated recall interviews, the teachers were encouraged to reflect upon what had been observed and to bring their own sense-making processes to the discussions in order to co-construct a ‘rich’ descriptive picture of their classroom practices. In other words, they were encouraged to reflect upon and explain why they did what they did on their own terms. Through the use of this process, they explained for us that they all placed the culture of the child at the centre of learning relationships by developing in their classrooms what we later termed (after Gay, 2000; Villegas and Lucas, 2000) a culturally appropriate and responsive context for learning. 9

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The third study, Te Kotahitanga: Improving the Educational Achievement of MƗori students in Mainstream Schools (Bishop et al., 2003), which will be detailed in Chapter 2, is a work-in-progress, research/professional development project that is now entering its fifth phase of implementation in 50 schools with some 2000 teachers. The project commenced in 2001 seeking to address the self determination of MƗori secondary school students by talking with them and other participants in their education about just what is involved in limiting and /or improving their educational achievement. The project commenced with the gathering of a number of narratives of students’ classroom experiences by the process of Collaborative Storying from a range of engaged and non-engaged MƗori students (as defined by their schools), in five non-structurally modified mainstream secondary schools. This approach is very similar to that termed testimonio in that it is the intention of the direct narrator (research participant) to use an interlocutor (the researcher) to bring his/her or their situation to the attention of an audience “to which he or she would normally not have access because of their very condition of subalternity to which the testimonio bears witness” (Beverly, 2000, p. 556). In this research project, the students were able to have their narratives about their experiences of schooling shared with teachers who otherwise might not have access to them. It was from these amazing stories (Bishop & Berryman, 2006), that the rest of this project developed. In their narratives the students clearly identified the main influences on their educational achievement by articulating the impact and consequences of their living in a marginalized space. That is, they explained how they were perceived in pathological terms by their teachers, and how this has had a negative effect up on their lives. In addition, the students told the research team how teachers, in changing how they related and interacted with MƗori students in their classrooms, could create a context for learning wherein MƗori students’ educational achievement could improve; again by placing the self-determination of MƗori students at the centre of classroom relationships. Such an approach is consistent with Ryan (1999) who suggests that a solution to the one-sidedness of representations that are promoted by the dominance of the powerful, in this case pathologising discourses, is to portray events as were done in the collaborative stories of the MƗori students, in terms of “competing discourses rather than as simply the projection of inappropriate images” (p. 187). He suggests that this approach, rather than seeking the truth or “real pictures,” allows for previously marginalized discourses “to emerge and compete on equal terms with previously dominant discourses” (p. 187). On the basis of the suggestions from Year 9 and 10 (ages 14–16) MƗori students, the research team developed an Effective Teaching Profile. Together with other information from narratives of experiences from those parenting the students, their principals and their teachers, and from the literature, this Effective Teaching Profile has formed the basis of a professional development program, that when implemented with a group of teachers in four schools, was associated with improved learning, behaviour and attendance outcomes for MƗori students in the classrooms of those teachers who had been able to participate fully in the professional development program (Bishop et al, 2003). 10

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ADDRESSING ISSUES OF SELF-DETERMINATION

Western approaches to operationalising self-determination (agentic positioning and behaviour) in others are, according to Noddings (1986) and Davies (1990), best addressed by those who position themselves within empowering relationships. Authors such as Oakley (1981), Tripp (1983), Burgess (1984), Lather (1986; 1991), Patton (1990), Delamont (1992), Eisner (1991), Reinharz (1992), and Sprague and Hayes (2000) suggest that an “empowering” relationship could be attained by developing what could be termed an “enhanced research relationship,” where there occurs a long-term development of mutual purpose and intent between the researcher and the researched. In order to facilitate this development of mutuality, there is also the recognition of the need for personal investment in the form of self-disclosure and openness on the part of the researcher. Sprague and Hayes (2000) explain that such relationships are mutual: [to] the degree to which each party negotiates a balance between commitment to the other’s and to one’s own journey of self-determination. In mutual relationships each strives to recognize the other’s unique and changing needs and abilities, [and] takes the other’s perspectives and interests into account (p. 684). In the practice of Kaupapa MƗori research, however, there develops a degree of involvement on the part of the researcher, constituted as a way of knowing, that is fundamentally different from the concepts of personal investment and collaboration as suggested by the above authors. For, while it appears that “personal investment” is essential, this personal investment is not on terms determined by the “investor.” The investment is on terms of mutual understanding and control by all participants, so that the investment is reciprocal and could not be otherwise. In other words, the “personal investment” by the researcher is not an act by an individual agent but emerges out of the context within which the research is constituted. Traditional conceptualizations of knowing do not adequately explain this understanding. Elbow (1986, as cited in Connelly & Clandinin, 1990) identifies a different form of reciprocity, one he terms “connected knowing” where the “knower is attached to the known” (p. 4). In other words, where there is common understanding and a common basis for such an understanding, where the concerns, interests, and agendas of the researcher become the concerns, interests, and agendas of the researched and vice versa. Hogan (as cited in Connelly & Clandinin, 1990, p. 4) refers to this as a “feeling of connectedness.” Heshusius (1994, 2002) transforms this notion by suggesting the need to move from an alienated mode of consciousness which sees the knower as separate from the known to a participatory mode of consciousness. Such a mode of consciousness addresses a fundamental reordering of our understanding of the relationship “between self and other (and therefore of reality), and indeed between self and the world, in a manner where such a reordering not only includes connectedness but necessitates letting go of the focus on self ” (Heshusius, 1994, p. 15). Heshusius (1994) identifies this form of knowing as involving, that which Polyani (1966) calls “tacit knowing,” which Harman calls “compassionate consciousness” (as cited in Heshusius, 1994), and which Berman calls “somatic” or “bodily” knowing 11

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(as cited in Heshusius, 1994). Barbara Thayer-Bacon (1997) describes a relational epistemology that “views “knowledge as something that is socially constructed by embedded, embodied people who are in relation with each other” (p. 245). Each of these authors is referring to an embodied way of being and of a knowing which is a non-accountable, non-describable way of knowing. Heshusius (1994) suggests that “the act of coming to know is not a subjectivity that one can explicitly account for,” but rather it is of a “direct participatory nature one cannot account for” (p. 17). Heshusius (1996) also suggests that: In a participatory mode of consciousness the quality of attentiveness is characterised by an absence of the need to separate, distance and to insert predetermined thought patterns, methods and formulas between self and other. It is characterised by an absence of the need to be in charge (p. 627). Heshusius (1994) identifies the ground from which a participatory mode of knowing emerges as “the recognition of the deeper kinship between ourselves and other” (p. 17). This form of knowing speaks in a very real sense to MƗori ways of knowing, for the MƗori term for connectedness and engagement by kinship is whanaungatanga6. This concept is one of the most fundamental ideas within MƗori culture, both as a value and as a social process. Whanaungatanga literally consists of kin relationships between ourselves and others and is constituted in ways determined by the MƗori cultural context. Whakawhanaungatanga as a Kaupapa MƗori Research Approach Whakawhanaungatanga is the process of establishing family (whƗnau) relationships, literally by means of identifying, through culturally appropriate means, your bodily linkage, your engagement, your connectedness, and, therefore, an unspoken but implicit commitment to other people. For example, a mihimihi (formal ritualized introduction) at a hui (MƗori ceremonial gathering) involves stating your own whakapapa (genealogy) in order to establish relationships with the hosts/others/ visitors. A mihimihi does not identify you in terms of your work, in terms of your academic rank or title, for example. Rather, a mihimihi is a statement of where you are from and of how you can be related and connected to these other people and the land, in both the past and the present. For MƗori people, the process of whakawhanaungatanga identifies how our identity comes from our whakapapa and how our whakapapa and its associated raranga korero (stories) link us to all other living and inanimate creatures and to the very earth we inhabit. Our mountain, our river, our island are us. We are part of them and they are part of us. We know this in a bodily way, more than in a recitation of names. More than in the actual linking of names, we know it because we are blood and bodily related. We are of the same bones (iwi), of the same people (iwi). We are from the same pregnancies (hapu), and are of the same subtribe (hapu). We are of the same family (whƗnau), the family into which we were born (whƗnau). We were nurtured by the same land (whenua), by the same placenta (whenua). In this way the language reminds us that we are part of each other. 12

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So when MƗori people introduce ourselves as whanaunga (relatives), whether it be to engage in research or not, we are introducing part of one to another part of the same oneness. Knowing who we are is a somatic acknowledgment of our connectedness with and commitment to our surroundings, human and nonhuman. For example, from this positioning it would be very difficult to undertake research in a “nonsomatic” distanced manner. To invoke “distance” in a MƗori research project would be to deny that it is a MƗori project. It would have different goals, not MƗori goals. Establishing and maintaining whƗnau relationships, which can be either literal or metaphoric within the discursive practice that is Kaupapa MƗori, is an integral and ongoing constitutive element of a Kaupapa MƗori approach to research. Establishing a research group as if it were an extended family is one form of embodying the process of whakawhanaungatanga as a research strategy. In a Kaupapa MƗori approach to research, research groups constituted as whƗnau attempt to develop relationships and organizations based on similar principles to those which order a traditional or literal whƗnau. Metge (1990) explains that to use the term whƗnau is to identify a series of rights and responsibilities, commitments and obligations, and supports that are fundamental to the collectivity. These are the tikanga (customs) of the whƗnau; warm interpersonal interactions, group solidarity, shared responsibility for one another, cheerful cooperation for group ends, corporate responsibility for group property, material or nonmaterial (e.g. knowledge) items and issues. These attributes can be summed up in the words aroha (love in the broadest sense, also mutuality), awhi (helpfulness), manaaki (hospitality), and tiaki (guidance). The whƗnau is a location for communication, for sharing outcomes, and for constructing shared common understandings and meanings. Individuals have responsibilities to care for and to nurture other members of the group, while still adhering to the Kaupapa of the group. The group will operate to avoid singling out particular individuals for comment and attention and to avoid embarrassing individuals who are not yet succeeding within the group. Group products and achievement frequently take the form of group performances, not individual performances. The group will typically begin and end each session with prayer and will also typically share food together. The group will always make major decisions as a group and then refer those decisions to kaumatua (respected elders of either gender) for approval, and the group will seek to operate with the support and encouragement of kaumatua. This feature acknowledges the multigenerational compositioning of a whƗnau with associated hierarchically determined rights, responsibilities, and obligations. Determining Benefits: Identifying Lines of Accountability using MƗori Metaphor Determining who benefits from the research and to whom the researchers are accountable can also be understood in terms of MƗori discursive practices. What non-MƗori people would refer to as management or control mechanisms are traditionally constituted in a whƗnau as taonga tuku iho, literally those treasures passed down to us from the ancestors, those customs that guide our behaviour. In this manner the structure and function of a whƗnau describes and constitutes the relationship among research participants, in traditional research terminology between the researcher 13

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and the researched, within Kaupapa MƗori research practice. Research, thus, cannot proceed unless whƗnau support is obtained, unless kaumatua provide guidance, and unless there is aroha (mutuality) between the participants, evidenced by an overriding feeling of tolerance, hospitality, and respect for others, their aspirations, preferences and practices. The research process is participatory as well as participantdriven in the sense that it is the concerns, interests, and preferences of the whƗnau that guide and drive the research processes. The research itself is driven by the participants in terms of setting the research questions, ascertaining the likely benefits, the design of the work, the undertaking of the work that had to be done, the distribution of rewards, the access to research findings, the control over the distribution of the knowledge and to whom the researcher is accountable. This approach has much in common with that described by Kemmis and McTaggart (2000) as participatory and collaborative action research which emerged “more or less deliberately as forms of resistance to conventional research practices that were perceived by particular kinds of participants as acts of colonisation” (p. 572). To Esposito and Murphy (2000) participatory action research emphasizes the political nature of knowledge production and places a premium on self-emancipation (p. 180) where [s]uch research groups are typically comprised of both professionals and ordinary people, all of whom are regarded as authoritative sources of knowledge. By making minorities the authorized representatives of the knowledge produced, their experiences and concerns are brought to the forefront of the research. The resulting information is applied to resolving the problems they define collectively as significant. As a result, the integrity of distinct racial groups is not annihilated or subsumed within dominant narratives that portray them as peripheral members of society (p. 181). For researchers, this means they are not information gatherers, data processors and sense makers of other people’s lives, but rather they are expected to be able to communicate with individuals and groups, to participate in appropriate cultural process and practices and interact in a dialogic manner with the research participants. Esposito and Murphy (2000) explain that research “methods are geared to offer opportunities for discussion. After all, information is not transmitted between researchers and individuals; instead, information is co-created, data are coproduced intersubjectively in a manner that preserves the existential nature of the information” (p. 182). Esposito and Murphy (2000) also suggest that such an approach may facilitate the development of the kind of research that Lomawaima (2000) and Fine and Weis (1996) describe where investigators are more attuned to “locally meaningful expectations and concerns” (Lomawaima 2000, p. 15). In addition, they suggest that the researchers become actively involved in the solutions, and promote the well-being of communities, instead of merely using locations as sites for data collection as Lomawaima (2000) suggests, opening up the “possibilities for directly meaningful research - research that is as informative and useful to tribes as it is to academic professionals and disciplinary theories” (p. 15). 14

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However, what is crucial to an understanding of what it means to be a researcher in a Kaupapa MƗori approach is that it is through the development of a participatory mode of consciousness that a researcher becomes part of this process. He or she does not start from a position outside of the group and then chooses to invest or reposition him/herself. Rather the (re)positioning is part of participation. The researcher cannot “position” him/herself or “empower” the other. Instead, through entering a participatory mode of consciousness the individual agent of the “I” of the researcher is released in order to enter a consciousness larger than the self. One example of how whƗnau processes in action affect the position of the researcher is the way in which different individuals take on differing discursive positionings within the collective. These positionings fulfil different functions oriented towards the collaborative concerns, interests, and benefits of the whƗnau as a group, rather than towards the benefit of any one member, a member with a distanced research agenda for example. Such positionings are constituted in ways that are generated by MƗori cultural practices and preferences. For example, the leader of a research whƗnau, here termed a whƗnau of interest to identify it as a metaphoric whƗnau, will not necessarily be the researcher. Kaumatua, which is a MƗori-defined and -apportioned position, will be the leaders. Leadership in a whƗnau of interest, however, is not in the sense of making all the decisions, but in the sense of being a guide to culturally appropriate procedures (kawa) for decision making and a listener to the voices of all members of the whƗnau. The kaumatua are the consensus seekers for the collective and the producers of the collaborative voice of the members. By developing research within such existing culturally constituted practices, concerns about voice and agency can be addressed. This emphasis on positionings within a group constituted as a whƗnau also addresses concerns about accountability, authority and control. In a MƗori collective whƗnau, there are a variety of discursively determined positions, some of which are open to the researcher, some of which are not. The extent to which researchers can be positioned within a whƗnau of interest is therefore tied very closely to who they are, often more so than what they are. Therefore, positioning is not simply a matter of the researchers’ choice, because this would further researcher imposition. That is, researchers are not free to assume any position that they think the whƗnau of interest needs in order for the whƗnau to function. The researchers’ choice of positions is generated by the structure of the whƗnau and the customary ways of behaving constituted within the whƗnau. The clear implication is that researchers are required to locate themselves within new “story-lines” that address the contradictory nature of the traditional researcher/researched relationship. The language used by researchers working in Kaupapa MƗori contexts in Bishop (1996, 1998b) for example, contains the key to the new story-lines. The metaphor and imagery they used to explain their participation in the research were those located within the research participants` domains, and the researchers either were or needed to move to become part of this domain. Researchers were positioned within the discursive practices of Kaupapa MƗori by the use of contextually constituted metaphor within the domain where others constituted themselves as agentic. Further, within this domain existed discursive practices which provided the researchers with 15

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positions that enabled them to carry through their negotiated lines of action whether they were insiders or outsiders. As a result of these negotiations they had differing positions and expectations/tasks offered to them. From this analysis, it can be seen that through developing a research group by using MƗori customary socio-political processes, the research participants become members of a research whƗnau of interest, which, as a metaphoric whƗnau, is a group constituted in terms understandable and controllable by MƗori cultural practices. These whƗnau of interest determine the research questions and the methods of research, and they use MƗori cultural processes for addressing and acknowledging the construction and validation/legitimization of knowledge. Further, the whƗnau of interest develops a collaborative approach to processing and constructing meaning/ theorizing about the information, again by culturally constituted means. It is also important to recognize that whƗnau of interest are not isolated groups, but rather are constituted and conduct their endeavors in terms of the wider cultural aspirations, preferences, and practices of MƗori cultural revitalization within which their projects are composed. Spiral Discourse WhƗnau of interest are developed by and use a MƗori cultural process in both its literal and metaphoric senses. This process is termed here spiral discourse, a culturally constituted discursive practice which is found in many MƗori cultural practices associated for example with hui (MƗori formal meetings). A hui generally commences with a formal welcome (a powhiri), a welcome rich in cultural meaning, imagery, and practices which fulfill the enormously important task of recognizing the relative tapu (specialness; being with potentiality for power) and mana (power) of the two sides; the hosts and the visitors (Salmond, 1975; Shirres, 1982). Once the formal welcome is complete and once the participants have been ritually joined together by the process of the welcoming ceremony, hui participants move on to the discussion of the matter under consideration (the Kaupapa of the hui). This usually takes place within the meeting house, a place designated for this very purpose, free of distractions and interruptions. This house is symbolically the embodiment of an ancestor, which further emphasizes the normality of a somatic approach to knowing in such a setting and within these processes. The participants address the matters under consideration, under the guidance of respected and authoritative elders (kaumatua), whose primary function is to provide and monitor the correct spiritual and procedural framework within which the participants can discuss the issues before them. People get a chance to address the issue without fear of being interrupted. Generally the procedure is for people to speak one after another, in sequence of left to right. People get a chance to state and restate their meanings, to revisit their meanings, and to modify, delete, and adapt their meanings according to local customs (tikanga). The discourse spirals, in that the flow of talk may seem circuitous, opinions may vary and waver, but the seeking of a collaboratively constructed story is central. The controls over proceedings are temporal and spiritual, as in all MƗori cultural practices. 16

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The procedures are steeped in metaphoric meanings, richly abstract allusions being made constantly to cultural messages, stories, events of the past, and aspirations for the future. Such procedures are time proven and to the participants are highly effective in dealing with contemporary issues and concerns of all kinds.7 The aim of a hui is to reach a consensus, to arrive at a jointly constructed meaning. This takes time, days if need be, or sometimes a series of hui will be held in order that the elders monitoring proceedings can tell when a constructed “voice” has been arrived at. INITIATING RESEARCH USING MƖORI METAPHOR: REJECTING EMPOWERMENT

Addressing the self-determination of participants is embedded within many MƗori cultural practices and understandings, for example, during the proceedings of a hui, one visible manifestation of this reality is seen in the way visitors make a contribution toward the cost of the meeting. This contribution is termed a koha. In the past, this koha was often a gift of food to contribute to the running of the hui; nowadays it is usually money that is laid down on the ground, by the last speaker of the visitors’ side, between the two groups of people who are coming together at the welcoming ceremony. The koha remains an important ritualized part of a ceremony that generally proceeds without too much trouble. What must not be forgotten, however, is that the reception of the koha is up to the hosts. The koha, as a gift or an offering of assistance towards the cost of running the hui, goes with the full mana (status/power) of the group so offering. It is placed in a position, such as laying it on the ground between the two groups coming together, so as to be able to be considered by the hosts. It is not often given into the hands of the hosts, but whatever the specific details of the protocol, the process of “laying down” is a very powerful recognition of the right of others to self-determination, that is to choose whether to pick it up or not. The koha generally precedes the final coming together of the two sides. The placing of the koha comes at a crucial stage in the ceremony, where the hosts can refuse to accept the mana of the visitors, where the hosts can display their ultimate control over events, where the hosts can choose whether they want to become one with the visitors (manuhiri) by the process of the hongi and haruru (pressing noses and shaking hands). Symbolically, with the koha, the hosts are taking on the kaupapa (agenda) of the guests by accepting that which the manuhiri (guests) are bringing for debate and mediation. But overall it is important that the kaupapa (agenda) the guests laid down at the hui is now the “property” of the whole whƗnau. It is now the task of the whole whƗnau to deliberate the issues and to own the problems, concerns, and ideas in a way that is real and meaningful, the way of whakakotahitanga (developing unity), where all will work for the betterment of the idea. By invoking these processes in their metaphoric sense, Kaupapa MƗori research is conducted within the discursive practices of MƗori culture. Figuratively, laying down a koha as a means of initiating research, for example, or of offering solutions to a problem, challenges notions of empowerment, which is a major concern within contemporary Western-defined research. It challenges what constitutes “self ” and “other” in Western thought. Rather than figuratively saying “I am giving you power,” 17

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or “I intend to empower you,” the laying down of a koha and stepping away for the others to consider your gift, means that your mana is intact, as is theirs and that you are acknowledging their power of self-determination. The three research projects referred to above all saw the researchers either laying out their potential contribution as a researcher, or asking a research participant to explain what has been observed in their classrooms or seeking the meaning that participants construct about their experiences as young people in secondary schools. In each of these cases, the researcher was indicating that they do not have the power to make sense of the events or experiences alone and indeed do not want anything from the relationship that is not a product of the relationship. In this way, it is up to the others to exert agency, to decide if they wish to “pick it up,” to explain the meanings of their own experiences on their own terms. Whatever they do, both sides have power throughout the process. Both sides have tapu (specialness) that is being acknowledged. In this sense, researchers in Kaupapa MƗori contexts are repositioned in such a way as no longer needing to seek to give voice to others, to empower others, to emancipate others, or to refer to others as subjugated voices, but rather to listen to and participate with those traditionally “othered” as constructors of meanings of their own experiences and agents of knowledge. Not wanting anything from the experience for one’s “self ” is characteristic of what Schachtel (as cited in Heshusius, 1994) calls “allocentric knowing.” It is only when nothing is desired for the self, not even the desire to empower someone, that complete attention and participation in “kinship” terms is possible. In such ways, researchers can participate in a process that facilitates the development in people of a sense of themselves as agentic and of having an authoritative voice. This is not a result of the researcher “allowing” this to happen or “empowering” participants. It is the function of the cultural context within which the research participants are positioned, negotiate, and conduct the research.8 In effect, the cultural context positions the participants by constructing the story-lines, and with them the cultural metaphors and images, as well as the “thinking as usual,” the talk/language through which research participants are constituted and researcher/researched relationships are organized. Thus, the joint development of new story-lines is a collaborative effort. The researcher and the researched together rewrite the constitutive metaphors of the relationship. What makes it MƗori is that it is done using MƗori metaphor within a MƗori cultural context. Such approaches are essential to move the power dynamics of research relationships for as was identified earlier, differential power relations among participants, while construed and understood as collaborative by the researcher, may still enable researcher concerns and interests to dominate how understandings are constructed. This can happen even within relations constructed as reciprocal, if the research outcome remains one determined by the researcher as a data-gathering exercise (Goldstein, 2000; Tripp, 1983). Where attempts at developing dialogue move beyond efforts to gather “data” and move towards mutual, symmetrical, dialogic construction of meaning within appropriate culturally constituted contexts, as is illustrated in the three examples introduced earlier, then the voice of the research participants is heard, and their agency is facilitated. 18

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Such understandings seeks to address the self/other relationship by examining how researchers shift themselves from a “speaking for” position to a situation Michelle Fine (1994) describes as taking place “when we construct texts collaboratively, selfconsciously examining our relations with/for/despite those who have been contained as Others, we move against, we enable resistance to, Othering” (p. 74). Fine (1994) attempts to: …unravel, critically, the blurred boundaries in our relation, and in our texts; to understand the political work of our narratives; to decipher how the traditions of social science serve to inscribe; and to imagine how our practice can be transformed to resist, self-consciously, acts of othering (p. 57). Fine and her colleagues Weis, Weseen and Wong (2000) stress “that questions of responsibility-for-whom will, and should, forever be paramount” (p. 125). Reciprocity in indigenous research, however, is not just a political understanding, never an individual act, nor just a matter of refining and/or challenging the paradigms within which researchers work. It is the very world-view within which the researcher becomes immersed that holds the key to knowing. For example, establishing relationships and developing research whƗnau by invoking the processes of whakawhanaungatanga establishes interconnectedness, commitment, and engagement, within culturally constituted research practices by means of constitutive metaphor from within the discursive practice of Kaupapa MƗori. It is the use of such metaphor that reorders the relationship of the researcher/researched from within, from one which focused on researcher as “self ” and on the researched as “other” to one of a common consciousness of all research participants. Similarly, a Kaupapa MƗori approach suggests that concepts of “distance,” “detachment,” and “separation”, epistemological and methodological concerns that researchers have spent much time on in the recent past (Acker, Barry & Esseveld, 1991; Stacey, 1991; and Troyna & Carrington, 1992), do not characterise these research relationships in any way. Rather, Kaupapa MƗori research experiences insist that the focus on “self ” is blurred and that the focus turns to what Heshusius (1994) describes as a situation where “reality is no longer understood as truth to be interpreted but as mutually evolving” (p. 18). In an operational sense, it is suggested that researchers address the concerns and issues of the participants in ways that are understandable and able to be controlled by the research participants so that these concerns and issues also are, or become, those of the researchers. In other words, spiral discourse provides a means of effecting a qualitative shift in how participants relate to one another. Sidorkin (2002) suggests that such understandings have major implications for how we understand the “self ” and “invites us to think about the possibilities of a relational self” (p. 96), one where “only analysis of specific relations in their interaction can provide a glimpse of the meaning of the self” (p. 97). To this end Fitzsimons and Smith (2000) describe Kaupapa MƗori philosophy as that which is “call[ing] for a relational identity through an interpretation of kinship and genealogy and current day events, but not a de-contextualised retreat to a romantic past” (p. 39). 19

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This re-ordering of what constitutes the research relationship with its implications and challenges of the essential enlightenment-generated self is not on terms or within understandings constructed by the researcher, however well intentioned contemporary impulses to “empower” the “other” might be. From an indigenous perspective such impulses are misguided and perpetuate neo-colonial sentiments. In other words, rather than researcher-determined criteria for participation as a research process, whakawhanaungatanga uses MƗori cultural practices, such as those found in hui, to set the pattern for research relationships, collaborative storying being but one example of this principle in practice. Whakawhanaungatanga as a research process uses methods and principles similar to those used to establish relationships among MƗori people. These principles are invoked to address the means of research initiation, to establish the research questions, to facilitate participation in the work of the project, to address issues of representation and accountability, and to legitimate the ownership of knowledge defined and created. Kincheloe and McLaren (2000) demonstrate how developments in critical ethnography as one example, have benefited from such new understandings of culture and cultural practices and processes, used in both literal and figurative senses, to identify “possibilities for cultural critique, that have been opened up by the current blurring and mixing of disciplinary genres-those that emphasize experience, subjectivity, reflexivity and dialogical understanding” (p. 302). One major benefit from such analysis is that social life is “not viewed as preontologically available for the researcher to study” (p. 302). They suggest that this is a major breakthrough in the domain of critical theory which previously remained rooted in the western-based dialectic of binary analysis of oppositional pairings which viewed emancipation in terms of emancipating ‘others’ (Kincheloe and McLaren, 2000), and in many cases conflated economic marginalization with ethnicity and gender and other axes of domination (See Bishop and Glynn, 1999, Chapter 2, for a detailed critique of this approach in New Zealand). ADDRESSING ISSUES OF REPRESENTATION AND LEGITIMATION: A NARRATIVE APPROACH

Interviewing as Collaborative Storying (Bishop, 1997) as used in the three studies identified earlier, addresses what Denzin and Lincoln (1994) identify as the twin crises of qualitative research; representation and legitimation by suggesting that rather than there being distinct stages in the research from gaining access to data gathering to data processing, there is a process of continually revisiting the agenda and the sense-making processes of the research participants within the interview. In this way, meanings are negotiated and co-constructed between the research participants within the cultural frameworks of the discourses within which they are positioned. This process is captured by the image of a spiral. The concept of the spiral not only speaks in culturally preferred terms, the fern or koru, but it also indicates that the accumulation is always reflexive. This means that the discourse always returns to the original initiators where control lies. Mishler (1986) and Ryan (1999) explain these ideas further by suggesting that in order to construct meaning it is necessary to appreciate how meaning is grounded in, 20

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and constructed through, discourse. Discursive practice is contextually, culturally, and individually related. Meanings in discourse are neither singular nor fixed. Terms take on “specific and contextually grounded meanings within and through the discourse as it develops and is shaped by speakers” (Mishler, 1986, p. 65). Or to put it another way, “meaning is constructed in the dialogue between individuals and the images and symbols they perceive” (Ryan, 1999, p. 11). A ‘community of interest’ between researchers and participants, call them what you will, cannot be created unless the interview, as one example, is constructed so that interviewers and respondents strive to arrive together at meanings that both can understand. The relevance and appropriateness of questions and responses emerges through and is realized in the discourse itself. The standard process of analysis of interviews abstracts both questions and responses from this process. By suppressing the discourse and by assuming shared and standard meanings, this approach short-circuits the problem of meaning (Mishler, 1986). This analysis suggests that when interviewing, perhaps one of the most commonly used qualitative methods, there needs to be a trade-off between two extremes. The first position claims “the words of an interview are the most accurate data and that the transcript of those words carries that accuracy with negligible loss” (Tripp, 1983, p. 40). In other words, what people say should be presented unaltered and not analysed in any way beyond that which the respondent undertook. The second position maximizes researcher interpretation, editorial control and ownership by introducing researcher coding and analysis in the form often referred to as “grounded theory” (after Glaser & Strauss, 1967). This chapter suggests there is a third position where the ‘coding’ procedure is established and developed by the research participants as a process of storying and restorying, that is the co-joint construction of further meaning within a sequence of interviews. In other words, there is an attempt within the interview or rather within a series of in-depth, semi-structured interviews as “conversations” (see Bishop, 1996, 1997), to actually co-construct a mutual understanding by means of sharing experiences and meanings. The three examples of research outlined at the start of this chapter all used research approaches associated with the process of Collaborative Storying so that the research participants were able to recollect, reflect and to make sense of their experiences within their own cultural context and in particular their own language, hence being able to position themselves within those discourses wherein explanations/meanings lie. In such ways their interpretations and analyses become ‘normal’ and ‘accepted’ as opposed to those of the researcher being what is legitimate. Indeed when indigenous cultural ways of knowing and aspirations in this case for self-determination are central to the creation of the research context, then the situation goes beyond empowerment to one where sense making, decision making and theorizing takes place in situations that are ‘normal’ to the research participants rather than constructed by the researcher. Of course, the major implication for researchers is that they should be able to participate in these sense-making contexts rather than expecting the research participants to engage in theirs, emphasizing, as Tillman (2002, p. 3) suggests, the centrality of culture to the research process and identifies “the multi-dimensional aspects of African-American cultures(s) and the 21

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possibilities for the resonance of the cultural knowledge of African-Americans in educational research” (p. 4). This is not to suggest that only interviews as Collaborative Stories are able to address MƗori concerns and aspirations for self-determination. Indeed, Sleeter (2000) has even argued that “quantitative research can be used for liberatory as well as oppressive ends” (p. 240). Indeed, this author’s experiences when researching within secondary schools demonstrates that given that the level of negotiation that is described here as occurring through the process of spiral discourse occurs “with full regard for local complexities, power relations and previously ignored life experiences” (Sleeter, 2001, p. 241), then powerful outcomes are possible using a variety of research approaches. What is fundamental is not the approach per se, but rather establishing and maintaining relationships that address the power of the participants to selfdetermination. Hence the usefulness of the notion of Collaborative Storying as a generic approach, not just as a research method that speaks of a re-ordering of the relationships between the researchers and research participants. An understanding that Sidorkin (2002) suggests addresses power imbalances because “[r]elations cannot belong to one thing: they are the joint property of at least two things” (p. 94). In this way deconstructing research practices that Scheurich and Young (1997) describe as arising out of the “social history and culture of the dominant race” [that] “reflect and reinforce that social history and the controlling position of that racial group” (p. 13) and as a result are epistemologically racist in that they deny the relational constructedness of the world in order to promote and maintain the hegemony of one of the supposed partners. APPROACHES TO AUTHORITY AND VALIDITY

Many of the problems identified above arise from researchers positioning themselves within modernist discourses. It is essential to challenge modernist discourses with their concomitant concerns regarding validity, including strategies such as objectivity/ subjectivity, replicability, and external measures for validity. These discourses are so pervasive that MƗori/indigenous researchers may automatically revert to using such means of establishing validity for their texts, but problematically so because these measures of validity are all positioned/defined within another world-view. As bell hooks (1993) explains, the Black Power movement in the United States in the 1960s was influenced by the modernist discourses on race, gender, and class that were current at the time. As a result of not addressing these discourses and the ways they affected the condition of Black people, issues such as patriarchy were left unaddressed within the Black Liberation movement. bell hooks insists that unless Black people address these issues themselves, others will do so for them, and in ways determined by the concerns and interests of others, rather than those that “women of color” would prefer.9 Indeed, Linda Tillman (2002) promotes a culturally sensitive research approach for African-Americans that focuses on “how African Americans understand and experience the world” (p. 4) that promotes the use of an approach to qualitative research wherein “interpretative paradigms offer greater possibilities for the use of alternative 22

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frameworks, co-construction of multiple realities and experiences, and knowledge that can lead to improved educational opportunities for African Americans (p. 5). Yet historically, traditional forms of non-reflective research conducted within what Denzin and Lincoln (1994) term as positivist and post-positivist frames of reference perpetuate problems of outsiders determining what is valid for MƗori. This occurs by the very process of employing non- MƗori methodological frameworks and conventions for writing about such research processes and outcomes. For example, Lincoln and Denzin (1994) argue that terms such as “logical, construct, internal, ethnographic, and external validity, text-based data, triangulation, trustworthiness, credibility, grounding, naturalistic indicators, fit, coherence, comprehensiveness, plausibility, truth and relevance… [are] all attempts to reauthorise a text’s authority in the post-positivist moment” (p. 579). These concepts, and the methodological frameworks within which they exist, represent attempts to contextualise the grounding of a text in the external, empirical world. “They represent efforts to develop a set of transcendent rules and procedures that lie outside any specific research project” (p. 579). These externalized rules are the criteria by which the validity of a text is then judged. The author of the text is thus able to present the text to the reader as valid, thus replacing the sense making, meaning construction, and voice of the researched person with that of the researcher by representing the text as an authoritative re-presentation of the experiences of others by using a system of researcher-determined and -dominated coding and analytical tools. Ballard (1994) referring to Donmoyer’s work, suggests that formulaic research procedures are rarely in fact useful as “prescriptions for practice” because people use their own knowledge, experience, feelings and intuitions “when putting new ideas into practice or when working in new settings” (pp. 301–302). Further, personal knowledge and personal experience can be seen as crucial in the application of new knowledge and/or working in new settings. This means that the application of research findings is filtered through the prior knowledge, feelings, and intuitions we already have. Donmoyer (as cited in Ballard, 1994) proposes that experience compounds, and this compounded knowledge/experience, when brought to a new task, provides for the occurrence of an even more complex process of understandings. Experience builds on and compounds experience, and, as Ballard suggests, this is why there is such value placed on colleagues with experience in the PƗkehƗ world and on kaumatua (elders) in the MƗori world. A related, and somewhat more complex danger of referring to an existing methodology of participation is that there may be a tendency to construct a set of rules and procedures that lie outside of any one research project, and, in so doing, take control over what constitutes legitimacy and validity, that is, what authority is claimed for the text will be removed from the participants- thus, with such recipes comes the danger of outsiders controlling what constitutes reality for other people. It is important to note, though, that the Kaupapa MƗori approach does suggest that all knowledge is completely relative, but rather suggests, as Heshusius (1996) does, that: the self of the knower and the larger self of the community of inquiry are, from the very starting point, intimately woven into the very fabric of that which 23

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we claim as knowledge and of what we agree to be the proper ways by which we make knowledge claims. It is to say that the knower and the known are one movement. Moreover, any inquiry is an expression of a particular otherself relatedness (p. 618). Kaupapa MƗori research, based in a different world-view from that of the dominant discourse makes this political statement while at the same time rejecting a meaningless relativism by acknowledging the need to recognize and address the ongoing effects of racism and colonialism in the wider society. Kaupapa MƗori rejects outside control over what constitutes the text’s call for authority and truth. A Kaupapa MƗori position promotes what Lincoln and Denzin (1994) term an epistemological version of validity, one where the authority of the text is “established through recourse to a set of rules concerning knowledge, its production and representation” (p. 578). Such an approach to validity locates the power within MƗori cultural practices where what is acceptable and what is not acceptable research, text, and/or processes is determined and defined by the research community itself in reference to the cultural context within which it operates. As was explained above, MƗori people have always had criteria for evaluating whether a process or a product is valid for them. Taonga tuku iho are literally the treasures from the ancestors. These treasures are the collected wisdom of ages, the means that have been established over a long period of time which guide and monitor our very lives today and in the future. Within these treasures are the messages of kawa, those principles that, for example, guide the process of establishing relationships. Whakawhanaungatanga is not a haphazard process, decided on an ad hoc basis, but rather is based on time-honored and proven principles. How each of these principles is addressed in particular circumstances varies from tribe to tribe and hapu to hapu. Nevertheless, it is important that these principles are addressed. For example, as described earlier, the meeting of two groups of people at a hui on a marae involves acknowledgment of the tapu of each individual and of each group, by means of addressing and acknowledging the sacredness, specialness, genealogy, and connectedness of the guests with the hosts. Much time will be spent to establish this linkage, a connectedness between the people involved. How this is actually done is the subject of local customs, which are the correct ways to address these principles of kawa. Tikanga (customs) are an ongoing fertile ground for debate, but all participants know that if the kawa is not observed, then the event is “invalid.” It does not have authority. Just as MƗori practices are epistemologically validated within MƗori cultural contexts, so are Kaupapa MƗori research practices and texts. Research conducted within a Kaupapa MƗori framework has rules established as taonga tuku iho which are protected and maintained by the tapu of MƗori cultural practices, such as the multiplicity of rituals within the hui and within the central cultural processes of whanaungatanga. Further, the use of these concepts as constitutive research metaphors is subject to the same culturally determined processes of validation, the same rules concerning knowledge, its production, and its representation as are the literal phenomena. Therefore, the verification of a text, the authority of a text, the quality of its 24

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representation of the experiences and perspective of the participants are judged by criteria constructed and constituted within the culture. By using such MƗori concepts as whƗnau, hui, and whakawhanaungatanga as metaphors for the research process itself, Kaupapa MƗori research invokes and claims authority for the processes and for the texts that are produced in terms of the principles, processes, and practices that govern such events in their literal sense. Metaphoric whƗnau are governed by the same principles and processes that govern a literal whƗnau and, as such, are understandable to and controllable by MƗori people. Literal whƗnau have means of addressing contentious issues, resolving conflicts, constructing narratives, telling stories, raising children, and addressing economic and political issues, and, contrary to popular non- MƗori opinion, such practices change over time to reflect changes going on in the wider world. Research whƗnauof-interest also conduct their deliberations in a whƗnau style. Kaumatua preside, others get their say according to who they are, and positions are defined in terms of how this will benefit the whƗnau. Subjectivities/Objectivities As was identified above, an indigenous Kaupapa MƗori approach to research challenges colonial and neo-colonial discourses that inscribe “otherness.” Much quantitative research has dismissed, marginalized, or maintained control over the voice of others by insistence on the imposition of researcher-determined positivist and neo-positivist evaluatory criteria, internal and external validity, reliability, and objectivity. Nonetheless, a paradigm shift to qualitative research does not necessarily obviate this problem. Much qualitative research has also maintained a colonizing discourse of the “other” by seeking to hide the researcher/writer under a veil of neutrality or of objectivity or subjectivity, a situation where the interests, concerns, and power of the researcher to determine the outcome of the research remain hidden in the text (Davies & Harré, 1990). Objectivity, “that pathology of cognition that entails silence about the speaker, about [their] interests and [their] desires, and how these are socially situated and structurally maintained” (Gouldner, as cited in Tripp, 1983, p. 32) is a denial of identity. Just as identity to MƗori people is tied up with being part of a whƗnau, a hapu, an iwi, in the research relationship, membership in a metaphoric whƗnau of interest also provides its members with identity and hence the ability to participate. In Thayer-Bacon’s (1997) view, “we develop a sense of ‘self’ through our relationships with others” (p. 241). For MƗori researchers to stand aside from involvement in such a sociopolitical organization is to stand aside from one’s identity. This would signal the ultimate victory of colonisation. For non-MƗori researchers, denial of membership of the research whƗnau of interest is, similarly, to deny them a means of identification and hence participation within the projects. Further, for non-MƗori researchers to stand aside from participation in these terms is to promote colonization, albeit participation in ways defined by indigenous peoples may well pose difficulties for them. What is certain is that merely shifting one’s position within the Westerndominated research domain need not address questions of interest to MƗori people, 25

CHAPTER 1

because paradigm shifting is really a concern from another world-view. Non-MƗori researchers need to seek inclusion on MƗori terms, in terms of kin/metaphoric kin relationships and obligations, that is, within MƗori constituted practices and understandings in order to establish their identity within research projects. This does not mean, however, that instead, researchers need to try to control their subjectivities. Heshusius (1994) suggests that managing subjectivity is just as problematic for qualitative researchers as managing objectivity is for the positivists. Esposito and Murphy (2000) similarly raise this problem of the preoccupation of many researchers who while ostensibly locating themselves within critical race theory for example, remain focused “strictly on subjectivity” and employ analytic tools “to interpret the discursive exchanges that, in the end, silence the study participants… [because] The investigator’s subjectivity replaces the co-produced knowledge her research presumably represents” (p. 180). This problem is epistemic in that the development of objectivity, through borrowing methodology from the natural sciences, introduced the concept of distance into the research relationship. Heshusius (1994) argues that the displacement of “objective positivism” by qualitative concerns about managing and controlling subjectivities perpetuates the fundamental notion that knowing is possible through constructing and regulating distance, a belief that presumes that the knower is separable from the known, a belief that is anathema to many indigenous peoples’ ways of knowing. Heshusius suggests that the preoccupation with “managing subjectivity” is a “subtle form of empiricist thought” (p. 16) in that it assumes that if one can know subjectivity then one can control it. Intellectualizing “the other’s impact on self ” perpetuates the notion of distance, validates the notion of “false consciousness” in others, emancipation as a project, “othering” as a process, and reduces the selfother relationship to one that is mechanistic and methodological. Operationally, Heshusius (1994) questions what we as researchers do after being confronted with ‘subjectivities’. “Does one evaluate them and try to manage and to restrain them? And then believe one has the research process once again under control?” (p. 15). Both these positions address “meaningful” epistemological and methodological questions of the researcher’s own choosing. Instead, Heshusius suggests researchers need to address those questions that would address moral issues, such as “what kind of society do we have or are we constructing?” (p. 20). For example, how can racism be addressed unless those who perpetuate it become aware through a participatory consciousness of the lived reality of those who suffer? How can the researcher become aware of the meaning of MƗori schooling experiences if they perpetuate an artificial “distance” and objectify the “subject”, dealing with issues in a manner that is of interest to the researcher, rather than of concern to the subject? The message is that you have to ‘live’ the context in which it happens. For example, the third study referred to before, Te Kotahitanga (Bishop et al., 2003), attempts to provide teachers with a means of critically reflecting on their positioning in respect to deficit thinking and racism by providing them with previously unheard testimonios of students’ experience. Preoccupations with managing and controlling one`s subjectivities also stand in contrast with Berman`s historical analysis (as cited in Heshusius p. 16), which 26

FREEING OURSELVES FROM NEO-COLONIAL DOMINATION

suggests that “before the scientific revolution (and presumably the enlightenment) the act of knowing had always been understood as a form of participation and enchantment.” Berman states that “for most of human history, man [sic] saw himself as an integral part of it.” The very act of participation was knowing. Participation was direct, somatic (bodily), psychic, spiritual, and emotional involvement. “The belief that one can actually distance oneself, and then regulate that distance in order to come to know… has… left us alienated from each other, from nature and from ourselves” (Heshusius, 1994, p. 16). Instead of addressing distance, Heshusius (1994) suggests that researchers need to acknowledge their participation and attempt to develop a “participatory consciousness”. This means becoming involved in a “somatic, non-verbal quality of attention that necessitates letting go of the focus of self ” (p. 15). The three examples of Kaupapa MƗori research projects identified earlier demonstrate that the researchers understand themselves to be involved somatically in a group process, a process whereby the researcher becomes part of a research whƗnau, limiting the development of insider/outsider dualisms. To be involved somatically means to be involved bodily, that is physically, ethically, morally and spiritually, not just in one’s capacity as a ‘researcher’ concerned with methodology. Such involvement is constituted as a way of knowing that is fundamentally different from the concepts of personal investment and collaboration as suggested in traditional approaches to research. For, while it appears that ‘personal investment’ is essential, this personal investment is not on terms determined by the ‘investor’. The investment is on terms mutually understandable and controllable by all participants, so that the investment is reciprocal and could not be otherwise. The ‘personal investment’ by the researcher is not an act by an individual agent but emerges out of the context within which the research is constituted. The process of colonization developed an alienated and alienating mode of consciousness and, thus, has tried to take away a fundamental principle of life from MƗori people- that we do not objectify nature, nor do we subjectify nature. For as we learn our whakapapa, we learn of our total integration, connectedness, and commitment to the world and the need to let go of the focus on self. We know that there is a way of knowing that is different from that which was taught to those colonized into the Western way of thought. We know about a way that is born of time, connectedness, kinship, commitment, and participation. EPILOGUE

Throughout this chapter, a number of issues of power relations have been canvassed. Table 2 provides a series of critical questions as a means of evaluation that researchers and research participants can use to evaluate power relations prior to and during the research activity. The text identified that researchers and research participants need a means whereby they can critically reflect upon the five issues of power that are identified in Table 1. This table provides such a means through a series of critical questions that can be considered prior, during and after a research project. 27

CHAPTER 1

Table 2. A means of evaluating research

Initiation

Researchers and research participants need to critically reflect upon modes of initiation including the processes of defining and determining the research questions, the goals of the project, who sets the goals and who designs the work. Above all the research participants need to critically consider whose agendas, concerns and interests have generated the research and how and in what way this has been negotiated. Benefits Researchers and research participants need to critically question what benefits will there be and who will actually benefit from the research and in what way. How will this research support and promote MƗori/indigenous people’s cultural and language aspirations? Above all, will this research make a difference for MƗori/indigenous people? How and in what ways? Representation This concern is about whose ‘voice’ is heard; about who has the power to define the lived realities of MƗori /indigenous peoples. Researchers and research participants need to consider whose interests, agendas and concerns the text represents. How were the means of depicting cultural realities generated? And by whom? With what knowledge? Further considerations include what agendas do the participants have? And what are they really saying? Legitimation Researchers and participants need to consider who has the authority to produce research texts, and who defines what is accurate, true and complete in a text. Who is going to gather and process the data? Who is going to be involved in the analysis of the data? Who is going to theorize the data. Accountability Who are researchers accountable to? What are the protocols of accountability? Who is to have access to the research findings? And for what purpose? Who has control over the distribution of the new knowledge? And what systems of control are there for research participants? NOTES 1 2

28

This chapter is reproduced with permission from Bishop, 1998a; 1998b and 2005. Two peoples created Aotearoa/New Zealand when in 1840 Lieutenant-Governor Hobson and the chiefs of New Zealand signed the Treaty of Waitangi on behalf of the British Crown and the MƗori descendants of New Zealand. The Treaty is seen as a charter for power sharing in the decision-making processes of this country and for MƗori determination of their own destiny as the indigenous people of New Zealand (Walker, 1990). The history of MƗori and PƗkehƗ relations since the signing of the Treaty has not been one of partnership, of two peoples developing a nation, but one of domination by PƗkehƗ and marginalization of the MƗori people (Bishop, 1991b; Simon, 1990; Walker, 1990). This has created the myth of our being “one people” with equal opportunities (Hohepa, 1975; Simon, 1990; Walker, 1990). Results of this domination are evident today in the lack of equitable participation by MƗori in

FREEING OURSELVES FROM NEO-COLONIAL DOMINATION

3

4

5

6

all positive and beneficial aspects of life in New Zealand and by their over-representation in the negative aspects (Pomare, 1988; Simon, 1990). In education for example, the central government’s sequential policies of Assimilation, Integration, and Multiculturalism (Irwin, 1989; Jones et al., 1990) and Taha MƗori (Holmes, Bishop, & Glynn, 1993; G. Smith, 1990), while concerned for the welfare of MƗori people, effectively stress the need for MƗori people to subjugate their destiny to the needs of the nation-state, whose goals are determined by the PƗkehƗ majority. Traditional is used here to denote that “tradition” of research that has grown in New Zealand as a result of the dominance of the Western world-view in research institutions. MƗori means of accessing, defining, and protecting knowledge, however, existed before European arrival. Such MƗori cultural processes were protected by the Treaty of Waitangi, subsequently marginalized, but are today legitimised within MƗori cultural discursive practice. The concept of hegemony is used here in the sense defined by Foucault (in Smart, 1986), who suggests that hegemony is an insidious process which is gained most effectively through “practices, techniques, and methods which infiltrate minds and bodies, cultural practices which cultivate behaviors and beliefs, tastes, desires and needs as seemingly naturally occurring qualities and properties embodied in the psychic and physical reality of the human subject” (p. 159). Irwin (1992a) argues that prior to the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi and the colonisation of New Zealand there existed a “complex, vibrant MƗori education system” which had “MƗori development[as] its vision, its educational processes and its measurable outcomes” (p. 9). Protection of this education system was guaranteed under Article Two of the Treaty of Waitangi, just as Article Three guaranteed MƗori people, as citizens of New Zealand, the right to equitable educational outcomes. Yet this promise had been negated by subsequent practice. The outcome is the present educational crisis (Davies & Nicholl, 1993; Jones et al., 1990). The post-Treaty education system which developed in New Zealand, the mission schools (Bishop, 1991a), the Native schools (Simon, 1990), and the present mainstream schools (Irwin, 1992a), have been unable to “successfully validate matauranga MƗori, leaving it marginalised and in a precarious state” (Irwin, 1992a, p. 10). Further, while mainstream schooling does not serve MƗori people well (Davies & Nicholl, 1993), the MƗori schooling initiatives of Te Kohanga reo (MƗori medium pre-schools), Kura Kaupapa MƗori (MƗori medium primary schools), Whare Kura (MƗori medium secondary schools), and Whare Waananga (MƗori tertiary institutions) “which have developed from within MƗori communities to intervene in MƗori language, cultural, educational, social and economic crises are successful in the eyes of the MƗori people” (Smith, 1992, p. 1, emphasis added). WhƗnau is a primary concept (a cultural preference) that underlies narratives of Kaupapa MƗori research practice. This concept contains both values (cultural aspirations) and social processes (cultural practices). The root word of whƗnau literally means family in its broad “extended” sense. However, the word “whƗnau” is increasingly being used in a metaphoric sense (Metge, 1990). This generic concept of whƗnau subsumes other related concepts: whanaunga (relatives), whanaungatanga (relationships), whakawhanaungatanga (the process of establishing relationships), and whakapapa (literally, the means of establishing relationships). (The prefix “whaka” means “to make;” the suffix “tanga” has a naming function). It is important to emphasize at this point that the use of MƗori cultural practices (literally and/or metaphorically) in research might lead those not familiar with New Zealand to question how relevant such an analysis is to the lived realities of MƗori people today. As MƗori people today are a fourth world nation or nations, that is, within a larger entity, it is more a matter of degree as to who participates and when they participate. So rather than being able to quantify which portion of the MƗori population still acts in this way, it is perhaps more realistic to say that most do at some time. For some, it might be only at funerals or weddings; others, of course, (albeit a small proportion) live this way all the time, but increasingly more and more MƗori people are participating in (for example) Kaupapa Mäori educational initiatives, and these are all run in a MƗori manner. So most people do sometimes, some all the time, others not so often. What is perhaps more critical is that most MƗori people are able to understand the processes and are able to participate. Much is said of the impact of urbanization on MƗori people and the removal of young people from their tribal roots and the consequent decline in language abilities and cultural understandings. It is a 29

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7

8

9

30

measure of the strength of the whƗnau (the extended family) and the strength of genealogical linkages, however, that when MƗori people gather, the hui (formal meetings) process is usually the one that is used, almost as a “default setting,” despite more than a century of colonisation. Indeed, it is a measure of the strength of these cultural practices and principles that they have survived the onslaught of the last 150 years. It is to these underlying strengths that I turn also as inspiration for developing an approach to MƗori research. So my argument is not an attempt to identify “past practices” or reassemble a romantic past, but rather to present MƗori cultural practices that are guided by the messages from the past. MƗori, along with many other indigenous people, are guided by the principle of guidance from the ancestors. It is not a matter of studying how people did it in the past but more an ongoing dynamic interactive relationship between those of us alive today as the embodiment of all those who have gone before. It seems to me that, in practice, MƗori cultural practices are alive and well and that, when used either literally or metaphorically, they enable MƗori people to understand and control what is happening. Eminent MƗori scholar, Rose Pere (1991) describes the key qualities of a hui as “respect, consideration, patience, and cooperation. People need to feel that they have the right and the time to express their point of view. You may not always agree with the speakers, but it is considered bad form to interrupt their flow of speech while they are standing on their feet; one has to wait to make a comment. People may be as frank as they like about others at the hui, but usually state their case in such a way that the person being criticized can stand up with some dignity in his/her right of reply. Once everything has been fully discussed and the members come to some form of consensus, the hui concludes with a prayer and the partaking of food” (p. 44). People often use the term kawa to refer to marae protocols. For example, at the time of whaikorero (ritualized speechmaking), some tribes conduct this part of the powhiri by a tikanga known as paeke, where all the male speakers of the hosts’ side will speak at one time, then turn the marae over to the visitors’ speaker who then follows. Other tribes prefer to follow a tikanga termed utuutu, where hosts and visitors alternate. Some tribes welcome visitors into their meeting house following a hongi; others keep the hongi until the end of the welcoming time. It is clear that these various tikanga are practices that are correct in certain tribal or hapu contexts, but underneath is the practice of the kawa being handed down from those who have gone before about the need to recognize the tapu of people, their mana, their wairua, and the mauri of the place and events. See Salmond, Hui: A Study of MƗori Ceremonial Greetings (1975) for a detailed ethnographic study. Donna Awatere (1981) and Kathie Irwin (1992b) are two MƗori feminist scholars who have taken up this challenge in Aotearoa/New Zealand, in a way that has clearly delineated their stance as different from white feminisms. In operationalising MƗori feminisms they have critiqued modernist issues from a MƗori world-view in MƗori ways. Awatere critiqued white modernist feminists for hegemonically voicing MƗori feminist concerns as identical to their own. Kathie Irwin’ s critique addressed the question that is vexatious to non-MƗori modernist feminists of “Why don’t women speak on a marae?” She responded with other questions such as “What do you mean by speaking? … Is a karanga not speaking?” and “Who is defining what speaking is?” She asserts that rather than taking an essentialist position, the validity of a text written about MƗori women “speaking” on a marae is understandable only in terms of the rules established within MƗori cultural practices associated with marae protocols. In this she is not only addressing a MƗori issue but is also addressing modernist feminists in poststructural terms of epistemological validity.

CHAPTER 2

FREEING OURSELVES FROM NEO-COLONIAL DOMINATION IN PUBLIC SCHOOL CLASSROOMS1

We are dealing, it would seem, not so much with culturally deprived children as with culturally deprived schools. And the task to be accomplished is not to revise, and amend, and repair deficient children, but to alter and transform the atmosphere and operations of the schools to which we commit these children. Only by changing the nature of the educational experience can we change the product. To continue to define the difficulty as inherent in the raw material, the children, is plainly to blame the victim and to acquiesce in the continuation of educational inequality (Ryan, 1976, pp. 61–62). PART A: KAUPAPA MƖORI AS SCHOOLING

As was detailed in Chapter 1, Kaupapa MƗori is a discourse of proactive theory and practice that emerged from within the wider revitalisation of MƗori communities that developed in New Zealand following the rapid MƗori urbanization in the 1950’s and 1960’s. This movement grew further in the 1970s and by the late 1980’s had developed as a political consciousness among MƗori people that promoted the revitalisation of MƗori cultural aspirations, preferences and practices as a philosophical and productive educational stance and resistance to the hegemony of the dominant discourse. As Smith, (1997) explains “MƗori communities armed with the new critical understandings of the shortcomings of the state and structural analyses began to assert transformative actions to deal with the twin crises of language demise and educational underachievement for themselves” (p. 171). In terms of schooling, Smith, (1997) explains that it is especially since the advent of Te Kohanga Reo (language nests: MƗori medium pre-schools) in 1982 that Kaupapa MƗori has become “an influential and coherent philosophy and practice for MƗori conscientisation, resistance and transformative praxis to advance MƗori cultural capital and learning outcomes within education and schooling” (p. 423). The Kaupapa MƗori approach developed among MƗori groups across a wide range of educational sectors, such as Te Kohanga Reo, Kura Kaupapa MƗori (MƗori medium schools), Wharekura (MƗori medium secondary schools) and Waananga MƗori (MƗori tertiary institutions) and also included other groups such as the NZ MƗori Council, The MƗori Congress, MƗori Health and Welfare bodies, Iwi (tribal) Authorities and most recently, a MƗori political party. For MƗori, the specific intention was to achieve “increased autonomy over their own lives and cultural welfare” (Smith, 1992, p. 12). In education, this call for autonomy grew in response to the lack of programmes and processes within existing educational institutions that were designed to “reinforce, 31

CHAPTER 2

support or proactively co-opt MƗori cultural aspirations in ways which are desired by MƗori themselves” (Smith, 1992, p. 12). Smith further suggests that the wish for autonomy also challenged the “increasing abdication by the State of its 1840 contractual obligation [The Treaty of Waitangi] to protect MƗori cultural interests” (p. 10). In other words, if the government, granted the right to govern in Article 1 of the Treaty of Waitangi (Durie, 1998), was unable or unwilling to facilitate MƗori protection of cultural treasures that were guaranteed in Article 2 of the Treaty, then MƗori groups would need to take on this task themselves. This call for autonomy is operationalised in a Kaupapa MƗori approach as selfdetermination (tino rangatiratanga) by and for MƗori people (Bishop, 1996; Durie, 1995, 1998; Smith, 1997; Smith, 1999). Self-determination in this sense meaning the right to determine one’s own destiny, to define what that destiny will be and to define and pursue means of attaining that destiny. However, there is also a clear understanding among MƗori people that such autonomy is relative, not absolute, that it is self-determination in relation to others. As such, MƗori calls for self-determination are often misunderstood by non-MƗori people. It is not a call for separatism or noninterference, nor is it a call for non-MƗori people to stand back and leave MƗori alone, in effect to relinquish all responsibility for the ongoing relationship between the peoples of New Zealand. Rather it is a call for all those involved in education in New Zealand to reposition themselves in relation to these emerging aspirations of MƗori people for an autonomous voice (Bishop, 1994; Smith, 1997; Durie, 1998). In other words, Kaupapa MƗori seeks to operationalise MƗori people’s aspirations to restructure power relationships to the point where partners can be autonomous and interact from this position rather than from one of subordination or dominance. Young (2004), in a chapter that considers the development of the notion of selfdetermination among Western nation-states, explains how this misunderstanding is caused because the dominant discourse on self-determination, (which stands in contrast to indigenous people’s understandings,) speaks of self-determination in absolute terms. This dominant discourse on self-determination was informed by the development of sovereign nation states, particularly following the two world wars of the twentieth century and posits that self-determination means sovereignty over a space and all the constituent activities within a designated boundary; a boundary that broaches no interference from outside. In other words, self-determination is related to territoriality. On the other hand, indigenous peoples’ aspirations for selfdetermination are relational, acknowledge interdependence and “...are better understood as a quest for an institutional context of non-domination” (p. 187). That is, being self-determining is possible if the relations in which peoples and individuals stand to each other are non-dominating. To ensure non-domination, “their relations must be regulated both by institutions in which they all participate and by ongoing negotiations among them” (p. 177). The indigenous position on self-determination therefore in practice means that individuals should be free to determine their own goals and make sense of the world in their own culturally generated manner. However, as Young, (2004), emphasizes, self-determining individuals cannot ignore their interdependence with others and the claims that others may have to their own self-determination. Therefore, the 32

NEO-COLONIAL DOMINATION IN PUBLIC SCHOOL

implications for educational institutions are that they should be structured and conducted in such a way, by the participants in these institutions, as to seek to mediate these potential tensions by actively minimizing domination, co-coordinating actions, resolving conflicts and negotiating relationships. MƗori attempts to promote this indigenous peoples’ understanding of selfdetermination has to date been limited and the most successful MƗori education initiatives have been those that, on the surface at least, have most closely approximated the majority culture’s notion of self-determination. Perhaps they have been successful because of this perceived approximation. MƗori medium pre-schools, schools and tertiary education institutions have been developed in recent years by MƗori people themselves and have become a major success story among indigenous people’s efforts to address the impact of colonization on their lives. However, these efforts have messages for the mainstream (where most MƗori children are enrolled), for as G. Smith, (1992; 1997) has suggested, these projects share some common elements that have formed out of the cycle of conscientisation, resistance and transformative praxis that typifies the struggle of MƗori people that, although these elements arise from the MƗori education sector, and Kura Kaupapa MƗori in particular, they may also speak to the “general crisis in schooling” (p. 18; p. 446) for MƗori. This chapter sets out to examine what might constitute this “speaking to” the wider crisis in MƗori education, in particular disparities in achievement in mainstream educational settings from MƗori experiences of successful MƗori innovations in education. This examination is further informed by a range of studies into effective innovation in MƗori medium schooling Alton-Lee, (2003), Bishop et al., (2001); Smith, (1997) and focuses upon, in particular, MƗori metaphor that might provide solutions to the MƗori educational crisis in mainstream settings. The metaphors used in this part of this chapter are those that Smith, (1997) identifies are fundamental to MƗori medium schooling (rangatiratanga, taonga tuku iho, ako, kia pike ake…, whƗnau and Kaupapa) and are here expanded to provide a picture of what might constitute an appropriate pedagogy for MƗori students in mainstream schools. Rangatiratanga: Relative Autonomy/Self-determination Fundamental to MƗori educational institutions is the concept of rangatiratanga. Literally rangatiratanga means chiefly control, however increasingly it has taken on its figurative meaning of self-determination which as is described above means the right to determine one’s own destiny, to define what that destiny will be and to define and pursue a means of attaining that destiny, in relation to others; this notion of relations being fundamental to MƗori epistemologies. For example, MƗori cultural practices for formally establishing relationships (powhiri), the complex set of interactions undertaken by people when meeting and greeting each other at the commencement of ceremonial and decision-making interactions (hui), illustrates the centrality of MƗori understandings of self-determination to such events. These interactions contain metaphoric meaning in terms of both recognizing the mana (power/status) and tapu (the potentiality for power) of each participant whilst also acknowledging and ritualizing the necessary relatedness of the participants. In this way, a Kaupapa MƗori 33

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analysis of the metaphor fundamental to this discourse is both a means of proactively promoting a MƗori world-view as legitimate, authoritative and valid in relationship to other cultures in New Zealand and also is suggested here as a means of addressing educational disparities in New Zealand. In other words, it is suggested that educational relationships and interactions, predicated upon a MƗori understanding of self-determination, that is as non-dominating relations of interdependence, could well be a means of addressing the seemingly immutable problems of disparate achievement levels within mainstream educational institutions. In this way, issues of power relations; initiation, benefits, representation, legitimation and accountability, (see for example, Table 1) will be addressed in totally different ways than they have been in the past and as Bruner, (1996) suggests, participation on one’s own terms brings commitment; commitment to Applebee, (1996), brings about learning. One way of implementing such an approach in classroom contexts is as Beane, (1997) suggests where children could participate in the process of decision making about curriculum planning to the extent of participating in a pedagogy of sharing power over decisions about curriculum content and the directions that learning will take. In Applebee’s, (1996) terms, this is the process of developing and participating in knowledge-in-action, and is far closer to what happens in real life. Scientists for example, do not make discoveries by solely being recipients of the thinking processes of others. They use their own in a kaleidoscope of ways to investigate the natural world. Artists and writers also use a similar process. Central to this concern is that the attempt to reduce disparities does not just focus on bringing low achieving students up to the current levels of their peers by traditional means, rather all students achievement level needs to be raised in order that educators can create learning contexts that will provide students with those tools that are vital for future citizens in a democracy; the tools of planning, relationships, creativity, critical reflection and communication. In order to do so, we need to immerse students in power-sharing relationships with their peers and their teachers from an early age. In short, the principle of self-determination within non-dominating relations of interdependence should be relevant to all involved in classroom interactions (including teachers of course) and should raise educational achievement of all involved, whilst reducing disparities. Taonga Tuku Iho (Cultural Aspirations) Literally meaning the treasures from the ancestors, this phrase nowadays is almost always used in its metaphoric sense as meaning the cultural aspirations that MƗori people hold for their children and include those messages that guide our relationships and interaction patterns such as manaakitanga, (caring) kaitiakitanga, (oversight) mana motuhake (respect for specialness). Above all this message means that MƗori language, knowledge, culture and values are normal, valid and legitimate, and indeed are valid guides to classroom interactions. The implications of this principle for educational contexts is that educators need to create contexts where to be MƗori is to be normal; where MƗori cultural identities are valued, valid and legitimate. In other words where MƗori children can be themselves. 34

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Stereotyping of MƗori children, however needs to be avoided by classroom teachers; rather it is important that learning relationships allow for the many realities within which MƗori children might live and grow up; urban/rural, tribal/non-tribal, rich/poor, single-parented/dual parented/ extended families (Durie, 1998). A further dimension that needs consideration is the realisation that individual identities are multi-faceted and multi-generative. Students are no longer if they ever were, monocultural. Indeed some will have experiences of many cultural settings. As Kalantzis & Cope, (1999) identify, “[j]ust as there are multiple layers and facets to everyone’s identity, so to there are multiple discourses of identity and multiple discourses of recognition to be negotiated” (p. 270). In short, a pedagogy is needed that is holistic, flexible and complex, that will allow children to present their multiplicities and complexities and their individual and collective diversities, rather than a pedagogy that perpetuates teachers’ images. Taonga tuku iho therefore teaches us to respect the tapu (their potentiality for power) of each individual child and to acknowledge their mana, (their power,) rather than ascribe cultural meanings to the child. Just as manuhiri (visitors) at a hui (meeting) must have their mana and tapu respected in the process of bringing them onto a marae (meeting place), so this image can guide us in our relationships with young people. In Kalantzis & Cope’s (1999), terms, in order to recognise the diversity of lifestyles and their discursive practices “learning processes need to recruit, rather than attempt to ignore and erase, the different subjectivities students bring to learning” (p. 270). This is because “[i]ndividuals have at their disposal a complex range of representational resources, never of one culture, but of many cultures in their lived experience, the many layers of their identity and the many dimensions of their being” (p. 271). Taonga tuku iho, far from being a prescriptive set of knowledges to be transmitted for regurgitation, suggests a set of principles by which to live and interact with one another. Ako (Reciprocal Learning) Literally meaning to teach and to learn, this term metaphorically emphasises reciprocal learning, which means that the teacher does not have to be the fountain of all knowledge, but rather should be able to create contexts for learning where the students can enter the learning conversation. Teachers and students can take turns as in the conversation that is learning when storying and re-storying their realities, either as individual learners or within a group context. Reciprocal learning also promotes in Applebee’s (1996) terms, learning as knowledge-in-action, that is learning through participation in the discursive practices that creates knowledge in contrast to knowledge-out-of-context that promotes learning about, often through transmission education practices. One implication of this principle is that active learning approaches are preferred because in this way the processes of knowledge-in-action are able to be brought to the interaction, indeed for the interaction. This means that students can participate using sense-making processes they bring to the relationship and share these with others, as of right, and has clear implications for the type of classroom interactions and pedagogies that will be useful in promoting this vision. 35

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Kia piki ake i nga raruraru o te kainga (Mediation of Socio-economic and Home Difficulties) Participation in kura Kaupapa MƗori reaches into MƗori homes and brings parents and families into the activities of the school because it is understood that where parents are incorporated into the education of their children on terms they can understand and approve of, then children do better at school. This contention is well supported by research data, for example, Durie, (1995), Glynn & Glynn, (1986) and Glynn, Berryman & Glynn, (2000). This feature also has implications for better and less problematic home to school transitions. These studies show that the closer classroom and home experiences are for students, then the more likely it will be that students will be able to participate in the educational experiences designed at the school. This addresses the preference MƗori people have for their problems to be dealt with in culturally familiar ways that intervene in the educational crisis in a way quite different from an SES intervention for example, because it deals with a collective entity through the promotion of culturally acceptable alternatives. As Smith, (1992) explains, difficulties, such as those that are created by economic poverty, child relationships, health and social issues, are resolved by a collective action which in turn involves individual responses and commitments. WhƗnau: (Extended Family) WhƗnau is a primary concept (a cultural preference) that contains both values (cultural aspirations) and social processes (cultural practices) that has multiple meanings for mainstream education. The root word of whƗnau literally means family in its broad ‘extended’ sense. This generic concept of whƗnau subsumes other related concepts; whanaunga (relatives), whanaungatanga (relationships), whakawhanaungatanga (the process of establishing relationships) and whakapapa (literally, the means of establishing relationships). The term whƗnau, is as Metge, (1990) explains, a term that MƗori people can, and do, apply to a variety of categories and groups usually linked by blood ties. However, above all, the most rapid growth in the application of the term whƗnau has been in the metaphorical use of the term to refer to collectives of people working for a common end, who are not connected by kinship, let alone descent, but who act as if they were. These metaphoric whƗnau attempt to develop relationships, organisations and operational practices based on similar principles to those which order a traditional whƗnau. Metge, (1990) explains that to use the term is to identify a series of rights and responsibilities, commitments and obligations, and supports that are fundamental to the collectivity. These are the tikanga (customs) of the whƗnau; warm interpersonal interactions, group solidarity, shared responsibility for one another, cheerful cooperation for group ends, and corporate responsibility for group property, material or non-material (e.g. knowledge) items and issues. These attributes can be summed up in the words aroha (love in the broadest sense), awhi (helpfulness), manaaki (hospitality) and tiaki (guidance). When imaging or theorising classroom interactions in terms of for example, metaphoric whƗnau relationships, classroom interactions will be fundamentally different 36

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from those created when teachers talk of method and process using machine or transmission metaphors to explain their theorising/images. For example, in Bishop, (1996, 2005) the centrality of whƗnau and the process of establishing extended family-like relationships were used metaphorically as a research strategy to address concerns about research initiation, benefits, representation, legitimation and accountability created by the imposition of the researcher’s agenda, concerns and interests on the research process. This approach gave voice to a culturally positioned means of collaboratively constructing research stories in a culturally conscious and connected manner by focusing on the researcher’s connectedness, engagement, and involvement with others in order to promote self-determination, agency and voice of those involved in the interaction. Indeed, establishing and maintaining whƗnau type relationships is a fundamental, often extensive and ongoing part of the research process. This involves the establishment of whƗnau of interest through a process of spiral discourse. This means establishing a whƗnau like relationship among the research group and using collaborative storying and restorying (spiral discourse) as a means of creating a collective response. Similarly in classrooms, where whƗnau type relationships are established, commitment and connectedness would be paramount and responsibility for the learning of others would be fostered. Further, the classroom would be seen as an active location for all learners, and this includes the teachers, to participate in the decision making processes through the medium of spiral discourse; a major means of addressing current power imbalances. WhƗnau processes may also be used, literally or metaphorically, to give substance to a culturally positioned and understood means of collaboratively constructing learning objectives and “texts” to promote culturallypositioned self-determination, agency and voice, as opposed to pre-determined learning objectives and developing a commitment in learners and teachers to these objectives in a culturally conscious and connected manner. Establishing whƗnau relationships in mainstream classrooms also addresses the power and control issues in a manner of, to use Heshusuis’s, (1994), term, participatory consciousness, that facilitates the sharing of power and control. In classroom interactions, such an approach seeks to create a consciousness among educators where the metaphors of engagement are inclusive, dialogic, interactive and participatory. The clear implication for classroom relationships is that where the establishment of whƗnau type relationships in the classroom is primary, then a pattern of interactions would develop where commitment and connectedness is paramount, where responsibility for the learning of others is fostered and where the classroom becomes an active location for all learners to participate in decision making processes through the process of spiral discourse. Kaupapa (Collective Vision, Philosophy) Just as KKM have a collective vision, a Kaupapa that provides guidelines for what constitutes excellence in MƗori education that connects with “MƗori aspirations, politically, socially, economically and spiritually” (Smith, 1992, p. 23). To do so, mainstream institutions need such a philosophy or agenda for achieving excellence 37

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in both languages and cultures that make up the world of MƗori children. Such a Kaupapa is essential for the development of education relations and interactions that will promote educational achievement and reduce disparities. Implications of these Metaphors This series of metaphors, drawn from the experiences of Kaupapa MƗori educational theorizing and practice, is expanded here to address MƗori students in mainstream settings, to provide a picture of the sort of alternative educational relations and interactions that are possible where educators draw upon an alternative culture than that previously dominant. This picture consists of a collective vision, focusing on the need to address MƗori students’ achievement that identifies the need for power over reciprocal decision-making to be constituted within relationships and interactions constructed as within a collective whƗnau context. WhƗnau relationships would enact reciprocal and collaborative pedagogies in order to promote educational relationships between students, between pupils and teachers (also, between whƗnau members in decision making about the school) and between the home and the school as a means of promoting excellence in education. One wider indicator of this pattern being the development of inextricable two-way connections between the home and the school. Such a pattern of metaphor also creates an image of classroom relations and interactions where students are able to participate on their own terms; terms that are determined by the student because the very pedagogic process holds this as a central value. This means that there is the development of contexts for learning where teachers attempt to create learning relationships wherein learners’ culturally generated sensemaking processes are used in order that they may successfully participate in classroom interactions. Such relationships must promote the knowledges, learning styles and sense-making processes of the learner as ‘acceptable’ or ‘legitimate’. Teachers should interact with students in such a way that new knowledge is co-created. In this way, learners are able to be co-inquirers, interact and exchange notes and take part in the whole process of learning from goal setting to assessment and evaluation. Learning is to be seen as active, close to real-life, problem-based, integrated, critically reflective, creative, and life-long. Teachers seek to create socio-cultural contexts wherein learning takes place actively, reflectively and where learners can not only use a variety of learning styles, but also have the power to determine which learning styles they need to use. In other words, creating contexts where they can safely bring what they know and who they are into the learning relationship. Teachers and community interact and home and school aspirations are complementary. Further, where what students know, who they are, and how they know what they know, forms the foundations of interaction patterns in the classroom. In short, where culture counts. Such a position stands in contrast to traditional positions, where knowledge is determined by the teacher and children are required to leave who they are at the door of the classroom or at the school gate. In addition, a common set of goals and principles guides the process. Further, just as using MƗori metaphors for research repositions researchers within MƗori sense-making contexts (Bishop, 1996, 2005), so too does using new metaphors for pedagogy reposition teachers within different 38

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contexts where students’ sense-making processes offer new opportunities for them to engage with learning. In these contexts, learners’ experiences, representations of these experiences and sense making processes are legitimated. In detail, therefore, such a pattern of metaphor suggests that educators can create learning contexts that will address the learning engagement and improve the achievement of MƗori students by developing learning - teaching relationships where the following notions are paramount. That is – where power is shared: where learners can initiate interactions; learners’ right to self-determination over learning styles, and sense making processes are regarded as fundamental to power-sharing relationships; collaborative critical reflection is part of an ongoing critique of power relationships; – where culture counts: where classrooms are places where learners can bring “who they are” to the learning interactions in complete safety, and their knowledges are ‘acceptable’ and ‘legitimate’; – where learning is interactive and dialogic: learners are able to be co-inquirers, i.e. raisers of questions and evaluators of questions and answers; learning is active, problem-based, integrated and holistic; learning positionings are reciprocal (ako) and knowledge is co-created; classrooms are places where young people’s sensemaking processes and knowledges are validated and developed in collaboration with others; – where connectedness is fundamental to relations: teachers are committed to and inextricably connected to their students and the community and vice versa; school and home/parental aspirations are complementary. – where there is a common vision: a common agenda for what constitutes excellence for MƗori in education. In short, an education where power is shared between self-determining individuals within non-dominating relations of interdependence, where culture counts, learning is interactive, dialogic and spirals and participants are connected and committed to one another through the establishment of a common vision for what constitutes educational excellence. Drawing on Gay (2000) and Villegas & Lucas (2002) who identify the importance of a culturally responsive pedagogy and Sidorkin, (2002) and Cummins, (1996), who propose that relations ontologically precede all other concerns in education, such a pattern might well be termed a Culturally Responsive Pedagogy of Relations. PART B: A CULTURLLY RESPONSIVE PEDAGOGY OF RELATIONS

With this framework in mind, this chapter now seeks to examine what a culturally responsive pedagogy of relations might look like in practice. To do this, a largescale research project is examined. This project, called Te Kotahitanga, is one where MƗori metaphors inform educational theorizing and practice in ways that seeks to mediate the ongoing educational crisis facing MƗori people in mainstream education from within a Kaupapa MƗori framework. Te Kotahitanga: Improving the Educational Achievement of MƗori students in Mainstream Schools (Bishop et al., 2003, 2005), is a Kaupapa MƗori research/ professional development project that aims to improve the educational achievement 39

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of MƗori students through operationalising MƗori people’s cultural aspirations for self-determination within non-dominating relations of interdependence and developing classroom relations and interactions and in-school institutions for this purpose. The project commenced in 2001, seeking to address the self determination of MƗori secondary school students by talking with them and other participants in their education about just what is involved in limiting and/or improving their educational achievement through an examination of the main influences on MƗori students’ educational achievement. The project sought to examine how a number of groups might address this issue and commenced with the gathering of a number of narratives of students’ classroom experiences and meanings by the process of collaborative storying (Bishop, 1996) from a range of engaged and non-engaged MƗori students (as defined by their schools), in five non-structurally modified mainstream secondary schools, These stories were also complemented by the gathering of stories of experience and meaning from those parenting these students, their principals and their teachers. Cook-Sather, (2002) suggests that an approach that authorises student perspectives is essential to reform education “because of the various ways that it can improve educational practice, re-inform existing conversations about educational reform, and point to the discussions and reform effects yet to be undertaken.” (p. 3). From a detailed analysis of the literature she identified that such authorising of students’ experiences and understandings can directly improve educational practice in that when teachers listen to and learn from students, they can begin to see the world from the perspective of those students. This in turn can help teachers make what they teach more accessible to students. These actions can also contribute to the conceptualisation of teaching, learning, and the ways we study as being more collaborative processes. Further, students can feel empowered when they are taken seriously and attended to as knowledgeable participants in learning conversations, and they can be motivated to participate constructively in their education. In addition, she further identifies that authorising students’ perspectives is a major way of addressing power imbalances in classrooms in order for students’ voices to have legitimacy in the learning setting. Such understandings inform this project for it is a Kaupapa MƗori position that when teachers share their power with students, they will better understand the world of the “others” and those “othered” by power differentials, and students will be better able to more successfully participate and engage in educational systems on their own culturally constituted terms. In turn, teachers will create culturally appropriate and responsive contexts for learning (Bishop et al., 2003; Gay, 2000) through drawing upon a different pattern of metaphor such as described in the first part of this chapter. In this way MƗori students will be able to interact with teachers and others in ways that legitimates who they are and how they make sense of the world. It is suggested that such positive, inclusive interactions will lead to improved student engagement in learning. Numerous studies (Fisher et al., 1981; Widdowson, Dixon & Moore, 1996; Bruner, 1996; Applebee, 1996) identify that improving student engagement is a necessary condition for improving educational achievement. Further, improved student on-task engagement has been identified as a moderate to good 40

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predictor of long-term student achievement (Fisher et al., 1981; Gage & Berliner, 1992; Ysseldyke & Christiansen, 1998; Widdowson et al., 1996). Fundamental to Kaupapa MƗori theorizing is an analysis of that which might limit MƗori advancement in education. Therefore, as part of this project, in addition to the narratives of the students, those parenting the students, their principals (as the agenda setters of the schools) and a representation of their teachers (approx 23% of the teachers in the 5 schools), were also asked to narrate their experiences in order to develop narratives of the experiences and involvement of these groups in the education of MƗori students. In this way, the students’ experiences could be understood within the wider context of their education and their lives in general. The analysis of these narratives provided some very illuminating information about the positions taken by people in relation to one another, the consequent pattern of interdependence and the potential of a variety of discursive positionings for perpetuating or offering solutions to the problem of educational disparities. The Students Whilst there were differences between the experiences of the engaged and nonengaged students, most students reported being MƗori in a mainstream secondary school was for them a negative experience. Few reported that being MƗori in their classrooms, currently or in the past, was a positive experience. Further, most of the students identified that the relationships they have with their teachers was the most influential factor in their ability to achieve in the classroom. In particular, the students emphasised that the ways in which teachers taught, that is how they interacted with MƗori students, influenced them into either becoming engaged in their learning or not. To a lesser extent, students identified how issues related to their home experiences, and to structural issues within the school impacted on their learning and contributed to their educational experience being less productive. Overall, the majority of the students interviewed wanted to be able to attend school, to have positive educational experiences and to achieve. Most of all however, they wanted to be able to do this as MƗori. In so doing they alerted us of the need for education to be responsive to them as culturally located people and in this way to the emerging literature on the creation of learning contexts and how these contexts might be constituted as appropriate and responsive to the culturally generated sense-making processes of the students. This notion of cultural responsiveness (after Gay, 2000; Nieto, 2000) offers a means whereby teachers can acknowledge and address MƗori students self-determination within their classrooms by creating learning contexts wherein the learning relationships and interactions are such that MƗori students can bring themselves into what Grumet (1995), terms the “conversation that makes sense of the world.” Those Parenting (WhƗnau) Those parenting MƗori students (their whƗnau) identified that the major influence on MƗori students’ educational achievement was the quality of their children’s 41

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relationship with their teachers. These whƗnau members acknowledged that they had to take some responsibility for ensuring their child did well in the educational setting and that the relationship they had with their children contributed to their success at school. However, there remained a strong expectation that schools should take some responsibility for providing their children with good experiences at school. If this was to be achieved, according to the whƗnau members, the schools and the teachers needed to have a greater understanding of things MƗori, including the reality that MƗori people have their own cultural values, aspirations and ways of knowing. This realization was seen as vital so as to allow the culture of the child to be present, recognised and respected within the school and the classroom. This expectation was also raised by both student groups. The Principals Like the students and those parenting, the principals also drew primarily upon the discourse of relationships to identify the main influences on MƗori students’ educational achievement. In particular, the principals identified that the attitude of the teacher was crucial to the development of positive learning relationships between the teacher and their MƗori students. Teachers’ low expectations of MƗori students and the need for teachers to adjust to the individual learning requirements of their students were also identified as critical factors. The principals identified that one way teachers might facilitate a more responsive relationship was by recognising MƗori students’ culture and taking cognisance of MƗori cultural aspirations and notions of belonging. They identified that developing more culturally responsive relationships required schools to build MƗori pedagogies that went beyond the limited inclusion of MƗori cultural iconography into their curriculum and programmes. This type of initiative was seen by principals as a means of enhancing the relationships between MƗori students and staff, and as a means of gaining positive support from parents of MƗori students. Pivotal to this was the building and maintaining of relationships with their MƗori communities. The Teachers Contrary to the narratives of experience provided by the students, those parenting and the principals, most teachers identified factors from within the discourse of the child and their home as having the greatest influence on MƗori students’ educational achievement. In particular, teachers perceived deficits within the home, or problems that MƗori students brought with them to school from home as having the major influence on MƗori students’ educational achievement. In terms of influences outside of the school, teachers identified problems of home background and socio-economic problems, leading to greater mobility and transience of MƗori students, as being problematic. Deficit influences were further elaborated by teachers’ perceptions of MƗori students’ lack of access to resources, inadequate nutrition, condoned absenteeism, access to drugs, alcohol and other anti-social behaviours in the community, participation in work outside of school, and inadequate parental support or positive role models. 42

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In addition, teachers identified the problems that MƗori students cause when they are at school. Teachers argued that MƗori student underachievement was the result of the low-level aspirations of MƗori students and their lack of motivation and poor behaviour. Teachers also spoke of the negative influence of peers (MƗori), and the wasted talent of MƗori students being unwilling to stand out from the crowd (a perceived cultural issue). Teachers identified that MƗori students were disorganised, not prepared for their classes or for learning and difficult to discipline. Many teachers expressed a great deal of disillusionment about their ability to effect change in the face of these constant pressures. Although teachers as a group were less convinced that in-class relationships were of importance to MƗori students’ educational achievement, a small group of teachers did identify that positive relationships were built in their classrooms through their respecting the cultural knowledge and aspirations of MƗori students. They further suggested that these actions resulted in improved student behaviour, engagement and involvement in learning. The teachers identified that structural and systemic issues had the least influence on MƗori students’ educational achievement. These included curriculum demands being placed upon teachers and high student and staff turnover. Overall however, the teachers argued strongly about the perceived deficits of the child and/or their homes as having the most significant impact on MƗori students’ educational achievement. Interpretation of the Narratives of Experience: Development of the Analytical Model A critical reading of the narratives of experience identified that there were three main discourses within which the participant groups positioned themselves when identifying and explaining both positive and negative influences on MƗori students’ educational achievement. There was the discourse of the child and their home, which included those influences that were to be found outside of the school and the classroom. There was the discourse of structure and systems or those influences outside of the classroom, but pertaining to the school itself and or the wider education system. Thirdly there was the discourse of relationships and classroom interaction patterns, which included all those influences that were identified as being within the classroom. This schema was used in the analysis of all the narratives as a means of comparing the relative weightings that the various groups of interview participants gave to each set of influences within the major discourses. This was undertaken by compiling frequency tables of unit ideas, (see Bishop et al., 2003 and Figure 1). In this way researchers sought to identify which influence each group gave primacy to, and which discourse each group drew upon most frequently. The analysis of the narratives was coded according to idea units and the number of times those units were repeated across the schools, rather than within each school. In this way we were attempting to develop a picture from across all the schools, as opposed to letting the experiences of one school dominate, or even one articulate student or teacher. Therefore the frequency count as shown in Figure 1 is a tally of 43

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idea units. These idea units were then listed according to the discourse they illustrated and ranked according to the number of times such idea units were mentioned in the narratives. This analysis of the narratives was conducted within the same Kaupapa MƗori approach that had been used in the process of interviewing. Primacy in the interviewing approach was given to acknowledging the self-determination of the interview participants to be able to explain their own experiences in their own culturally constituted terms. The interviews were undertaken as in-depth, semi-structured, interviews as conversations (Bishop & Glynn, 1999) and sought to minimize the imposition of the researchers own sense making and theorizing on the experiences and explanations of the interview participants. As a result, in the construction of the narratives, emphasis was given to the meanings that interview participants had ascribed to their experiences and in this way produced a representation that the participants would legitimate. Similarly, when coding the narratives the research team were particular to refer to the meaning that the various participants ascribed to their experiences, that is, coding was based on what the experiences meant to the speaker rather than what it meant to us as researchers. For example, some of the students’ references to peer influences may be coded to relationships, whereas for parents and teachers these idea units may be coded as part of the discourse of the child and home. Another example is coding references to the curriculum. For many of the students, this is coded as part of the discourse of relationships, however, for many of the teachers it was coded as part of the discourse of structures. On the surface this may appear to be inconsistent, however, all of those who were coding, were fully conversant with the process of constructing narratives of experience through the process of spiral discourse/collaborative storying (Bishop, 1996) and therefore when coding, were reading the narratives widely so as to identify the meaning that the interview participants had attributed to that particular issue. In addition, for purposes of consistency, the coding was undertaken by a small number of the research team who were both familiar with the process of collaborative storying and who had developed a common agreement as to what constituted idea units, themes, sub themes and more importantly how participants positioned themselves in relation to the various discourses. However, as this analysis of the interviews came from only a small number of schools it is suggested that rather than this graph representing firm generalisations, it provides a means of ascribing a rough weighting to each discourse that might be indicative of patterns and trends that one may well find in other, similar settings. Therefore the picture presented here is more of one that others can reflect upon, so that they can critically evaluate where they position themselves when constructing their own images, principles and practices in relation to MƗori students from their own settings than a truly summative picture of classroom relations in New Zealand. Indeed, when we share these stories with teachers in professional development and other workshops, many people voice their own familiarity with these experiences and also express that reading these narratives of experience enables them to reflect upon their own discursive positioning and its potential impact upon their students’ learning. 44

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90 80 70 60 Students Parents Principals Teachers

Percentage

50 40 30 20 10 0 Child

Structure

Relationship

Frequency of Discourses Figure 1. Frequency of discourses - Bishop et al., (2003).

We present these stories, not so others can generalise, but rather so that educators can particularise as to their own experiences. The interpretative process that drew on both qualitative and quantitative means of measurement provided frequency bars for all four interviewee groups. When viewed together as in Figure 1, they provide a clear picture of the conflict in theorizing that is to be found about the lived experiences of MƗori students, a picture that, from anecdotal evidence, is to be found time and again in New Zealand schools. In addition, while it may be tempting to attribute significance to some minor differences in numbers or percentages, it is the overall pattern of differences that is of importance to this argument. It is also important to note that the frequency figures refer to the number of narratives where such a factor was found; these are frequencies from groups of students (and later of groups of parents and of teachers) rather than of individual responses. Only in the principals’ narratives are there individual responses. Discursive Positioning It is clear from the pattern shown in Figure 1 that the main influences on MƗori students’ educational achievement that people identify varies according to where they position themselves within the three discourses. Those who identify that from their experiences, in-class relationships between teachers and students (and others involved in the educational community) have the greatest influence on MƗori students’ 45

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educational achievement stand in contrast to those who identify the main influences as being MƗori students themselves, their homes and/or the structure of the schools, that is influences from outside of the classroom. What is problematic for education is that it is mainly teachers who position themselves in significant numbers within this latter group. In so doing, a large proportion of the teachers were pathologising MƗori students’ lived experiences by explaining their lack of educational achievement in deficit terms, either as being within the child or their home, or within the structure of the school. Positioning within this latter group also means that the speakers tended to blame someone or something else outside of their area of influence and as a result they suggest that they can have very little responsibility for the outcomes of these influences. The main consequence of such deficit theorising for the quality of teachers’ relationships with MƗori students and for classroom interactions is that teachers tend to have low expectations of MƗori students’ ability or a fatalistic attitude in the face of systemic imponderables. This in turn creates a downward spiralling, self-fulfilling prophecy of MƗori student achievement and failure. Further, those who position themselves here see very few solutions to solve the problems. In terms of agency then, this is a very non-agentic position in that there is not much an individual can do from this position other than change the child’s family situation or the education ‘system’, solutions often well outside of their own agency. Therefore, along with others (Nieto, 2000; Gay, 2000; Kincheloe & Steinberg, 1997; Wagstaff & Fusarelli, 1995), it is suggested that this deficit theorising by teachers is the major impediment to MƗori students’ educational achievement and as Bruner, (1996) identifies, unless these positionings, these theorisings by teachers are addressed and overcome, they will not be able to realise their agency and little substantial change will occur. Indeed in Shields, Bishop and Mazawi, (2005), we found in 3 case studies of the impact of pathologising theories and practices on Navaho, MƗori & Bedouin peoples, that pathologising of the lived experiences of these 3 peoples was all pervasive and were deeply rooted in psychological, epistemological, social and historical discourses. Indeed, we found that pathologising is manifested in education and schooling in knowledge, power, agency, structures and relationships including both the pedagogical and homeschooling relationships. In fact pathologising in the form of deficit theorizing is the major impediment to the achievement of minoritised students; an understanding that is only too well known by indigenous peoples such as MƗori and which forms the basis of MƗori resistance to such theorizing (p. 196). In contrast, speakers who position themselves within the discourse of relationships and interactions understand that within this space, explanations that seek to address the power differentials and imbalances between the various participants in the relationships can be developed and implemented. In addition, these speakers tend to accept responsibility for their part in the relationships and are clear that they have agency, in that they are an active participant in educational relationships. That is, speakers who position themselves here have a personal understanding that they can bring 46

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about change and indeed are responsible for bringing about changes in the educational achievement of MƗori students. Implications for Pedagogy Bruner (1996) identifies that when teaching occurs, progress is decided upon and practices modified as “a direct reflection of the beliefs and assumptions the teacher holds about the learner” (p. 47). This means that “…our interactions with others are deeply affected by our everyday intuitive theorizing about how other minds work” (p. 45). In other words, our actions as teachers, parents or whoever we are at that particular time are driven by the mental images or understandings that we have of other people. Thus despite our being well-meaning, if students with whom we are interacting as teachers are led to believe that we think they are deficient, they will respond negatively. We were told time and again by many of the interview participants in 2001 (Bishop and Berryman, 2006), and again in 2007 (Bishop et al., 2007), that negative, deficit thinking on the part of teachers was fundamental to the development of negative relations and interactions between students and their teachers. In 2001, the students, their whƗnau, the principals and the teachers gave us numerous examples of such thinking, the resultant problematic and resistant behaviours and the frustrating consequences for both students and teachers. The teachers spoke of their frustration and anger; the students spoke about negative relations being an assault on their very identity as MƗori people. Such understandings have major implications for teachers hoping to be agentic in their classrooms and for educational reformers. Elbaz (1981, 1983) explains that understanding the relationship between teachers’ theories of practice about learners and learning is fundamental to teachers being agentic. The principles teachers hold dear and the practices they employ are developed from the images they hold of others. To Foucault (1972), the images that teachers create when describing their experiences are expressed in the metaphors that are part of the language of the discourses around education. That is, teachers draw from a variety of discourses to make sense of the experiences they have when relating to and interacting with MƗori students. Therefore, rather than it being anything inherent or even biological within the students or teachers, it was the discourses that teachers drew upon to explain their experiences that kept them frustrated and isolated. It was not their attitudes or personalities. It was what Foucault termed their “positioning within discourse”. That is, we are not of the explanations but rather, by drawing on particular discourses to explain and make sense of our experiences, we are positioning ourselves within these discourses and acting accordingly in our classrooms. The discourses already exist, they have been developing throughout our history, are often in conflict which each other through power differentials, and importantly for our desire to be agentic, in terms of their practical importance, some discourses hold solutions to problems, others don’t. The crucial implication from this analysis is that discursive positions that teachers take are key to their being able to make a difference (or not) for MƗori students. 47

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Therefore, prior to in-class type professional development to promote new quality teaching classroom practices, such as culturalist theorists promote, teachers need to be provided with learning opportunities where they can critically evaluate where they discursively position themselves when constructing their own images, principles and practices in relation to MƗori students in their own classrooms. Such an activity is necessary so that they can reflect upon the part they might play in the wider power plays that mediate MƗori participation in the benefits that education has to offer. As we identified in 2001 when we commenced Te Kotahitanga in secondary schools, the majority of teachers we spoke to were positioned in discourses that limited their agency and efficacy. In particular the discourses were those that suggest the supposed deficiencies posed by students, families, schools, the education system, and society create situations and problems that are far beyond the power of teachers to address in the classroom. Therefore the learning opportunities offered to teachers in the professional development programme needed to provide them with an opportunity to undertake what Davies and Harre (197) called discursive repositioning, which means they need to be offered an opportunity to draw explanations and subsequent practices from alternative discourses that offer them solutions instead of reinforcing problems and barriers. This approach is supported by Mazarno et al., (2005) who have identified that most educational innovations do not address the “existing framework of perceptions and beliefs, or paradigm, as part of the change process – an ontological approach” (p. 162), but rather assume “that innovation is assimilated into existing beliefs and perceptions” (p. 162). They go on to suggest that reforms that are more likely to succeed are those that are fundamentally ontological in nature, providing participants with an “experience of their paradigms as constructed realities, and an experience of consciousness other than the ‘I’ embedded in their paradigms” (p. 162). Or as Sleeter (2005) suggests, [i]t is true that low expectations for students of color and students from poverty communities, buttressed by taken-for-granted acceptance of the deficit ideology, has been a rampant and persistent problem for a long time… therefore, empowering teachers without addressing the deficit ideology may well aggravate the problem” (p. 2). Such an approach is effective for according to Burr (1995, p. 146) we are all able to reposition ourselves from one discourse to another because, while we are partly the product of discourse, we have agency that allows us to change the way we see and make sense of the world by drawing from other discourses. We are free agents and we have agency; what is crucial to understand is that some of the discourses we draw from limit our power to activate our agency. In Te Kotahitanga (Bishop et al., 2003, 2007), we use narratives of the experiences of all the people most closely involved with the education of MƗori students, including the young people themselves, providing teachers with the opportunity to reflect upon the experiences of others involved in similar circumstances to themselves, including perhaps for the first time, the students. Sharing these vicarious experiences of schooling enables teachers to reflect upon their own understandings of MƗori children’s experiences and consequently upon their own theorising/ explanations about these experiences, their consequent practice and the likely impact 48

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of this theorising and practice upon MƗori student achievement. In other words, we are seeking to open the ‘Black Box’ that Timperley et al., (2007) referred to, as teachers are afforded the opportunity to critically reflect upon their own discursive positioning, its implications and the part they themselves might be playing in reproducing the power imbalances that are part of the wider society in their classrooms. In addition where necessary, teachers are able to discursively reposition themselves from discourses that limit their agency to those where they can be agentic. As we began to implement what became Te Kotahitanga, we also learnt that positive classroom relationships and interactions were built upon positive, nondeficit thinking by teachers about students and their families. This thinking viewed the students as having many experiences that were relevant and fundamental to classroom interactions. This agentic thinking by teachers means that they see themselves as being able to solve problems that come their way, they have recourse to skills and knowledge that can help all of their students and that all of their students can achieve. We learnt that this positive thinking was fundamental to the creation of learning contexts in classrooms where young MƗori people are able to be themselves as MƗori; where MƗori students’ humour was acceptable, where students could care for and learn with each other, where being different was acceptable and where the power of MƗori students own self-determination was fundamental to classroom relations and interactions. Indeed, it was the interdependence of self-determining participants in the classroom that created vibrant learning contexts which were in turn characterised by the growth and development of quality learning relations and interactions, increased student attendance, engagement and achievement, both in school and national-based measures (see Bishop et al., 2007; Timperley et al., 2007). Of course discursive repositioning, while in itself a necessary condition for educational reform, is not sufficient to bring about educational reform. However, theorising from within a relational discourse addresses the limitations (which will be detailed below) of both the culturalist position (limited consideration of the impact of power differentials within the classroom, school and society) and the structuralist position (limited consideration of the agency of teachers, school leaders and policy makers) at all levels of education, and can be used to develop a model that promotes effective and sustainable educational reform that is drawn from a relational discourse. RESPONSIVE AND SUSTAINABLE CLASSROOM PRACTICES

Culture is central to effective pedagogy because learning new concepts is aided by creating associative links; that is, connecting prior knowledge, including that obtained outside the classroom, to new classroom learning to counter the proposition that “substantial amounts of classroom time is wasted because the instructional experiences do not match children’s memory processes” (Alton-Lee, 2006, p. 618). Culturally responsive pedagogies, therefore, become all the more important the greater the distance between the world of the teacher and that of the child. When there is a cultural mismatch between teacher and child, “it ought to be the teacher who makes the cognitive adjustment” (Bishop, 2003, p. 235). This, in turn, allows student engagement from a self-determining perspective, which Bruner (1996) argues brings commitment, from which comes learning (Applebee, 1996). In practice, this means 49

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there will be a pedagogy of power sharing that involves children in decisions about curriculum planning and “the directions that learning will take” (Bishop, 2003, p. 225). Consequently, MƗori language, culture and knowledge become a valid guide, both literally and metaphorically, to classroom interactions so that “MƗori children can be themselves” (Bishop, 2003, p. 225). Culture is, in fact, one’s sense-making process. Too often (as was seen in Bishop et al., 2007) culture is seen as tikanga or customs, and cultural iconography displayed in classrooms is seen as being sufficient for engaging MƗori students with learning. However, if instead it is the child’s sensemaking process that is “acceptable” and “official”, teacher interactions can focus on the co-construction of knowledge. A further benefit of this approach is that it can lessen the distance between the world of the child and that of the school, which in turn increases the likelihood of parental involvement in the child’s schooling. A study of high-performing Hispanic schools in the USA by Reyes, Scribner and Scribner (1999) provides evidence of the significance of such an approach to teaching to the achievement of minority students. Reyes et al., (1999) noticed that in a number of schools where Hispanic children were achieving well, central to their success were dynamic teachers who were able to transcend cultural and linguistic barriers to make a difference in the lives of these children. The high-performing Hispanic schools that were the focus of this study “have been characterised as communities of learners where students were first, learning is fun and everything begins in the classroom” (Reyes et al., 1999, p. 4). Classroom experiences in these schools were characterised by “teachers engaging students in the learning process that maximises excellence and achievement” (ibid.). Teachers were typically antideficit theorists, and as a result understood their own agency in the matter, took responsibility for their students’ learning, and did not fall into the trap of allowing lower expectations to lead to self-fulfilling prophecies about student failure. Within these classrooms, teachers were also empowered by the structural and wider cultural arrangements of the school to “adapt, modify, make culturally relevant, and match curricula to the unique needs of Hispanic students” (ibid.). Instruction was interactive, active and student-centred. Assessment was primarily formative; that is, “ongoing and advocacy-oriented” (ibid.), and through this process students were encouraged to become responsible for their own learning. Such findings are supported by an extensive, internationally based meta-analysis of differing effects on schooling (Hattie, 1999). For example, “effective teachers set challenging goals and then structure situations so that students can reach these goals” (Hattie, p. 16). Indeed, Hattie’s meta-analysis concludes that teaching is most effective when “achievement is enhanced to the degree that students and teachers set and communicate appropriate, specific and challenging goals”, and “achievement is enhanced as a function of feedback”, yet “the incidence of feedback in the typical classroom is usually very low, usually in seconds at best per day” (ibid.). To Hattie, feedback in its widest sense and the setting of challenging goals (which is a function of high expectations) are therefore the two most significant aspects of classroom practice that characterise effective teaching. Nonetheless, Hattie (1999) and Nutthall (2007) both stress that feedback on its own is insufficient, because teachers must be attentive to how their feedback is 50

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interpreted and understood by the child. In short, responding to the different ways in which children receive feedback “requires that teachers care about their students, know where they are coming from, and overly attend to the issue of whether their students are learning” (Hattie, p. 19). Effective professional development, in focusing on the classroom as the site of change, will therefore need to support the introduction and establishment of classroom strategies and interactions that provide cognitive challenges and challenging feedback. In a study of effective MƗori-medium teachers (Bishop et al., 2001b), we found that the pedagogic characteristics of expert teachers included depth of professional and cultural knowledge, passion and dedication, a clear philosophy of teaching, and clear teaching goals. Expert teachers were committed to developing children’s understanding and intellectual growth, their behaviour management strategies were non-confrontational, they were genuinely interested in children, and they provided high-quality academic feedback. These effective teachers continually reflected on their work and had high academic and behavioural expectations of children. Their classroom management was high quality, and they incorporated students’ prior learning into their teaching strategies and used materials that were related to the children’s world view and experiences. They matched strategies and materials to children’s ability, and monitored children’s progress. They encouraged high levels of academic engagement and close links to whƗnau, and created a “culturally appropriate and responsive context for learning by providing a visibly culture rich environment, enabling the children to bring their own culturally-generated meaning-making processes to learning. In this way, cultural identities were affirmed and a high degree of academic engagement is assured” (Bishop et al., 2001b, pp. viii–xii). USES OF THE NARRATIVES

The narratives of experience and the collaborative storying approach were therefore useful in a variety of ways in the project. 1. The Concept of Discourse is Useful Firstly, the analysis of the narratives identifies the usefulness of the concept of discourse as a means of identifying the thoughts, words and actions shaped by power relations; those complex network of images and metaphors that the various people in the stories drew upon to create meaning for themselves about their experiences with the education of MƗori students. A critical reading of the narratives illustrates the impact of discursive positioning where some discourses offer solutions, others merely perpetuate the status quo. For example, despite most teachers wishing to make a difference for MƗori students’ educational achievement, they are not able to do so because of their discursive positioning, whereas others, discursively positioned differently, were able to offer numerous solutions to seemingly immutable changes. However, despite discursive positionings making available to teachers different concepts, metaphors, images and language that “derive from our occupation of subject positions within discourses” (Burr, 1995, p. 146), nonetheless, teachers’ positively 51

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and vehemently rejecting deficit theorising as a means of explaining MƗori students’ educational achievement levels through discursive (re)positioning is possible, because it is not just a matter of our being subject to, or a product of, discourse; we have agency that allows us to (re)story our lives. As Burr, (1995) argues, this narrative notion “allows us the possibility of personal and social change through our capacity to identify, understand and resist the discourse we are also subject to” (p. 153). 2. Collaborative Storying Acknowledges Lived Realities Secondly, the interviews for the narratives were conducted in a Kaupapa MƗori manner (Bishop, 1997; 2005) in order that the participants were able to explain the meanings they constructed about their educational experiences either as or with MƗori students in ways that acknowledged their self-determination. The students for example clearly identified the main influences on their educational achievement by articulating the impact and consequences of their living in a marginalized space. That is, they explained how they were perceived in pathological terms by their teachers, and how this has had a negative effect up on their lives. The whƗnau members and the principals were also able to identify the main influences upon MƗori students’ education from their own experiences. Similarly their teachers were able to explain the vast range of experiences and meanings they ascribed to these experiences so that they were able to speak in ways that legitimated their representations. In this way, the narratives provided a means of addressing the question raised by Graham Smith some time ago. What is at issue here is whether the dominant PƗkehƗ education system in general and schooling in particular will ever be able to provide a mode of education which can free itself of its historical colonising baggage and genuinely meet MƗori student’s needs and aspirations. (Smith, 1997, p. 253) The patterns of dominance and subordination that exist in the wider society of Aotearoa/New Zealand also exist in our classrooms. Just as in research, the denial of cultural diversity as a feature of power imbalances, rather the promotion of cultural diversity as differences, perpetuates these patterns within classroom relationships and within classroom practice. It is this pattern of dominance and subordination and its constituent classroom interaction patterns that perpetuates the non-participation of many young MƗori people in the benefits that the education system has to offer. It is through the reassertion of MƗori cultural aspirations, preferences and practices that the political issues of power and control over structural issues of initiation, benefits, representation, legitimisation and accountability can be addressed in mainstream classrooms in ways that will benefit all students. Where the interrelationships and interaction patterns that develop in classrooms are based on MƗori sense making processes (ways of knowing) rather than on those imposed by another culture, we will realize what Bruner (1996) suggested where …. [w]e have known for years that if you treat people, young kids included, as responsible, contributing parties to the group, as having a job to do, they will grow into it – some better than others, obviously, but all benefit (p. 81). The models of interrelationships developed in Kaupapa MƗori educational contexts will help to identify 52

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and restructure power relationships within mainstream classrooms by identifying the problems caused by the imposition of teachers’ cultures and ‘teacher culture’ on the learning aspirations, preferences and practices of students. Incorporating the culturally generated sense-making processes that students bring into classroom interactions will increase the positive interactions and participation in classroom activities of MƗori students. This in turn will enable their more full participation in the benefits that education can offer. However, such goals are rarely attained in modern educational settings. Too often learning becomes a matter of the teacher being the provider of pre-determined knowledge; the student, the replicator, in Freire’s terms the ‘banking’ model. Applebee (1996) explains these phenomena as learning about rather than participating in the educational experience, or in his terms, the emphasis is on knowledge-out-of-context as opposed to knowledge-in-action. The continuing emphasis on knowledge-outof-context can be understood in the ways we speak of or imagine curriculum, and pedagogic interactions where “content” has been extracted from the ongoing process of developing knowledge and turned into a noun. The verb being cast aside. Applebee (1996) suggests that “Conceptions of curriculum …. have focused only the specialised content (the knowing), ignoring the discourse conventions that govern participation” (p. 30). Instead of learning about how to participate in the discourse – as do the children Hohepa et al., (1992) observed in Kohanga Reo institutions – students learn about knowledge that is selected by people outside their knowledges. Applebee (1996) suggests that this process of divorcing knowledge and participation in the discursive practices that create the knowledge has allowed a group of “experts” firstly to determine what students should know and secondly to arrange these ‘parts’ into an “elaborate scope and sequence chart that specify the order in which that content should be taught” (p. 31). This duality makes it difficult for MƗori children, and children socialised in ways other than those that support knowledge-out-of-context learning, to succeed in the education system. Knowledgeout-of-context learning emphasises a situation where knowledge is seen as fixed and transmittable and able to be memorised by students, and generally these are those whom are most like the teacher. These are the students who can suspend their questions and concerns in order to succeed, who foresee success in exams and in classroom and school assessment. Other children who begin school keen and eager to learn, soon lose their enthusiasm. Children increasingly are becoming distanced and distraught, causing bewilderment to well meaning but inappropriately trained teachers. This bewilderment is further exacerbated when the students are provided with “remedial” assistance, which amounts to more intensive applications of the same pedagogy and content. Traditional/Discursive Classrooms Power differentials can be seen in all levels and contexts of our society. What is true for researchers is also true for teachers. As identified earlier, teachers remain dominant by retaining power over the issues of initiation, benefits, representation, legitimation and accountability mainly by creating a teaching context of their own design. 53

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They retain power and control over these issues in their classes by constructing what Australian educationalist Robert Young (1991) terms the traditional classroom as a learning context for children. The [traditional] method [classroom] is one in which teachers objectify learners and reify knowledge, drawing on a body of objectifying knowledge and pedagogy constructed by the behavioural sciences for the former and empiricist and related understandings of knowledge for the latter. (p. 78) Young (1991) contends that it is the context created in such classrooms by teachers that impact upon children’s learning rather than the monocultural status of teachers. To Young (1991), in the traditional classroom, teachers see their function “as to ‘cover’ the set curriculum, to achieve sufficient ‘control’ to make pupils do this, and to ensure that pupils achieve a sufficient level of ‘mastery’ of the set curriculum as revealed by evaluation” (p. 79). The learning context these teachers create aims to promote these outcomes. In these classrooms it is teachers who are ‘active’ and who do most of the ‘official’ talk (classroom language). Technical mastery of this language and the language of the curriculum (which is generally one and the same thing) are pre-requisites for pupil participation with the official ‘knowledge’ of the classroom. The learning context that is created in traditional classrooms is such that there is a distinct power difference between teacher and learner which, as Smith (1997, p. 178) suggests, may be reinforced ideologically and spatially. Ideologically, in that the teacher is seen as the “font of all knowledge”; the pupils, in Locke’s terms, the ‘tabula rasa’, the empty slate; where the teacher is the ‘neutral’ and objective arbiter and transmitter of knowledge. Knowledge however, is selected by the teacher, guided by curriculum documents and possibly texts that are created from within and by the dominant groups. Far from being neutral, these documents actively reproduce the cultural and social hegemony of the dominant groups at the expense of marginalised groups. The spatial manifestation of difference can be seen in “the furniture arrangements within the classroom, in the organisation of staff meetings, and by holding assemblies with teachers sitting on the stage and so forth” (Smith, 1997, p. 179). Children who are unable or who do not want to participate in this pattern are marginalised and fail. Teachers will then explain the children’s lack of participation in terms of pupil inabilities, disabilities, dysfunctions or deficiencies, rarely considering that it may well be the very structure of the classroom that mitigates against the creation of a relationship that will promote satisfactory participation by pupils (Benton, 1988). Supportive of this pattern of curriculum and pedagogic dominance are stories created by researchers and teachers about the needs of children. These needs are often stated positively in terms of the need to promote self-esteem, but more often are stated conversely in terms of either intellectual deficiencies, cultural deficiencies, behaviour disorders or a combination of these as reasons for nonparticipation. These understandings of students’ needs beyond the curriculum have more to do with suppositions about developmental needs of children created as part of the dominant monocultural discourse, than about the cultural realities of the child’s life and the power relationship that is created when teachers accept or participate in these stories about inadequacy. This is sharply highlighted in the traditional paradigm of Special Education within which students ‘low achievement’ is attributed to 54

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disability conditions, neurological damage, and dysfunction or to deficiencies in their families or their ethnic groups (Moore et al, 1999). The type of context that is created in the classroom as a result of a traditional approach to learning has major implications for the motivational type that is fostered there. As Young (1991) suggests [t]eachers in general report that the problem of interesting the pupils in the greatest educational problems that they face after they have made some headway with the problem of control, which is the number one problem in the first few years of teaching. (p. 79) Teachers attempt to address the problem of motivating pupils by looking for new “pedagogical tricks to capture the children’s interest…” (p. 79). However, by that time, most classrooms have become what he terms traditional “method classrooms” where the teacher is dominant and where “control” relationships have become the dominant pattern. Unfortunately for the well-meaning teacher, the problems of motivation in the classroom are not solvable through a technical fix but rather through the development of new relationships of interest with different interaction patterns. However, unless the teacher has a means of critically revisiting their own practice they will continue to believe in the story created about children’s inadequacies and this will be where they will focus their attentions. Again, in the context of Special Education, the newer educational ecological paradigm locates students’ achievement within the quality of interactions they experience within their learning environments. This paradigm focuses assessment and intervention on improving the quality of teaching and learning contexts available for children with special needs in their classrooms and schools. Young (1991) highlights eight problems that are created by the patterns of interactions that are fundamental to teacher domination and imposition in the traditional method classroom. These problems are created where pupils are forced to respond to reproducing correct forms of answers to fit in with the teacher’s frameworks rather than answering creatively or rationally. These include:  dominance of decontextualised rote or lower order cognitive processes, that limits higher order goals of understanding and generality.  expecting rote responding to assist the development of reasoning and problemsolving skills.  limiting the use of social interaction skills beyond the dyadic, limits the development of the courage required in argument.  central to all creative rationality is interplay between “the hazy glimpse of the final shape of an argument and the present stage of it”.  responses by learners become responses to authority, seeking of approval, rather than responses that attempt to enhance understanding (as in storying). Learners develop distorted response and interaction patterns, seeking to guess what the teacher is thinking, or what will please the teacher or often what will do the opposite.  being treated as an object on which a pedagogy is practiced by a distanced “other” a teacher rather than being treated as another learner who is another partner in inquiry jeopardises “the pupils’ self-evaluation as a rational being”. 55

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 precluding those who have the most intimate knowledge of a pupil’s learning difficulties, the pupils themselves, from “expressing and exploring those difficulties.”  precluding the development of the conditions required for the “consideration of problem solving, namely the chance to reflect on our beliefs and values that interaction on an equal footing with others who see things differently can give us” (p. 88). A classroom educational environment in which students are seen as passive vessels, to whom knowledge is transmitted, requires frequent testing in order to ascertain if the transmission has been successful. Due to the need for extrinsic motivation strategies that such a process creates or relies upon, only a proportion of the student body are able to participate “successfully”. This is the group whom cultural reproduction theorists demonstrate are able to succeed because they have the “cultural capital” necessary for successful participation. Generally this is where the culture of the school matches that of the child. However, despite having the advantages of common cultural capital, intrinsic motivation of the learner in this type of classroom is rare. Teachers talk of covering the curriculum, teaching the subject and getting good grades for top students. For older students, external exams provide much of the motivation for both parties. What would happen in these classrooms if the external exams were removed? Pupils talk of getting good grades but rarely talk about their love of the subject or use terms describing their fascination and interest. Such attitudes are not rewarded or matched or given space; that is, they are not seen as valid outputs, rather as means to an end, the end being the acquisition of knowledge and skills. The mainstream education system appears to be incapable of internal self correction of the order required to address such issues. By stepping outside for a period of consolidation, MƗori educators have provided a critical gaze on mainstream practices and processes that will benefit MƗori and non-MƗori alike in comparison to other researchers who continue to tell us the problems that MƗori children bring to classrooms. Developing interaction patterns that will facilitate successful participation by MƗori children must contribute to the reformation of our schooling system which has remained unchanged for many years based as it is on unequal power relationships. Indeed we agree with Bruner (1996) whose vision of schooling is of schools and pre-schools … serving a renewed function within our changing societies. This entails building school cultures that operate as mutual communities of learners, involved jointly in solving problems with all contributing to the process of educating one another.” (p. 81/82) The Role of Questions in Teaching and Learning One of the most common forms of classroom interactions is initiated by teacher questioning. One would expect that such an approach would facilitate cultural variety in answers given that questioning is promoted as a means of initiating, extending and controlling the conversational interactions within a classroom. Effective questioning is identified in many teacher education institutions as a mark of good teaching. 56

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Questions are purported to “trigger” thinking, ignite inquiry and establish dialogic relationships. In order to engage learners with a variety of levels of thinking, ranges and taxonomies of questions are developed to identify levels of conceptual development. Questions are designed to promote thinking at the varying levels identified on a variety of taxonomies. For example, higher level questions are presented to stimulate higher order thinking and responses (Dillon, 1982, 1990). Such an approach seeks to promote the development of a range of thinking skills by the student through a series of carefully crafted questions being posed by the teacher. However, as Osborn (1995) identified in a study of courtroom interactions, “as language conventions and routines are rooted in socio-cultural traditions, the protocols associated with questioning vary according to setting and may not always be understood by children/ young persons” (p. 3). The effects of this cultural mismatch on interactions was identified in studies by Clay 1985 and Cazden (1988) that show how active verbal interactions between many MƗori students and teachers or students and other students are rare within such a questioning model. To Cazden (1998), questions are often used as a control mechanism or are an attempt to elicit a required response, one that services the aims of the questions rather than those of the questioned. Clay (1985) and others suggest that questions can also have an inhibitory effect on participation, and indeed lead to limited response and participation because of students’ unfamiliarity with the procedure or inability to guess what the teacher is thinking. Orsborn suggests, along with Clay (1985) and Cazden (1988), that “there is sufficient evidence now available to suggest a strong cultural variation in children’s responses to questions based on cultural differences in style, use, and shared understanding of the intent of questions” (Orsborn, 1997, p. 8). Problematically, questioning can and often does create a certain degree of tension and anxiety (Dillon, 1982), thus limiting responses to those considered safe by the questioned rather than developing oral responses and participation. Further, the language in which classroom questions are posed is often strange or unusual to the questioned. Ironically, this creates anxiety and nonresponsiveness and causes teachers to be bewildered and to look to the learners’ deficiencies as the cause of the non-response. Young (1991) explains that in contrast, the discursive classroom focuses on helping the pupil enter into the discourse of the wider culture/s by means of promoting different interaction patterns. Young (1991) defines the key to this new approach to classroom interactions as being [i]n the discourse classroom, we find the learner as pedagogical partner, rather than pedagogical object. The pedagogy is consciously co-constructed (instead of unconsciously, as in the method classroom). Pedagogy is not something teachers alone plan, but learning strategies children are given room for in a structured way. (p. 87) Applebee (1996) similarly explains that knowledge-in-action is reciprocally developed through the learner participating in a tradition of discourse. This means to Applebee (1996) that vital traditions of discourse are grounded in tacit conventions that govern what is said, by whom and in what ways. Particular traditions carry with them their 57

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own specialised content, reflected in a technical vocabulary and its associated concepts as well as in the rules of use governing discourse. That is, knowledge of a tradition involves both knowing and doing” (Applebee, 1996, p. 30). Geneva Gay (quoted in Sleeter and Montecinos, 1999) describes this as a process of cultural affirmation that is characterised by giving voice to students and allowing them to help shape the content, process, style and language of the classroom. Giving voice to students does not invalidate what the teacher knows, but rather restructures teacher-student relationships from mono-logical relationships in which the teacher has all the power to define curriculum and instruction, to dialogical relationships in which teacher and student co-construct curriculum and instruction.” (p. 118) There are however, dangers in this approach. Co-construction may still perpetuate teachers’ cultural dominance by means of another paradigm shift within the dominant culture that essentially shifts the domain of dominance from the knowledge-out-ofcontext that is being transmitted in the classroom to discursive practices that present only knowledge-in–action processes that are really part of the wider cultures of dominance. While this paradigm shift would appear to be a necessary condition for change, in itself it is not sufficient if it does not allow for the cultural traditions of knowledges-in-action of diverse cultures to be brought to the classroom. To see this another way, we need to refer back to the development of discursive patterns in research that were described in Chapter 1. It was clear that the power associated with the initiation of the research interaction needed to lie with the research participants, not with the researcher. It was also clear that the research participants’ modes of constructing meaning and explaining their own experiences (addressing issues of representation and legitimation) needed to be paramount in order to reduce the tendency of research to be impositional. Extrapolating from this realisation to classrooms means that the power of initiation needs to be with the students. In other words, it is the students who need to be the initiators of the discourse and it is in this way that it will be their cultural discourses (including sense making processes) that they will be drawing from and making reference to, rather than those of the teacher. Here we see a means whereby, given students are the initiators of the discursive interaction, the diverse realities that students bring to our classrooms may be acknowledged, where these diverse knowledges may be accepted and legitimated and where the students’ diverse sense-making processes can be validated and further developed. In such as classroom, this form of power sharing relationships, will be developed through the process of co-construction of pedagogic interactions. 3. Theories of Practice Thirdly, the analysis of the narratives allowed for a Kaupapa MƗori critique of the existing dominant theories of practice by promoting the usefulness of theorizing from within a relational discourse. When seeking solutions to ongoing educational disparities, both groups of students we interviewed, in 2003 and again in 2007, 58

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identified that the development of caring and learning relationships between the teacher and the students was the crucial factor in their being able to effectively engage in education. Importantly, in both cases students (and their whƗnau) understood themselves to be powerless to make changes to bring about such relationships where they did not already exist and that it was the teachers who had the power to bring about the necessary changes. This is not to deny that other broad factors such as prior learning and experience, socio-economic background, the structures and history of the school, and the sociallyconstructed impoverishment of MƗori created by the processes of colonisation are influential. It is just that teacher effectiveness stands out as the most easily alterable from within the school system. Further, as Hattie (2003a) suggests, this is the most useful site for the provision of professional learning opportunities for teachers when seeking to change the learning culture in schools and to reduce the persistent disparities in educational achievement. This position is supported by numerous international scholars including Sidorkin, (2002), Fullan (2003), Hargreaves (2005), and Elmore (2004) among others, who advocate that changing classroom practices and modifying school structures are the most likely strategies to improve student performance. Using Smith’s (1997) terms, it is clear that these somewhat ‘culturalist’ approaches stand in contrast to the more ‘structuralist’ notions of Nash (1993), Chapple, Jefferies and Walker (1997) and Thrupp, (2001, 2007) among others, who advocate a social stratification (low social class, low socio-economic status and resource/cultural deprivation) argument that being poor or poorly resourced inevitably leads to poor educational achievement. Much research in this area looks at the associations between variables such as socioeconomic status, ethnicity and other family attributes and resulting achievement in ways that suggest that such variables predetermine, or at least strongly influence achievement outcomes. Anyon (1997, cited in Thrupp, 2001) speaks for this group when she states that; Unfortunately educational “small victories” such as restructuring of a school or the introduction of a new pedagogical technique, no matter how satisfying to the individuals involved, without the long-range strategy to eradicate underlying causes of poverty and racial isolation, cannot add up to large victories in our inner cities with effects that are sustainable over time. (p. 20) While useful, both sets of arguments pose problems for educational practitioners in their search for reform models. Culturalists, for example, rightly point to pedagogic reform and changes to school culture as being necessary, however, they tend to ignore the lived reality of MƗori people, what Ballard (2007) identified as the “racialised social context” of current New Zealand society, and promote a ‘universalist’ approach, a “pedagogy for all. On the other hand, the more structuralist positions, while rightly identifying the impact of society-wide power imbalances on children who do not achieve well in school as being those who come from cultural groups which are not respected, are minoritised and impoverished by the majority, tend to promote the argument that teachers do not have agency in their practice in that there appears little that teachers can achieve in the face of overwhelming structural impediments such as ‘school mix’ and structural poverty. 59

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However, what is more problematic is that neither group of theorists have an adequate means of identifying how society-wide power differentials are played out in classrooms on a day-to-day basis and the part teachers, school leaders and policy makers may play in the perpetuation of power imbalances and educational disparities. MƗori students and their families are only too aware of how these power imbalances are played out (Bishop & Berryman, 2006). Alton-Lee (2003) and Timperley et al., (2007), along with G. Smith (1997) and other Kaupapa MƗori theorists in New Zealand and Freire (1997), McLaren (2003), Kincheloe and Steinberg (1997) and Valencia (1997) also emphasise that the product of long-term power imbalances needs to be examined by educators at all levels in terms of their own cultural assumptions and a consideration of how they might be participants in the systematic marginalisation of students in their classrooms, schools and the wider system. Smith (1997) warned that neither culturalist nor structuralist analyses can satisfactorily account for MƗori language, knowledge and cultural aspirations as major components of existing and developing educational interventions for MƗori. To Smith (1997), what is needed is a model that locates culture at the centre of educational reform in the face of deeper structural limitations, in the same manner as that practiced by the Kaupapa MƗori educational initiatives of Kohanga Reo and Kura Kaupapa MƗori. To Smith (1997) these institutions have developed “our forms of resistance and transformative praxis which engage both culturalist and structuralist concerns” (p. 222). What is therefore needed is a model that addresses the concerns and limitations of both culturist and structuralist positions and also provides a way for educators at all levels of the education system to critically reflect upon the part they might play in the wider power plays that mediate MƗori educational participation. Harker (2007) demonstrates such positioning when reconsidering the large data sets of the Smithfield (1994) studies and the Progress at School (1991) studies. He concludes that: It is clear from the data presented here that any uni-causal explanation based on socio-economic circumstances is inadequate to explain ethnic differences, thus supporting the caution expressed in Biddulph’s BES (Biddulph et al., 2003). The most likely explanation would seem to lie in the interaction between school environments and the values, attitudes, motivations that underpin the school “culture” and the culture of the home and community environments and the values, attitudes and motivations on which they are based. (p. 17) Harker goes on to suggest that: While it is important (even necessary) for the family and community culture of the students to be understood and supported by schools, it is also important (even necessary) for the culture of the school to be understood and supported by families and communities. (p. 17) Harker suggests that arguments about whether “schools make the difference”, or “is it down to the family” are really not useful. It is more a function of the interactions between these two sets of players that offers us explanations of variation in achievement and more importantly, provide us with solutions to problems of educational disparities. 60

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Such a relational theory is put forward in Bishop (2007) and Bishop et al., (2007) where MƗori aspirations for self-determination are placed at the centre of the theoretical frame. Self-determination in Durie’s (1995) terms “captures a sense of MƗori ownership and active control over the future” (p. 16). Nevertheless, despite self-determination meaning the right to determine one’s own destiny, there is a clear understanding among MƗori people that this autonomy is relative, not absolute; that it is self-determination in relation to others. It is not a call for separatism or noninterference, nor for non-MƗori to stand back and leave MƗori alone, in effect to relinquish all responsibility for the ongoing relationship between the peoples of New Zealand. Rather a Kaupapa MƗori position is a call for all those involved in education in New Zealand to reposition themselves in relation to these emerging aspirations of MƗori people for an autonomous voice and successful participation in the mainstream of society (Bishop, 1994; Smith, 1997; Durie, 1998). 4. The Professional Development Process Fourthly, the detailed narratives of experience are used at the commencement of the professional development part of this project in response to Bruners’ (1996) understanding that “…our interaction with others are deeply affected by our everyday intuitive theorizing about how other minds work. (p. 45)”. In other words, it is necessary to acknowledge that teachers are not simply vessels to be ‘filled’ by the expert outsider and that they do have strongly held theories of practice that affect and direct their practice and maybe some of these positions offer hope and maybe some don’t. Indeed, it is clear from Figure 1 that many of these theories that teachers hold could well do with being challenged through the creation of a situation of cognitive, cultural and/or emotional dissonance by the provision of evidence that is outside of the usual experiences of the teachers; this evidence being used to critically reflect upon one’s discursive positioning and the implications of this positioning for student outcomes. However, in line with the principles outlined in the earlier part of this chapter, it is clear that this challenging needs to be undertaken in a non-confrontational manner, one that acknowledges the mana (power) of the teachers where manaakitanga (caring for others) overrides aspirations to argue with, to chastise or to correct the ideas of one’s guests. Therefore the focus of the professional development is to create a culturally appropriate and responsive context for learning wherein teachers can reflect upon the evidence of the experiences of others in similar circumstances, including perhaps for the first time, the students. In this manner, teachers can critically evaluate where they position themselves when constructing their own images, principles and practices in relation to MƗori students in their own classrooms. Sharing these vicarious experiences of schooling enables teachers to reflect upon their own understandings of MƗori children’s experiences and consequently upon their own theorizing/explanations about these experiences and their consequent practice. And in this way, teachers are afforded the opportunity to critically reflect upon their own discursive positioning and the implication of this positioning for their own agency and for MƗori students’ learning. At the workshop that commences the project, the GEPRISP model (pronounced Gep-risp), guides the sequence of activities and provides a framework for the complex 61

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range of components that need to be addressed in order for the educational achievement of MƗori students to improve. At this workshop, teachers are introduced to the need to address the specific Goal of raising MƗori student participation and achievement. MƗori Student Experiences of education (and those of their significant others) are then worked through in a problem-solving exercise using the original narratives of experience (Bishop, & Berryman, 2006). This provides teachers with an opportunity to critically examine their own discursive Positioning and its implications for their own classroom relations and interactions with MƗori students. Through this process teachers are invited to critically reflect upon the evidence presented in the narratives of MƗori students and others. A professional learning conversation is created wherein teachers can critically reflect upon their own experiences in similar settings. This activity provides opportunities for teachers to begin to identify and challenge their own discursive positioning. Teachers are invited to reject deficit thinking (“…until something happens for this family, there is nothing I can do”, “… these MƗori students are just not up to it”), and pathologising practices (“…they need more remedial work, special programmes, they can’t cope with this work”) as a means to theorising MƗori student achievement levels. They begin to understand how they themselves can reposition and operate more effectively from a position of agency (“maybe I can’t do anything about this child’s home circumstances but in my classroom, I can do…”). Changing teachers’ explanations and practices (theoretical repositioning within discourse) about what impacts on MƗori students’ learning involves providing teachers with the opportunity to challenge their own deficit theorising about MƗori students (and their communities) through real and vicarious means in non-confrontational ways. It is a fundamental understanding of this project that until teachers consider how the dominant culture maintains control over the various aspects of education, and the part they themselves might play in perpetuating this pattern of domination, albeit unwittingly, they will not understand how dominance manifests itself in the lives of MƗori students (and their communities) and how they and the way they relate to and interact with MƗori students may well be affecting learning in their classroom. Therefore, the professional development devised by the researchers includes a means whereby teachers’ thinking can be challenged, albeit in a supported way. Cognitive and affective dissonance, in effect, cultural dissonance, which Timperley et al., (2003) identify as being necessary for successful professional development, can lead teachers to a better understanding of the power imbalances of which they are a part. In particular those power imbalances which perpetuate cultural deficit theorising and support the retention of traditional transmission classroom practices. What is also crucial to understandings of critical pedagogy is that the relationships and interactions that are established in the classrooms are replicated throughout all levels of the project so that a critical understanding of how dominance manifests itself in the lives of minoritised students is fundamental to curriculum content, professional development programmes, school reform and systemic responses. The professional development induction hui then turns to examine those Relationships of care, expectation and management and discursive Interactions that are fundamental to creating culturally responsive contexts for learning. Strategies that 62

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can be used to develop relations of care and in-class learning conversations are specifically introduced next and indeed are also used as the model for presentation throughout the professional development hui with teachers. The importance of detailed Planning, to bring about change in classrooms, departments and across the school is then identified and illustrated. To implement what has been learned at the induction hui, the order of GEPRISP is reversed into PSIRPEG (pronounced Sir Peg, the P is silent) where teachers are supported to focus on their need to undertake classroom and lesson Planning that will use Strategies to promote discursive Interactions in their classrooms, that in turn will develop caring and learning Relationships, that will reinforce teachers’ anti-deficit, agentic, discursive Positioning. Together these in turn all work towards improving MƗori students’ educational Experiences and promote the Goal of improving MƗori students’ educational engagement, participation and achievement. In order to implement the PSIRPEG process, following the teachers’ return to school, a series of inclass professional development activities are implemented in each of the four terms of the school year. These consist of classroom observations (data-gathering for formative and summative purposes), interactive feedback sessions on the lesson observed, student evidence-based, problem-solving co-construction meetings followed by further in-class support in the form of shadow-coaching. These more formal visits are accompanied by informal contacts, and other classroom visits or professional development sessions seen to be necessary. For further details of the professional development process, see Bishop et al., (2007): Bishop and Berryman, (2010). 5. The Effective Teaching Profile Fifthly, the students were clear about how teachers, in changing how they related and interacted with MƗori students in their classrooms, could create a context for learning wherein MƗori students’ educational achievement could improve; again by placing the self-determination of MƗori students at the centre of classroom relationships and interactions. In addition, those others who positioned themselves within the relationship discourse, were able to add numerous practical solutions to the problems of educational disparities facing MƗori students. These stood in contrast to the very limited solutions, and mainly impractical (especially for classroom teachers) solutions offered by those who discursively positioned themselves within the other two discourses, that of the child and their home and the structural discourse. It was from the ideas of those who were positioned with the agentic, relationships discourse that an Effective Teaching Profile was developed (see Table 3). The Effective Teaching Profile (ETP) was constructed from reflecting upon the numerous conversations we had with the students, their whƗnau, their principals and their teachers when we were constructing the narratives of experience (Bishop & Berryman, 2006). These narratives are the heart of the project and are central to the professional development part of Te Kotahitanga, which seeks to assist teachers to implement the ETP in their classrooms so as to improve MƗori students’ achievement. The narratives are used to allow teachers to critically reflect upon and match their own understandings about how MƗori students see the world and experience 63

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Table 3. Te Kotahitanga effective teaching profile (Bishop, et al., 2003) Effective teachers of MƗori students create a culturally appropriate and responsive context for learning in their classroom. In doing so they demonstrate the following understandings: a)

they positively and vehemently reject deficit theorising as a means of explaining MƗori students’ educational achievement levels (and professional development projects need to ensure that this happens); and b) teachers know and understand how to bring about change in MƗori students’ educational achievement and are professionally committed to doing so (and professional development projects need to ensure that this happens); In the following observable ways: 1)

2)

3)

4)

5)

6)

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Manaakitanga: They care for the students as culturally-located human beings above all else. (Mana refers to authority and Ɨaki, the task of urging some one to act. It refers to the task of building and nurturing a supportive and loving environment). Mana motuhake: They care for the performance of their students. (In modern times mana has taken on various meanings such as legitimation and authority and can also relate to an individual’s or a group’s ability to participate at the local and global level. Mana motuhake involves the development of personal or group identity and independence). Whakapiringatanga: They are able to create a secure, well-managed learning environment by incorporating routine pedagogical knowledge with pedagogical imagination. (NgƗ tnjranga takitahi me ngƗ mana whakahaere: involves specific individual roles and responsibilities that are required in order to achieve individual and group outcomes). WƗnanga: They are able to engage in effective teaching interactions with MƗori students as MƗori. (As well as being known as MƗori centres of learning wƗnanga as a learning forum involves a rich and dynamic sharing of knowledge. With this exchange of views ideas are given life and spirit through dialogue, debate and careful consideration in order to reshape and accommodate new knowledge). Ako: They can use strategies that promote effective teaching interactions and relationships with their learners. (Ako means to learn as well as to teach. It is both the acquisition of knowledge and the processing and imparting of knowledge. More importantly ako is a teaching-learning practice that is culturally specific and appropriate to MƗori pedagogy). Kotahitanga: They promote, monitor and reflect on outcomes that in turn lead to improvements in educational achievement for MƗori students. (Kotahitanga is a collaborative response towards a commonly held vision, goal or other such purpose or outcome).

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schooling with how MƗori students themselves experience schooling. This reflection is a necessary part of the consideration by teachers of the part they play in their students’ learning. The ability of students to articulate their experiences clearly and in detail formed the basis of this profile, as the students told us about the types of relationships and interactions between themselves and their teachers that both hindered their educational achievement and also promoted their advancement. The Effective Teaching Profile is made up of two parts. The first identifies two major understandings that effective teachers possess, the second part identifies six relationships and interactions that can be seen in effective teachers’ classrooms on a daily basis. It is clear that our actions as teachers, parents or whoever we are at that particular time are driven by the mental images or understandings that we have of other people. To put it simply, if we think that other people have deficiencies, then our actions will tend to follow this thinking, and the relations we develop and the interactions we have with these people will tend to be negative and unproductive. That is, despite our being well-meaning, with the best intentions in the world, if students with whom we are interacting as teachers are led to believe that we think they are deficient, they will respond to this negatively. We were told time and again by many of the interview participants that negative, deficit thinking on the part of teachers was fundamental to the development of negative relations and interactions between the students and their teachers, resulting in frustration and anger for all concerned. The students, their whƗnau, the principals and the teachers gave us numerous examples of both negative aspects of such thinking, the resultant behaviours and the consequences for students and teachers. Both groups spoke of how negative relations affected them. The teachers spoke of their frustration and anger; the students spoke about negative relations being an assault on their very identity as MƗori people. They told us of their aspirations to participate in learning, and with what the school had to offer, but they spoke in terms of these actions being an all-out assault on their identity, on who they were, on their very basic need to be accepted and acceptable which precluded them from being able to participate in what the school had to offer. We also learnt that positive classroom relationships and interactions were built upon positive, non-deficit thinking by teachers about students and their families that saw the students as having loads of experiences that were relevant to the classroom interactions. This agentic thinking by teachers means that they see themselves as being able to solve problems that come their way, they have recourse to skills and knowledge that can help all of their students and that all of their students can achieve, no matter what. We learnt that this positive thinking was fundamental to the creation of learning contexts in classrooms where young MƗori people are able to be themselves as MƗori; where MƗori students’ humour was acceptable, where students could care for and learn with each other, where being different was acceptable and where the power of MƗori students own self-determination was fundamental to classroom relations and interactions. Indeed, it was the interdependence of self-determining participants in the classroom that created vibrant learning contexts which were in turn characterized by quality learning relations and interactions. 65

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The teachers who were already running effective classrooms along the lines described in the Effective Teaching Profile told us about the importance of their not seeing MƗori students in deficit terms and of their knowing in themselves that they could make a difference for all of their students. Indeed, these teachers were able to give us numerous examples of strategies they used to create effective learning relationships and interactions in their classrooms. These teachers were very clear that their ability to teach and interact effectively with MƗori students in their classrooms was closely tied to their having positive, non-judgmental relationships with MƗori students, seeing MƗori students as being self-determining, culturally located individuals and seeing themselves as being an inextricable part of the learning conversations; but not as the only speaker, but as one of the participants. The principals spoke of the importance of relationships that were built on trust and respect which in turn lead to positive learning outcomes. The whƗnau members were also convinced of the value of positive relationships based upon teachers respecting who the students were as MƗori rather then what problems they presented. Above all, the students were very clear that teachers who saw them as having deficiencies were not able to develop positive learning relationships with them, but those of their teachers who saw them in positive terms were wonderful to be with and learn with. Many students spoke of how they reacted strongly when confronted with what they saw as unfair treatment; for example, unfair punishments. Some spoke of them retreating into themselves, into drugs, and/or using selective absenteeism as a means of escaping from untenable relationships in some particular classrooms. However, one group in particular told us how they reacted and ‘fought back’ signaling to us that they were striving for their own self-determination within the situation they saw as being manifestly unfair. In many ways, it is a sad irony for MƗori people living in modern New Zealand that MƗori haka is used in international sports clashes to signal defiance and self-determination, whereas when MƗori students display their aspirations for self-determination in a defiant manner at school, they are punished rather than understood. We now turn to the actions that effective teachers demonstrate on a daily basis in their classrooms. In this section we describe each of the actions as drawn from a detailed consideration of the narratives, and then describe how our kuia whakaruruhau explained these actions in terms of MƗori understandings. MANAAKITANGA

The students and their whƗnau members spoke in detail about the importance of teachers caring for the children as MƗori. Indeed, they spoke about this as often as they spoke about their aspirations for the students to achieve at school. Many MƗori leaders have echoed these aspirations and asked what if we gain good achievement levels but we lose who we are as a people. That is, what was clear from the stories was the aspirations of MƗori people, old and young, for educational relationships and interactions that respected their aspirations for self-determination; for them to be able to be themselves, to be different, but to be part of the conversation that is learning, and to participate in the benefits that education has to offer. The people 66

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we spoke to emphasized the importance of teachers demonstrating on a daily basis that they cared for MƗori students as MƗori, as being culturally located; that is, as having cultural understandings and experiences that are different that other people in the classroom. They emphasized that MƗori people see, understand and interact with the world in different ways, and it is important that teachers are able to create learning relations and interactions where this is fundamental. Our kuia whakaruruhau termed this phenomenon, Manaakitanga, where mana refers to authority and Ɨaki, the task of urging some one to act. This concept refers to the task of building and nurturing a supportive and loving environment by teachers for MƗori and all students where students can be themselves. MANA MOTUHAKE

The students spoke at length about the low expectations that many of their teachers had of them and how their performance in class changed when their teachers signalled that they had high expectations of them. Time and again, the students emphasized that teachers get what they expect from their MƗori students. Our kuia explained that in modern times, mana has taken on various meanings such as legitimation and authority and can also relate to an individual’s or a group’s ability to participate at the local and global level. Mana motuhake involves the development of personal or group identity and independence which means teachers caring for the performance of their students. NGA WHAKAPIRINGATANGA

The students did not appreciate chaotic classrooms any more than did their teachers. They also knew when lessons were not prepared and when they were not at the centre of the teacher’s attention, but more of an irritant to be coped with until a more acceptable and probably senior class came along. The effective teachers and the students spoke of the strong desire for and necessity of boundaries, rules and organizations that are fundamental to effective learning. This includes teachers knowing their curriculum area and being able to use the curriculum flexibly so as to respond to the learning conversations being developed in the classroom. Our kuia saw this action in terms of NgƗ Whakapiringatanga: which involves the careful organization of specific individual roles and responsibilities required in order to achieve individual and group outcomes. This concept has at least two major implications for classroom management: that teachers are able to create a secure, well-managed learning environment by incorporating routine pedagogical knowledge with pedagogical imagination; teachers need to be able to organise classrooms so that all the individuals involved are able to contribute to their own learning and to support the learning of others. WANANGA

The students spoke time and again about the problems that traditional approaches to teaching posed for their learning. They could just not cope with the teacher writing 67

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notes endlessly on the board, or talking at them for long periods of time. They could not learn from this style of teaching whereas, when they were able to discuss things with their mates, and interact with the teacher in smaller than classroom sized settings, they felt much more able to learn. They also wanted feedback on their attempts at learning, and indications as to what they could do in terms of what they had attempted to do so far. Others spoke to us about the fact that they had good ideas and would like opportunities to share these with teachers and their peers in ways that would help them have a say in the direction of lessons and their learning. Our kuia identified that as WƗnanga. As well as being known as MƗori centres of learning wƗnanga as a learning forum involves a rich and dynamic sharing of knowledge. With this exchange of views ideas are given life and spirit through dialogue, debate and careful consideration in order to reshape and accommodate new knowledge. This means that teachers are able to engage in effective teaching interactions with MƗori students as MƗori. AKO

Many of the people we spoke to talked about the problems posed for students’ learning by teachers using a limited range of strategies, especially those that precluded interaction and discussion. Our kuia spoke of this aspiration as the desire to implement the MƗori understanding of Ako which means to learn as well as to teach. It is both the acquisition of knowledge and the processing and imparting of knowledge. More importantly ako is a teaching-learning practice that involves teachers and students learning in interactive, dialogic relationships where teachers can use strategies that promote effective teaching interactions and relationships with their learners. KOTAHITANGA

Students spoke about their desire to know how well they were learning and their desire to be let in on the secret that is learning in such a way that they can monitor their own progress, and the teachers spoke about how student progress could inform and allow them to reform their practice. Our Kuia understood this in terms of kotahitanga, which is a collaborative response towards a commonly held vision, goal or other such purpose or outcome, meaning that teachers and students can separately and collaboratively promote, monitor and reflect on outcomes that in turn leads to improvements in educational achievement for MƗori students. This profile represents an operationalisation of MƗori aspirations for education as identified in the first part of this chapter and attempts to illustrate just what a Culturally Responsive Pedagogy of Relations might look like in practice. The notion of developing a culturally appropriate and responsive context for learning grew out of international literature on this topic (Gay, 2000; Villegas & Lucas, 2002) and is based on the notion of culture that is fundamental to this project. Culture is what holds a community together, giving a common framework of meaning. It includes how people communicate with each other, how we make decisions, how we structure our families and who we think is important. 68

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It expresses our values towards land and time and our attitudes towards work and play, good and evil, reward and punishment. Culture is preserved in language, symbols and customs and celebrated in art, music, drama, literature, religion and social gatherings. It constitutes the collective memory of the people and the collective heritage which will be handed down to future generations. Quest Rapuara (1992, p. 7) In this way, culture is seen in terms of both its visible and invisible elements. The visible are the signs, images and iconography that are immediately recognizable as representing that culture and that theoretically create an appropriate context for learning. The invisible are the values, morals, modes of communication and decision making and problem-solving processes along with the world views and knowledge producing processes that assists individuals and groups with meaning and sensemaking. Hence the notion that the creation of learning contexts needs to allow for the existence of both visible and invisible elements. Fundamental to this profile is the creation of a culturally responsive context for learning where teachers understand the need to explicitly reject deficit theorising as a means of explaining MƗori students’ educational achievement levels, and where they take an agentic position in their theorising about their practice. That is, where they see themselves as being able to express their professional commitment and responsibility to bringing about change in MƗori students’ educational achievement and accept professional responsibility for the learning of their students. This notion of agentic positioning addresses what Covey (2004) terms response ability, that is teachers understanding the power they have to respond to who the students are and to what they bring to the classroom; often the invisible elements of culture. In short, the realization that learning comes about through changing the learning relations and interactions in classrooms, not just changing one of the parties involved, be they the students or the teachers. These two central understandings are observable in these teachers’ classrooms on a daily basis and are here again expressed and understood in terms of MƗori metaphor such as Manaakitanga, Mana Motuhake, Whakapiringatanga, WƗnanga, Ako and Kotahitanga. In practice these mean that teachers: care for and acknowledge the mana of the students as culturally located individuals; have high expectations of the learning for students; are able to manage their classrooms so as to promote learning (which includes subject expertise); reduce their reliance upon transmission modes of education so as to engage in a range of discursive learning interactions with students or enable students to engage with others in these ways; know a range of strategies that can facilitate learning interactively; promote, monitor and reflect on learning outcomes that in turn lead to improvements in MƗori student achievement and sharing this knowledge with the students so that they are let into the secret of what constitutes learning. This profile, constructed from MƗori students’ suggestions as to how to improve education for themselves and their peers, and supported by the reported experiences of their whƗnau, their principals and some of their teachers matches the principles identified from the pattern of MƗori metaphor earlier of this chapter. At centre stage is 69

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the necessity for a common Kaupapa or philosophy that rejects deficit thinking and pathologising practices as a means of explaining MƗori students’ educational achievement. In concert is the underlying aspiration for rangatiratanga that promotes the agency of teachers to voice their professional commitment, willingness to engage in whƗnau relations, and interactions and reciprocal practices that are fundamental to addressing and promoting educational achievement for MƗori students. The ways suggested for attaining success draws on MƗori cultural aspirations in the way that the interview participants identified; the need for caring as manaakitanga, for teachers demonstrating their high expectations and the creation of secure, well-managed learning settings again in terms of the mana of the students. The preferred discursive teaching interactions, strategies and the focus on formative assessment processes that are identified in the narratives also resonates with MƗori cultural aspirations, above all the creation of whƗnau type relations and interactions within classrooms and between teachers, students and their homes. Reciprocal approaches to learning, through cooperative learning strategies for example, in concert with the underlying aspiration for relative autonomy, underlies that desire to improve the educational achievement of MƗori students in New Zealand through operationalising MƗori people’s cultural aspirations for self-determination within non-dominating relations of interdependence. PART C: CONCLUSIONS

In this chapter an indigenous model of classroom relations and interactions is presented both theoretically in the Part A and in practice in Part B. Methodologically, this model was developed from a theoretical examination of MƗori people’s resistance to neo-colonial hegemonies and also from their aspirations for and actualization of a pro-active, culturally-constituted educational intervention in the educational crisis facing MƗori people in Aotearoa/New Zealand today. This analysis took the form of an examination of what the metaphor fundamental to Kaupapa MƗori generated educational institutions and Kaupapa MƗori research might mean for mainstream educational institutions. These latter institutions, which attempt to provide an education for the vast majority of MƗori students, are dominated by metaphors based in the dominant culture such as hierachical notions of self-determination and are sites of struggle for MƗori people, culture and language. The model suggests that mainsteam classrooms that are constituted as places where power is shared between selfdetermining individuals within non-dominating relations of interdependence, where culture counts, learning is interactive, dialogic and spirals, participants are connected and committed to one another and where there is a common vision of excellence, will offer MƗori students educational opportunities currently being denied to them. Methodologically, putting this model into practice involved a variety of approaches. The first involved the use of collaborative storying (Bishop, 1996, 2005) as a means of developing a series of narratives of experience. This approach seeks to address MƗori peoples concerns about researcher imposition by focusing on the collaborative coconstruction of the meaning that the participants ascribe to their reported experiences. As a result, the authorising of student experiences and the meanings they constructed 70

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from these experiences is conducted in ways that addresses the power of determination over issues such as who initiates research interactions; who determines what benefits there will be; who will benefit; whose reality or experiences (voice) are present in the narratives; with what authority do research participants speak; and to whom are researchers accountable? (Bishop, 1996; Bishop, 2005). The narratives were then used in the project in five main ways. Firstly they were used to identify a variety of discursive positions pertaining to MƗori student achievement and the potential impact of these positions on MƗori student learning. Secondly, the narratives were used to give voice to the participants (students, parents, principals, and teachers) in a manner that addressed issues of classroom power relations pertaining to issues of initiation, benefits, representation, legitimation and accountability. Thirdly, the narratives were used to critique current theories of practice. Fourthly, the narratives were used in the professional development phase of the project to provide teachers with a vicarious means of understanding how students experienced schooling in ways that they might not otherwise have access to. This experience provided teachers with a means of critically reflecting upon their own discursive positioning and the impact this might have upon their own students’ learning. Fifthly, the narratives provided us with a practical representation of the theoretical model that was identified in the first part of this chapter that when implemented in mainstream classrooms has simultaneously resulted in changes in MƗori students’ attendance, engagement, retention and achievement. Operationalising a culturally responsive pedagogy of relations means implementing the Effective Teaching Profile. Such a profile creates a learning context that is responsive to the culture of the child and means that learners can bring who they are to the classroom in complete safety and where their knowledges are acceptable and legitimate is central to this exercise. Such a context for learning stands in contrast to the traditional classroom where the culture of the teacher is given central focus and has the power to define what constitutes appropriate and acceptable knowledges, approaches to learning and understandings, and sense-making processes. This model suggests that when the learner’s own culture is central to their learning activities, they are able to make meaning of new information and ideas by building on their own prior cultural experiences and understandings. The visible culture of the child need not necessarily be present but may well become present as a result of coconstructing learning experiences with their teachers; in this way addressing the potential imposition of the teacher displaying cultural iconography. Such contexts for learning also teach learners how to critically reflect on their own learning, how they might learn better and more effectively and ensure greater balance in the power relationship of learning by modelling this approach in class. In effect therefore, raising expectations of students’ own learning and how they might enhance and achieve these expectations engages students actively, holistically and in an integrated fashion, in real-life (or as close to) problem-sharing and questioning and use these questions as catalysts for on-going study; this engagement can be monitored as an indicator of potential long-term achievement. This shift from traditional classrooms is important because traditional classroom interaction patterns do not allow teachers to create learning contexts where the culture of the child can be present, but rather assume 71

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cultural homogeneity (Villegas & Lucas, 2002), which in reality is cultural hegemony (Gay, 2000). Discursive classrooms have the potential to respond to MƗori students and parents desires to “be MƗori”; desires that were made very clear in their narratives of experience. However it must be stressed that fundamental to the development of discursive classrooms that include MƗori students, is the understanding that the deficit theorising by teachers must be challenged. Deficit theorising will not be addressed unless there are more effective partnerships between MƗori students and their teachers within the classrooms of mainstream schools. This understanding applies equally to those parenting MƗori students. Once these aspects are addressed, the culture of the child can be brought to the learning context with all the power that has been hidden for so long. The metaphors that Te Kotahitanga draws upon are holistic and flexible and able to be determined by or understood within the cultural contexts that have meaning to the lives of the many young people of diverse backgrounds who attend modern schools today. Teaching and learning strategies which flow from these metaphors are flexible and allow the diverse voices of young people primacy and promote dialogue, communication and learning with others. In such a pedagogy, the participants in the learning interaction become involved in the process of collaboration, in the process of mutual story-telling and re-storying, so that a relationship can emerge in which both stories are heard, or indeed a process where a new story is created by all the participants. Such a pedagogy addresses MƗori people’s concerns about current pedagogic practices being fundamentally monocultural and epistemologically racist. This new pedagogy recognises that all people who are involved in the learning and teaching process are participants who have meaningful experiences, valid concerns and legitimate questions. This model constitutes the classroom as a place where young people’s sensemaking processes are incorporated and enhanced, where the existing knowledges of young people are seen as ‘acceptable’ and ‘official’, in such a way that their stories provide the learning base from whence they can branch out into new fields of knowledge through structured interactions with significant others. In this process the teacher interacts with students in such a way (storying and re-storying) that new knowledge is co-created. Such a classroom will generate totally different interaction patterns and educational outcomes from a classroom where knowledge is seen as something that the teacher makes sense of and then passes onto students and will be conducted within and through a culturally responsive pedagogy of relations, wherein self-determining individuals interact with one another within non-dominating relations of interdependence. Te Kotahitanga began in 2001 in a small way, and now in 2010, as we move into our seventh year in 12 secondary schools, fourth year with 21 and first year with 17 secondary schools, we are seeing significant improvements in MƗori student engagement with learning and achievement along with major improvements in their enjoyment of the learning experience. Such an approach to creating learning contexts of course is not without its detractors, coming as it does from a once dominated and marginalized culture. Nevertheless, one of the main messages and challenges here for mainstream educators is as Freire, (1972) identified, that the answers to 72

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MƗori educational achievement and disparities do not lie in the mainstream, for given the experiences of the last 150 years, mainstream practices and theories have kept MƗori in a subordinate position, while at the same time creating a discourse that pathologised and marginalised MƗori peoples’ lived experiences. The counter-narrative that is Kaupapa MƗori demonstrates that the means of addressing the seemingly immutable educational disparities that plague MƗori students in mainstream schools actually lies elsewhere than in mainstream education. The answers lie in the sense making and knowledge generating processes of the culture the dominant system has sought to marginalize for so long. The power of counter-narratives such as Kaupapa MƗori, which has grown out of MƗori resistance to the dominance of majority culture aspirations on our lives (G. Smith, 1997; L. Smith, 1999; Bishop, 1996), is such that alternative pedagogies that are both appropriate and responsive, can be developed out of the cultural sensemaking processes of peoples previously marginalised by the dominance of colonial and neo-colonial educational relations of power. Such pedagogies can create learning contexts for previously pathologised and marginalised students in ways that allow them to participate in education on their terms, to be themselves and to achieve on their own terms as MƗori as well as becoming, in Durie’s (2002) terms, “citizens of the world”. NOTES 1

This chapter is reproduced with permission from Bishop, R. (2008). Te Kotahitanga: Kaupapa MƗori in mainstream classrooms. In Norman K. Denzin, Yvonna S. Lincoln, Linda Tuhiwai Smith (Eds.) Handbook of Critical and Indigenous Methodologies. Sage Publications Ltd, pp. 439–458.

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FREEING SCHOOLS AND EDUCATION SYSTEMS FROM NEO-COLONIAL DOMINANCE1

Ultimately, the only way to reconfigure the schooling process so that it works for both MƗori and PƗkehƗ students is to reconfigure schooling around MƗori ways of knowing, using a focus on MƗori student achievement as the touchstone for evaluating changes to the processes and systems of education. What will emerge from a sustained focus on reconstructing classroom processes for MƗori student achievement will be schooling that works better for both MƗori and PƗkehƗ students (Sleeter, 2005, p. 6). As was described in the previous chapter, developing an effective education reform that focuses on reducing disparities is a necessary condition for addressing what appear to be historical, ongoing and seemingly immutable disparities. However, it is not sufficient for reducing disparities across the nation. What is needed is to take the reform to scale, for scaling up educational reform has the potential to have a major impact on the disparities that exist in society because it is only by deepening and expanding the benefits of effective programmes that the status quo will change. This is not to say that educational reform on its own can address the many problems that confront minoritised students and their families, however, it is clear that educational reform can play a major part in a comprehensive approach to addressing social, economic and political disparities. This chapter develops a model for freeing up education systems from neocolonial dominance by scaling up effective indigenous/minoritised-based education reform. This model not only addresses the need to expand enclaves of successful reform to more schools and classrooms, but also addresses the qualitative complexity that lies beneath reform efforts in ways that sustain “change in a multi-level system characterised by multiple and shifting priorities” (Coburn, 2003, p. 3). This model addresses the conditions that are necessary for extending and sustaining educational reform by considering what McLaughlin and Mitra (2001) term “theory or principlebased educational reforms” or what Freire would consider to be methodological, in the sense of this meaning a theory of method, or philosophical reforms rather than the reform being reduced to a prescriptive method. Such reforms focus on improving student outcomes by creating a professional learning context in which teachers acquire an in-depth understanding of the underlying theoretical principles of the reform so that they can use their learning flexibly in their classrooms when new situations and challenges arise. Such reforms are initiated and designed outside of schools and focus on the need to reform educational practice at a number of levels - the

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classroom, the school and the education system as a whole - in order to improve student outcomes. Scaling up theory- or principle-based reforms requires that all of those currently involved deepen their understanding of their practices in response to changing circumstances within existing reform sites, as well as broadening the reach of the reform to these teachers’ other classrooms, to other teachers’ classrooms within the initial and new schools, and to policy makers at the national level. As Glennan, Bodilly, Galegher and Kerr (2004) observe, from their detailed meta-analysis of attempts to scale up a number of large-scale, theory-based educational reforms in the United States, scaling up an educational reform is no longer thought of in terms of a oneway replication model that simply seeks to increase the number of sites involved in the reform. Rather, scaling up is seen as a “non-sequential process of interaction, feedback, and adaptation among groups of actorsʊteachers, providers, schools, and district and state administrators” (p. 27). In other words, reform participants are not acted upon but are active participants in an iterative process. Successful scale up of educational reform requires of active participants that they not only change core instructional practices from those currently dominant in the schools, but also provide infrastructural and organisational support at a variety of levelsʊwithin the schools and beyond, and within the system itself. This may extend to changing “policies governing standards, assessments and accountability; the supporting infrastructure, including incentives for teachers and other actors; funding and resource allocations patterns; and networking arrangements” (ibid.). Issues of extending and sustaining educational reforms are not mutually exclusive: they are two sides of the same coin. Extending education reform means broadening the reform to other sites, be they classrooms, schools or districts/regions. By sustainability we follow the understandings of McLaughlin and Mitra (2001), Coburn (2003), Elmore (1996) and Timperley, Wilson, Barrar and Fung (2007), who stress that sustainability means more than simply maintaining the practices of the reform over time, or even continuing the level of implementation achieved when the reform design team leave the school. Rather, by sustainability we mean the provision of a means whereby the reform is able to be deepened and extended by teachers, school leaders and policy makers in response to a changing student curriculum, and context, over time and circumstance. Following McLaughlin and Mitra (2001), Elmore (1996) and Coburn (2003), we emphasise that issues of extension and sustainability are addressed by the same means, and that these means need to exist from the very inception of the reform and be built into the design and implementation of the reform from its very outset. In other words, “issues of invention, implementation, sustainability, and scale occur simultaneously when going deeper and broader with theory-based change” (McLaughlin & Mitra, 2001, p. 301). Sarason (1996) warns that, despite the initial success of a reform, reforms tend to founder once external support and funding are withdrawn, personnel and policies shift, and competition for internal resources grows. Theory-based reforms are designed to counter this tendency in that, while they are generally large scale, they have a motivating theoretical base which establishes core principles or norms of practice 76

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that define the change in terms of the theoretical foundations of classroom practice. This flexibility allows the reform to be appropriate to and owned by practitioners in a wide range of settings and circumstances. Indeed, what is crucial is that the local participants be able to adapt and modify their actual activities in line with the reform’s principles to make the reform relevant to their own setting. As Coburn (2003) notes, to deepen and extend the reform, schools, teachers and students need to be able to take ownership of the reform in order to maintain the focus in the face of competing interests and agendas. Along with Freire (1970) and Fullan (1993), we acknowledge that too many educational reform initiatives have been top down, drawing on expert theories of change while ignoring the necessary involvement and ownership by those on the ground. Although theory-based reforms are usually externally generated, they are given practical form in school settings, often requiring “significant teacher learning and contextualization if they are to change teaching and learning in significant, sustained ways” (McLaughlin & Mitra, 2001, p. 302). In short, theory-based reforms are externally generated, contain core principles, and allow for “co-invention and flexible implementation in practice” (p. 302). Such an approach is vital, for, as Elmore (1996) notes, “innovations that require large changes in the core of educational practice seldom penetrate more than a small fraction of US schools and classrooms and seldom last for very long when they do” (p. 1). By the core of education, Elmore means: how teachers understand the nature of knowledge and the student’s role in learning, and how these ideas about knowledge and learning are manifested in teaching and classwork. The ‘core’ also includes structural arrangements of schools, such as the physical layout of classrooms, student grouping practices, teacher responsibilities for groups of students, and relations among teachers in their work with students, as well as processes for assessing student learning and communicating it to students, teachers, parents, administrators, and other interested parties (p. 1). This model suggests that educational reform needs to occur at three levels: the classroom, the school and the system, be it district or at the national level. As Datnow and Stringfield (2000), Fullan (2007) and Glennan et al., (2004) all stress, it is the interdependence of the actors at all the levels of the education system that is crucial for sustaining and expanding educational reform. Such an approach is necessary, for although we understand clearly that teachers in classrooms are the engine room of educational reform, as Elmore (2004) suggests, the key to change is teacher action supported by responsive structural reform. Or, as Glennan et al., (2004) observe, “new teaching methods are doomed to fade if not supported by school- and district-wide policies and infrastructure” (p. 29). This chapter now considers what “responsive structural reform” looks like in practice and how to implement this at the school and system-wide levels. Based on our experiences of working within a large educational reform project with 50 secondary schools, their teachers, leaders and communities (some for over six years), and with reference to the literature in this field, a model for sustaining and extending theorybased educational reform is presented. 77

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PART A: TOWARDS A MODEL FOR SCALABILITY

A significant stepping-off point in this search was the large meta-analysis conducted by Cynthia Coburn (2003). Significantly, for our purposes, she noted that few studies consider these issues of scalability: only 18 of 44 projects she studied focused on efforts to scale up reform initiatives, and these “involved investigations of schools that had been involved in the reform for 4 or more years” (p. 6). Most of the studies she reviewed were of schools in their first few years of implementing a new, externally generated reform. Of particular significance to us was her concern that only one of the 44 projects she found looked at schools involved in reforms for which “an implementation period with additional resources and attention had officially ended” (p. 6). Couple these concerns with the title of Sarason’s (1990) book, The Predictable Failure of Educational Reform, the incentive to develop a model that would ensure the gains made by the Phase 3 schools in raising MƗori students’ achievement were not just a flash in the pan became very strong. Therefore, a major question that is not well addressed in the literature concerns how schools that have successfully initiated an educational reform sustain this reform in the face of the withdrawal of, or change in, external funding and personnel, competing priorities for resources, changing demands on schools, and teacher and leadership turnover. This in turn leads to the larger question of how sustainable reforms might be taken beyond those in the initial project. Coburn (2003) suggests that externally funded reforms are particularly vulnerable to this problem “because implementation typically involves a short-term influx of resources, professional development, and other forms of assistance to facilitate implementation that dissipates over time as external developers turn this attention to other sites” (p. 6). Yet Timperley et al., (2007) argue that external developers are a crucial ingredient in the successful development and implementation of effective professional development and the provision of professional learning opportunities for teachers. Coburn (2003) provides a model in her paper, and this model proved to be a useful starting heuristic for considering how to take a project to scale in a large number of classrooms in project schools, how to sustain the gains made in these classrooms and schools, and how to take the project to other schools once it had proven to be successful in the initial schools. Coburn indicates four main components: pedagogy; sustainability (essentially meaning institutionalisation); spread; and ownership. However, in light of our experiences in Te Kotahitanga and the relevant literature, we have developed this model by adding three more components: the need for an unrelenting focus on improving MƗori (or any target) students’ educational achievement; the need for leadership that is proactive, responsive and distributed; the need to develop further evaluation and monitoring instruments, along with the need to raise the capacity and capability of staff in the schools to undertake this evaluation and monitoring. The following model (Figure 1) was developed in a study funded by NgƗ Pae o te MƗramatanga, and the first part of the results was initially published as a monograph (Bishop & O’Sullivan, 2005). Earlier we looked at the GEPRISP/PSIRPEG mnemonic used for the implementation and evaluation process of the professional development process. The theoretical 78

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model in Bishop and O’Sullivan (2005) uses GPILSEO as a mnemonic device for the essential elements of a reform initiative. This model suggests that in order to ensure the reform initiative will be sustainable and scalable, the following elements (shown in Table 1) should be present in the reform initiative from the very outset. Each element includes a clear focus.

Figure 2. GPILSEO: A reform initiative must have these elements from its inception. Source: Bishop & O’Sullivan, 2005, p. 69. Table 4. GPILSEO: elements and foci GOALS: establishing goals and a vision for reducing disparities through improving targeted students’ educational achievement in its widest sense PEDAGOGY: embedding a new pedagogy to depth in order to change the core of educational practice INSTITUTIONS: developing new institutions and organisational structures to support in-class initiatives LEADERSHIP: developing leadership that is responsive, pro-active and distributed SPREAD: spreading the reform to include all teachers, parents, community members and external agencies EVIDENCE: developing and using appropriate tools and measures of performance to provide evidence to monitor the progress of targeted students and the reform in the school/s as a means of modifying core classroom and school practices OWNERSHIP: creating opportunities for all involved to take ownership of the reform in such a way that the original objectives of the reform are protected and sustained (Source: Bishop & O’Sullivan, 2005) 79

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It is important to emphasise that although each element is presented as if it should be implemented in an orderly, linear fashion, this is not how it works in reality. Rather, each element is interdependent and interacts with the others in a variety of ways and in a variety of settings. How this might look is shown in Table 2, again as an ideal type, which in practice would be far more complex in terms or interrelatedness and outcomes. Table 5. GPILSEO: Details of each element Establishing GOALs and a vision for improving targeted student participation and achievement

The reform must contain a means whereby individual teachers, schools and policy makers can set specific, measurable goals for improving student participation and achievement in their widest sense. Targeted student achievement must be the focus of the reform, because nonspecific education-forall approaches simply maintain the status quo: while all students may increase their achievement, the disparities remain.

Developing a new PEDAGOGY to depth

The reform must contain a means of embedding the conceptual depth of the reform into the theorising and practice of the classroom teachers, school leaders, principals and national administrators. Coburn (2003) suggests that teachers and schools that have a deep understanding of the underlying theories and principles and can implement appropriate practices are better able to respond to the new demands and changing contexts in ways that will sustain and deepen the reform over time. Reform without depth of understanding will trivialise the initiative, and teachers and schools will revert to old explanations and practices in a short time. From their detailed synthesis of best evidence regarding what constitutes effective professional development and learning for teachers, Timperley et al., (2007) also found that sustainability appears to depend on whether teachers acquire an in-depth understanding of the underlying theoretical principles so that they can use their learning flexibly in their classrooms when new situations and challenges arise. Such understanding is relevant to all levels of the education system.

INSTITUTIONALISING the elements of the reform

Connections to and collaboration with other teachers, including teachers in other schools engaged in similar reform, is essential, and the institutionalisation of a means to ensure this happens in a systematic manner is an essential element of sustaining change. Such institutionalisations need to be prioritised so that they are

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Table 5. (Continued) seen to be supportive of the efforts of teachers and are aligned withʊand indeed can informʊnational policies. Similarly, structural and organisational arrangements need to be modified to accommodate new institutions and staffing (re)allocations. Developing proactive, responsive and distributed LEADERSHIP

Proactive, responsive and distributed leadership is essential for the sustainability of a reform in a school. Leaders at all levelsʊclassroom, school and systemʊneed a sound understanding of the theoretical foundations of the reform and of what that theoretical basis means for classroom practice, school structure and culture, and national policies. Above all, leadership activities need to focus on and accept responsibility for student learning outcomes.

SPREADING the reform

The reform needs to contain, from its very inception, a means of spreading the reform within existing teachers’ classrooms, and from there to teachers in other schools, and to community and national policy makers. This element is necessary to align the new norms of the reform within the school, within the norms of supporting institutions, and within communities associated with the school to ensure sustainability. Extending the reform to other sites is based on implementing the same flexible, responsive reform in new partnerships.

Using EVIDENCE to engage in individual and collaborative problem solving and decision making

The reform needs, from the very outset, a means of engaging teachers in individual and collaborative evidence-based problem-solving activities. Evidence can range from narratives of students’ experience, through to the results of normreferenced standardised tests. Whatever the case, it is vital that the capacity of the staff is raised so that they can gather and use appropriate evidence of student performance. As the reform grows and develops in each school, systemic and institutional developments are necessary to support the changes taking place in the classroom. An area that needs to be developed is that of accurately measuring student attendance data, stand-downs, suspensions, early-leaving exemptions, retention rates and achievement data. This has two purposes: to allow teachers the opportunity to collaboratively reflect on these data to inform ongoing practice; and to use the same data for summative purposes to identify if there is a relationship between the 81

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Table 5. (Continued) implementation of the educational reform in question and positive changes in student participation and achievement. To ensure these objectives are met in the sequence of formative preceding summative purposes, it is important that the project schools are able to undertake the task of data gathering and processing in real time. To do so they will need to continue to develop the use of electronic student management systems so that the schools can use the data for formative purposes in collaborative settings and the data can be aggregated for summative purposes. OWNERSHIP of and authority for the goals of the reform must shift to the school

The last consideration is that ownership of and responsibility for the reform must shift from the external originators to within the school. This is necessary to ensure ongoing changes to the culture of the school are located in the hands of those most responsible for student learning and outcomes. As a result, one of the key considerations of reform is the creation of conditions within the project itself that will ensure that in-depth knowledge of and authority for the project shifts from external actors to teachers, schools and policy makers. This shift in ownership ensures the reforms become self-generative while at the same time maintaining the integrity of the reform so that the aims of the reform are met. The shift also ensures new situations are addressed from an in-depth understanding of the reform’s aims and approaches rather than from past practice. This shift in ownership is crucialʊdespite being the least-reported aspect in the literature on sustainabilityʊ because it is not the reform itself that needs to be preserved but rather the goal; in this case, the long-term, ongoing reduction of educational disparities through the raising of student achievement.

(Source: Bishop, O’Sullivan & Berryman, 2010)

Application of the Model to a Variety of Settings This model can be applied to a variety of levels within educationʊclassroom, school and system-wide (see Table 3 below). It is important to emphasise that although this model presents sustainability and scalability as discrete entities, this is only for the purposes of clarity. In reality, the emphasis is on the interdependence of each of the elements within and between the various levels of the system: the classroom, the schools and the system as a whole. 82

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GPILSEO AT THE CLASSROOM LEVEL

For a reform initiative to bring about sustainable change in classrooms, and which can then be extended to other classrooms, there must from the very outset be: – a focus on improving targeted students’ engagement, participation and achievement in the classroom – a means of implementing a new pedagogy to depth, so that students and teachers can understand and competently implement new practices, and new theories of practice, in their day-to-day classroom relationships and interactions – a means of developing new institutions in the classroom, such as those developed using co-operative learning approaches – a means of developing distributed leadership within the classroom so that students can be initiators of, and take responsibility for, their own learning and support the learning of others – a means whereby the new classroom relationships and interactions will include all students – a means of gathering and examining evidence to monitor the progress of all students to inform changes in instructional practice – above all, teacher and student learning that are central to classroom relations and interactions, and teacher learning that is based on analyses of patterns of student learning. GPILSEO AT THE SCHOOL LEVEL

At a school level there needs to be: – a focus on improving all targeted students’ achievement across the school – a culturally responsive pedagogy of relations developed across all classrooms, which is used to inform relations and interactions at all levels within the school and community – time and space created for the development of new institutions within the school, and structures such as timetables, staffing and organisational structures need to support this reform – leadership that is responsive to the needs of reform, proactive in setting targets and goals, and distributed to allow power sharing – a means whereby all staff can join the reform, and parents and community are included – a means whereby in-school facilitators, researchers and teachers are able to use appropriate instruments to monitor the implementation of the reform to provide data for formative and summative purposes – a means whereby the whole school, including the board of trustees, can take ownership of the reform. Ownership is seen when there has been a culture shift so that teacher learning is central to the school, and when systems, structures and institutions are developed to support teacher learning. In this way, the reform seeks to address both culturalist (the need to change the culture of the school) and structuralist (the need to change power and resource allocations within the classrooms and schools that reflect the wider society) concerns at the school level. 83

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GPILSEO AT THE SYSTEM LEVEL

The third level in Table 3 concerns the need for system-wide reform. At this level there needs to be a national policy focus and resource allocation for those least well served by education systems (Ministry of Education, 2008). This needs to be sufficient to realise the potential of these group members by raising their overall achievement and thereby reducing historical disparities. The reform should provide: – a means whereby in-service professional learning opportunities and professional development for teachers is onsite, ongoing and involves feedback loops, and whereby pre-service teacher education is aligned with in-service professional development so that each supports the other in implementing new culturally responsive pedagogies of relations – the development of supportive policies and infrastructure that provide incentives for teachers and the ability to revisit funding so that, for example, salaries for inschool professional developers are incorporated into schools’ staffing allocations and schooling organisations to provide ongoing, interactive and embedded reform – national-level support and professional development for leaders to promote proactive, responsive and distributed instructional/pedagogical leadership models – collaboration between policy funders, researchers and practitioners in an iterative process of interaction, feedback and adaptation – national-level support for the production of appropriate evidence that will enable collaborative formative problem solving and decision making that is ongoing and interactive, and from which supportive policies for standards, assessments and the mix of accountability and capacity building grow. – national-level support for integrated research and professional development that provides data for formative and summative purposes. – national ownership of the problem and the provision of sufficient funding and resources to see solutions in a defined period of time, in an ongoing, embedded manner. This model therefore encompasses the need to address both culturalist and structuralist positions at the three levels of classroom, school and system by creating a means of changing the classroom, the culture of the school and the education system itself. Cultural change concerns are addressed through goal setting, the development of appropriate pedagogies to depth, and the taking of ownership of the whole reform at each level. Structural concerns are addressed by the development of new institutions, responsive and distributed leadership, the spread of the reform to include all those involved, the development of data management systems within the school to support the reform, and the taking of ownership by the teachers, school and policy makers of both the cultural and structural changes necessary to reform education to address educational disparities, thereby removing the key contributing factors to poverty among MƗori in Aotearoa/New Zealand and other minoritised peoples in other parts of the world. Structural concerns are also addressed at a system-wide level when schools are supported, at a national level, to implement these structural changes.

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Table 6. Sustainability and scalability at classroom, school, and system-wide levels Sustainability / going to scale

Classroom

School

System

Goal

Goals need to focus on reducing disparities by raising targeted students’ achievement in its widest sense

Goals need to focus on improving targeted students’ participation, engagement, and achievement in the classroom

Goals need to focus on improving all targeted students’ achievement across the school

Goals need to focus on developing policies and allocating resources to ensure that those least well served by the system see overall achievement gains, thereby reducing historical disparities

Pedagogy

New pedagogy needs to be embedded in order to change the core of educational practice

A culturally responsive pedagogy of relations needs to be embedded so that students and teachers can understand and competently implement new practices and new theories of practice in their day-to-day classroom relationships and interactions

A new pedagogy of relations needs to be embedded in all classrooms, and needs to inform relations and interactions at all levels in the school and community

In-service professional learning opportunities and professional development for teachers need to be onsite, ongoing and involve feedback loops; and pre-service teacher education needs to be aligned with in-service professional development so that each supports the other in implementing new culturally responsive pedagogies of relations

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Table 6. (Continued) Institutions

New institutions and organisational structures are needed to support in-class initiatives

Developing new ways of relating and interacting in classrooms needs to be systematically organised and institutionalised

Time and space for the development of new institutions within the school need to be allowed; structures such as timetables, staffing and organisational structures need to support the reform

Supportive policies and infrastructure are needed that, for example, provide incentives for teachers, and revisit funding to allow salaries for in-school professional developers to be incorporated into schools’ staffing allocations and organisation

Leadership

Leadership needs to be responsive, proactive and distributed.

A means of developing distributed leadership within the classroom is needed so that students can be initiators of, and take responsibility for, their own learning and support the learning of others

Leadership needs to be responsive to the needs of the reform, proactive in setting targets and goals, and distributed to allow power sharing

National-level support and professional development for leaders is needed to promote proactive, responsive, and distributed instructional/ pedagogical leadership models

Spread

A means of spreading the reform is needed to include all teachers, parents, community members and external agencies

Inclusive classrooms are needed in which new classroom relationships and interactions include and engage all students in learning

All staff need to join the reform, and parents and community also need to be included

Policy funders, researchers, and practitioners need to collaborate in an iterative process of interaction, feedback and adaptation

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Table 6. (Continued) Evidence

A means of developing and using appropriate tools and measures of progress is needed in order to monitor the progress of targeted students towards the goals and the reform in the school/s as a means of modifying core classroom and school practices and policies

Teachers and students need to be able to gather and examine formal and informal formative assessment measures in order to improve their practice and learning through informing changes in instructional practice

In-school facilitators and researchers need to be able to use appropriate instruments to monitor the implementation of the reform in order to provide data for formative and summative purposes

National-level support is needed for the production of appropriate evidence that will enable collaborative formative problem solving and decision making that is ongoing and interactive, and from which supportive policies regarding standards, assessments and the mix of accountability and capacity building grow

Ownership

A means of creating opportunities for all involved to take ownership of the reform is needed, in such a way that the original objectives of the reform are protected and sustained

Ownership is seen when teachers’ and students’ learning needs are central to classroom relations and interactions, and when teachers’ learning needs are based on analyses of patterns of student learning

Ownership is seen when the whole school, including the board of trustees, takes ownership of the reform, when teacher learning is central to school systems and structures, and when institutions are developed to support teacher learning

National ownership of the problem and provision of sufficient funding and resources is needed in order to see solutions within a defined period of time and in an ongoing, embedded manner

(Source: Bishop, et al., 2007, p. 197)

However, Guskey (1995) cautions against searching for the “one right answer” in trying to identify the essential elements of an education reform programme. 87

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Instead, he suggests that we need to establish criteria against which success might be measured; for example, children’s engagement with learning and achievement in association with the reduction of disparities. In this way, Guskey argues that one might avoid “prescriptions of general practices that are described in broad and nebulous terms” (pp. 116–117). Further, prescriptions of general practice risk ignoring contexts, which in turn promotes culturally devoid prescriptions and frameworks within which children provide a multitude of “right answers”. Sustaining a project and taking it to scale, that is, ensuring depth of the transfer of knowledge, spreading the reform and transferring ownership of the project, institutionalising reform components, and developing effective leadership, require, in Guskey’s terms, a minimalising of prescription. The best that can be offered are procedural guidelines that appear to be critical to the professional development process. These guidelines reflect a framework for developing the optimal mix of professional development processes and technologies that will work best in a specific context at a particular point in time (Guskey, p. 118). This chapter therefore presents a series of procedural guidelines based on Figure 2 that can be used when seeking to implement and sustain an education reform programme, when taking such a programme to scale. The guidelines for classroom practice were detailed in Chapter 2. Here, the focus is on what school leaders need to undertake in their schools and what policy makers at the district/national level can do to support reform initiatives. PART B: SCHOOL LEADERSHIP

In many ways, however, the question of how much impact school leaders have on student outcomes is a flawed one, because the answer surely depends on what it is that leaders do. The contribution of leadership research should be to identify the types of leadership that have relatively more or less impact on students, so that they can be emphasised in leadership preparation and development programmes and be better supported by education policies and infrastructure (Robinson, 2007, p. 5). In Chapter 2 of this book, the central importance of changing classroom relationships and interactions to bring about change in student achievement and disparity levels was detailed. However, in this chapter it is argued that such changes on their own are not sufficient to bring about sustainable, school-wide changes. Institutional, organisational, and structural changes are necessary to create contexts in which classroom learning can be responded to, supported, and enhanced so that student achievement can improve and disparities can be reduced. It is leaders who drive these changes. We now turn to the question of “what leaders need to know and do to support teachers in using the pedagogical practices that raise achievement and reduce disparities” (Robinson, Lloyd & Rowe, 2007, p. 2). This focus on leadership is central to the GPILSEO model because, as Leithwood, Seashore Louis, Anderson, and Wahlstrom (2004) concluded from a detailed review of leadership literature, “leadership is second only to classroom instruction among all school-related factors that 88

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contribute to what students learn at school” (p. 7). In terms of the GPILSEO model, effective leadership of sustainable educational reform: 1. establishes and develops specific measurable goals so that progress can be shown, monitored over time, and acted upon 2. supports the development and implementation of new pedagogic relationships and interactions in the classroom 3. changes the institution, its organisation, policies and structures 4. spreads the reform to include staff, parents, community, reform developers, and policy makers so that a new school culture is developed and embedded 5. develops the capacity of people and systems to produce and use evidence of student progress to inform change 6. promotes and ensures that the ownership of the reform shifts to be within the school. Leadership has an Overall Purpose It is important to reiterate that these leadership activities have an overall purpose, which is to directly or indirectly reduce educational disparities through improving student outcomes. Fullan (2003) sees this as having a moral purpose, that is, a social justice focus, which at the school level means: that all students and teachers benefit in terms of identified desirable goals, that the gap between the high and low performers becomes less as the bar for all is raised, that ever-deeper educational goals are pursued, and that the culture of the school becomes so transformed that continuous improvement relative to the previous three components become built in. (p. 31) Elmore (2004) supports this purpose and argues that the primary purpose of educational leadership is the “guidance and direction of instructional [pedagogical] improvement” (p. 13). Robinson, Hohepa and Lloyd, (2009) found, in the empirical part of their best evidence synthesis of leadership studies, that pedagogic or instructional leadership, where there is a “close involvement of leadership in establishing an academic mission, monitoring and providing feedback on teaching and learning and promoting the importance of professional development” (p. 55), has nearly four times the impact on student outcomes as the other commonly promoted form of leadership, transformational. However, they also warn against dismissing the qualities of transformational leadership through creating false dichotomies between these two types of leadership. In effect they are suggesting that leadership needs to exhibit characteristics that encompass the broad rubric of pedagogic or instructional leadership, with its unequivocal focus on improving student outcomes, as well as incorporating those aspects of transformational leadership, and what Shields (2003) terms “transformative leadership”, into the mix of what constitutes effective leadership. In other words, the leadership mix or distribution in schools needs to include instructional leaders’ unequivocal focus on improving student outcomes through the provision of support for teaching and learning, transformational leaders’ concerns with the collective 89

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interests of the group, the “ability to inspire and motivate others and develop group commitment to a common vision” (p. vii), and transformative leaders’ focus on creating the conditions or contexts that release others’ capacity for self-determination in a manner that promotes the establishment of collaborative relationships for attaining the desired end. Robinson et al., (2009) suggest that creating dichotomies in leadership styles can promote the notion that there is a distinction between tasks and relationships; that is, between “leading through progressing tasks and leading through relationships and people” (p. 8). There is also a danger that we talk about there being a sequence of first developing relationships, then developing tasks; in other words, get the relationship right then pursue the common task, the educational challenges, the goalsetting and such like. In contrast, Robinson et al., (2009) argue that “relationship skills are embedded in every dimension” (p. 8). In goal-setting, for example, “effective leadership involves not only determining the goal content (task focus), but doing so in a manner that enables staff to understand and become committed to the goal [relationship focus]” (p. 8). So whether we are focusing at the level of the classroom, school, or system, relationships are part and parcel of everyday activities that seek to improve student outcomes. At the classroom level we learnt from detailed interviews with 350 MƗori students in 2005 and 2006 that the teaching approaches they preferred, and indeed within which they could achieve, was not a matter of teachers being either task or relationship oriented, but both simultaneously (Bishop et al., 2007). These MƗori students clearly understood that when both were happening at the same time they were able to engage effectively with learning and see their achievement levels improve. They were able to describe a range of scenarios. The first was when a teacher was task oriented but did not clearly exhibit that they cared for the learning of their students; learning did not occur. Secondly, if the teacher demonstrably cared for the learning of the students, but was unable to engage them in meaningful learning interactions, again they were unable to learn. It was only when their teachers were task and relationship oriented simultaneously í that is, they were able to demonstrate on a daily basis that they cared for the learning of their students, set high expectations for performance and classroom management (including their own subject content knowledge), as well as being able to use a range of discursive interactions and strategies, including formative assessment í that they knew they were going to learn and achieve. She’s dedicated to what we do in our class. I think it’s just her passion, that she likes seeing kids achieving instead of failing. Feels cool, that we’ve got someone who’s gonna help us get through school. (School 2) Fullan (2003) notes that this task/relationship intersection is based on what Bryk and Schneider (2002) term “relational trust”, which their research showed was fundamental to improved student achievement. Just as at the classroom level, relational trust is also fundamental to creating an effective school culture. Fundamental to the creation of such a school culture is leaders creating contexts for learning wherein leaders and teachers are able to consider how the dominant culture maintains control 90

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over the various aspects of education, and the part they themselves might play in perpetuating this pattern of domination, albeit unwittingly. In effect therefore, relational trust is not a neutral situation, but one where leaders and teachers need to be provided with opportunities to understand how dominance manifests itself in the lives of MƗori students (and their communities) and how they and the way they relate to and interact with MƗori students may well be affecting students’ learning in their classrooms. Such opportunities can lead leaders and teachers to a better understanding of the power imbalances of which they are a part; in particular those power imbalances which perpetuate cultural deficit theorising, support the retention of traditional transmission classroom practices and all the institutional supports that perpetuate traditional means of domination. It is vital that leaders and teachers are critically aware of their discursive positioning for where leaders position themselves will have a major impact upon their agency as leaders. Those who identify that the main influences on MƗori student achievement are MƗori students themselves, their homes or the structure of the schools will find themselves unable to progress educational reform effectively as they will be seeing impediments and problems wherever they look. In our experience, often leaders and teachers will move from deficit theorising about students to deficit theorising about the institution and educational processes and systems, effectively retaining their lack of agency despite seemingly having undergone a critically conscious move. In contrast, those who see themselves as agentic leaders enable others “to make a fresh reading of their reality” (Gadotti. 1994), through the process of dialogue, that process based on mutual respect and trust wherein in “remaking the world which they didn’t make, make their world, and in this making and remaking, they remake themselves. They are because they are being” (Freire in Gadotti, 1994, p. 58). In addition, relational trust must also create in classrooms and across schools learning relationships wherein learners’ culturally generated sense-making processes are used and developed so that they may successfully participate in problemsolving and decision-making interactions. Such relationships must promote the knowledge, preferred learning styles, and sense-making processes of the participants as “acceptable” or “legitimate”. Leaders should interact with others in such a way that new knowledge is co-created within contexts where all can safely bring what they know and who they are to the learning relationship; and where what participants know, who they are, and how they know what they know form the foundations of interaction patterns. In short, where culture counts (Bishop & Glynn, 1999). Bryk and Schneider (2002) stress that developing relational trust is effective because it reduces feelings of vulnerability among teachers faced with new and somewhat daunting tasks associated with the reform initiative. The development of relational trust facilitates collaborative problem-solving that allows for curriculum alignment and collaborative decision-making based on evidence of student learning, supports internal in-school accountability that all students learn, and reduces the tendency to look for external agencies to blame. Relational trust is also fundamental to addressing the need for balancing the inevitable tension between individual autonomy and self-determination and the need for collective and collaborative action 91

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towards a common goal. Bryk and Schneider conclude that relational trust provides the moral resource that is needed to sustain “the effort of the long haul” which is needed for school reform. Teachers need to feel they are working in a context where their strong personal commitments to the organisation and its goals is respected, valued, and reciprocated. Just as the students in the example above were willing to give their best efforts when they felt they were with a teacher who ensured their success at school, so too when school/reform leaders create a context based on relational trust, all school participants are “more willing to give extra effort even when the work is hard” (Fullan, 2003, p. 43). Leadership in this sense is not just confined to the principal, although much of what we say in this chapter will clearly resonate with them. Rather, we are talking about all leaders í the school’s trustees, the principal, members of the senior management team, heads of departments and syndicates, developers and facilitators of professional development, educational policy makers and analysts, teachers, parents, and students í since all of these people exercise leadership in some form during their daily interactions. DISTRIBUTED LEADERSHIP

The model of leadership is one termed “distributed” by Elmore (2000) and is also one of collective responsibility, mainly because no one person can be responsible for all of the leadership activities detailed above. It is our understanding that the strength of the school will be greatly enhanced when these leadership activities are undertaken by all involved in a collaborative manner. This is particularly important in large secondary schools for, as Robinson et al., (2007) note, “size, more differentiated structures and specialist teaching culture” (p. 21) limit the degree to which the principal can be directly involved in the pedagogic process. This points clearly to the need for leaders other than the principal to be prominent in many of the activities. For example, it may be appropriate for heads of departments or knowledgeable and skilled professional developers to be involved in providing feedback to teachers in their classrooms in secondary schools, whereas this may well be a task that principals of primary schools may be willing and able to cover. Without diminishing the role of the principal, this supports the notion of shared “pedagogic (or instructional) leadership” proposed in the New Zealand Ministry of Education’s best evidence syntheses (Alton-Lee, 2004, p. 2). Although distributive leadership can contribute to a coherent sense of direction and strengthen the basis for reform to sustain itself, it remains true that if the principal is not instrumental in setting the vision for reform and ensuring the necessary responsive cultural and organisational environment, as Hall and Hord (2006) argue, space is created for individuals or cliques to take over the leadership of the reform or destabilise the reform. We have also found that when there is a change in principal, this can be a time when the reform’s aims are seriously challenged to the point of being annihilated by a new principal determining a new direction for the school. We now turn to a detailed investigation of the qualities of effective leadership, organised in terms of the GPILSEO model. 92

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The Qualities of Effective Leadership 1. Effective Leaders Establish and Develop Specific Measurable Goals so that Progress can be Shown, Monitored over Time, and Acted Upon Effective leaders establish explicit academic goals that are “vital for maintaining a coherent and stable student-centered vision” (McDougall, Saunders, & Goldenberg, 2007, p. 53). Robinson (2007) explains that: Goal setting works by creating a discrepancy between what is currently happening in some desired future state. When people are committed to a goal, this discrepancy is experienced as constructive discontent that motivates goalrelevant behaviour. Goals focus attention and lead to more persistent effort than would otherwise be the case. (p. 10) Leithwood and Jantzi (2006) argue that people are motivated to set goals and work towards them when individual: evaluation of present circumstances indicates that it is different from the desired state, when the goals are perceived to be hard but achievable, and when they are short term but understood within the context of longer term and perhaps more important, more obviously valuable purposes. (p. 206) For an individual to motivate others, however, the individual must possess a high level of self-efficacy or agency. Leadership, therefore, ought to be based on the assumption that “the school improvement process must be conceived of as relating to the school, subgroups and individuals simultaneously, yet still leading ... to a coordinated, positive set of results” (Lindahl, 2007, p. 321). Effective principals lead individuals and groups as well as institutions (Lindahl, 2007). Principals need to inspire collective agency, which means they must themselves have a clear sense of purpose. Holloman, Rouse, and Farrington (2007) argue that a major impediment to implementing large-scale reforms is that “[t]he culture of today’s school does not promote permanent fixes. In fact, the cynicism that many educators feel today is a result of years of cyclical changes in programmes and innovations” (p. 437). Leadership, therefore, begins with a convincing and authoritative introduction to the reform, especially to influential school staff members (Hall & Hord, 2006). The principal sets the school’s tone, and the authority vested in the principal makes the office instrumental to reform. Equally, a new principal unconvinced by the reform’s objectives or methodologies has considerable power to undermine reform, even where a school board of trustees directs otherwise. The school’s capacity to effect change is not simply the sum of individuals’ capacities. No individual can work effectively in a vacuum, which is why leadership must attend to the co-ordination of all individual activities towards a shared goal. But ultimately the specifics of change should be demonstrably linked to the reform’s wider vision: Leaders matter. What leaders think, say, and do í and who they are when they come to work each day í profoundly affects organizational performance, 93

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the satisfaction they and those with whom they interact derive from their work, and their ability to sustain engagement with their work over the period of time necessary to oversee significant improvements (Sparks, 2005, p. 7). Leadership needs to be proactively directed towards a common goal of establishing the school as a high-performing institution where high levels of student achievement and learning are normalised. This means that “[i]f goals are to function as influential co-ordinating mechanisms, they need to be embedded in school and classroom routines and procedures” (Robinson, 2007, pp. 9–10). Leaders of high-achieving schools are more likely to see that their goals and expectations are well understood and to see that academic achievement is recognised and conveyed to the community. Staff consensus about goals is more likely to characterise high-performing schools (Robinson, 2007, p. 10). Goals need to be specific because specificity allows selfregulation: “it’s possible to judge progress and thus adjust one’s performance … Goalsetting increases performance and learning” (Robinson, 2007, p. 11). As Leithwood and Riehl (2003) argue, effective leaders understand the importance of leadership that sets relevant examples for staff and others to follow that are cohesive and in line with the school values and goals. Professional Development Staff Need to Support Teachers to set Goals It is important that leaders of educational reform initiatives, such as professional development facilitators, themselves set, and support teachers to set, specific goals rather than unspecified changes or developments. This is because “the potency of leadership for increasing student achievement hinges on the specific classroom practices which leaders stimulate, encourage and promote” (Leithwood & Jantzi, 2006, p. 223). Achieving these goals requires leadership that looks beyond shortterm solutions to immediate problems: a mixture of long-term and short-term goals is necessary. Schmoker (1999) promotes the setting of short term-goals as being motivational, but Hargreaves and Fink (2006) warn that setting short term-goals may promote the practice of teaching so that students can pass the next test. Focusing on long-term learning gains is necessary and will focus teaching activities on sustainable long-term change designed to eliminate barriers to achievement. Short-term goals, however, are necessary to monitor progress towards the long-term goals. 2. Effective Leaders Promote and Support Pedagogic Reform Effective leadership for sustainable educational reform promotes and is responsive to the development and implementation of pedagogic relationships and interactions in the classrooms that promote the reduction of educational disparities through improvements in student learning and achievement. Effective leaders do this by providing and/or supporting the means/process of professional learning for teachers that allows them to embed the conceptual depth of the reform into the theorising and practice of classroom teachers, principals, and national policy makers. Teachers’ conceptual depth of the theoretical principles that underlie the reform is a major indicator of sustainability. 94

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Teachers and school leaders who have a deep understanding of the underlying theories and principles of the reform and can implement appropriate practices are better able to respond flexibly to new demands and changing contexts in ways that will sustain and perhaps deepen the reform over time. Reform without depth of understanding will trivialise the initiative, and teachers and schools will soon revert to old explanations and practices. Two of the dimensions of leadership identified by Robinson et al., (2007) support this understanding. The first is that which “involves leadership of effective teaching, including how to improve and evaluate it, along with skills in developing collegial discussions on instructional matters” (p. x). Their empirical analysis shows this dimension to have a moderate impact on student outcomes. It includes such activities as: leaders being actively involved in collegial discussions on how teaching practice affects student achievement; an active oversight and co-ordination of the teaching programme; involvement in teacher observation and feedback; and leading staff to systematically monitor student progress to inform their ongoing teaching programme. Coupled with this dimension is a focus on promoting and participating in teacher learning and development through dialogue. This dimension includes actions such as leaders using their own knowledge to help staff solve teaching problems, and working directly with teachers or subject department heads to plan, co-ordinate, and evaluate the impact of teachers and teaching on student learning and achievement through the monitoring of student progress in relation to what is being taught and how it is being taught. It is also important that leaders are seen to be learners themselves, as an integral part of the whole learning process. The evidence gathered by Robinson et al., (2009) showed that: leaders who are actively involved in professional learning gain a deeper appreciation of what teachers require to achieve and sustain improvements in student learning, which enables them to discuss the changes with teachers and support them in making appropriate adjustments to class organisation, resourcing and assessment procedures (p. xi). In short, the more leaders focus their relationships, their work, and their learning on the core business of teaching and learning, the greater their influence on student outcomes will be. Creating, Promoting, and Developing Professional Learning Communities According to Robinson (2007), “[s]uccessful leadership influences teaching and learning through both face-to-face relationships and by structuring the way that teachers do their work” (p. 10). Creating and sustaining effective school-wide professional learning communities would appear to be a critically important function of leadership. A professional learning community in this sense is an inclusive group of people, motivated by a shared learning vision, who support and work with each other, and who find ways í inside and outside their immediate community í to enquire about their practice and together to learn new and better approaches that will enhance all pupils’ learning (Stoll & Seashore Louis, 2007). 95

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The professional learning community will not arise of its own accord, and is necessarily a product of leadership. It must be consciously created, and thoughtfully and systematically sustained. Consideration needs to be given to ways of incorporating meetings into school routine without additional cost and without closing the school for the duration of the meeting (DuFour, 1998). This emphasises the need for the reform to be placed at the centre of school routines, such that the necessity of each school meeting can be assessed against its contribution to the reform. Schools might then consider prioritising meeting agendas for their contribution to reform goals. Robinson and Timperley (2007), referencing Bolam, McMahon, Stoll, Thomas, and Wallace (2005), warn that there is little evidence that professional learning communities have a strong impact on student outcomes unless they promote “the type of teacher learning that makes a difference to their students” through “an intensive focus on the relationship between what the teacher had taught and what the students had learned” (p. 11). By this it is meant that in these professional learning communities leaders not only supply or demonstrate how teachers can obtain evidence of student participation and learning, but also lead collaborative problem-solving and decision-making discussions about the relationship between teaching practice and student outcomes based on collaborative analysis of this evidence. In other words, leaders focus “the group on how to move beyond analysis of the data to identifying specific teaching practices to help a particular student or group of students” (Robinson & Timperley, 2007, p. 12). In this role leaders are facilitators of student learning rather than leaders of collegial discussions. 3. Effective Leaders Redesign the Institutional and Organisational Framework Leaders need to create opportunities for connections to, and collaboration through dialogue, with other teachers engaged in the reform. The institutionalisation of a means to ensure that this happens in a systematic manner is an essential element of sustaining change. Such institutionalisations need to be prioritised so that they are seen to support the efforts of teachers and are aligned with, and indeed can inform, school policies and strategic plans. Effective leadership that aims to sustain an educational reform needs to strategically promote and align organisational and structural changes with the need to embed the reform within the everyday practices of the school. This will include changing timetables, meeting times and agendas, staff recruitment procedures, staff promotion criteria, the provision of support and space for in-school professional development staff, the establishment of permanent positions for professional development staff in the school, the reshaping of the role of the heads of departments, and the reshaping of the composition of the senior management team to include senior professional developers, among others. 4. Effective Leaders Spread the Reform to Include those Traditionally Marginalised Effective leadership that aims to sustain an educational reform needs to develop a means to spread the reform so that parents, families and community members are 96

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engaged in a manner that addresses their aspirations for the education of their children. Through these actions we would expect to see a re-connection of parents and families with the educational advancement of their children, and an enormous change in the life chances and lifestyles of those people currently underserved by the education system. Communicating the intentions of the reform and signalling that the school is prepared to be accountable to the community are necessary steps in promoting effective relationships with the community. One way this is done in Te Kotahitanga is for the schools to hold annual staff induction workshops at local marae (meeting places), hosted by local MƗori families. At these events there are opportunities for the leaders, both formally and informally, to inform the local community, in a very convivial setting, of their intentions to develop and/or persist with the goal of raising the achievement of their children. Communication of the outcomes of the reform in terms of raised student achievement is also important on a regular basis. Again we find that when students begin to achieve well at school, parents who have previously been absent from parent– teacher report meetings, for example, become only too visible. This visibility then begins to be seen in other activities of the school’s life. Success attracts success. Principals and other teacher leaders can help the wider school community to understand the changes that are needed to strengthen teaching and learning and encourage and support their participation. Leaders need to spread the reform to others, within and outside the school, so as to align the new norms of the reform within the school, within the norms of supporting institutions, and within communities in association with the school. Spreading the reform to include all staff can pose problems and is something that needs to be undertaken with care. Holloman, Rouse and Farrington, (2007) propose a “purpose-driven” leadership model, which requires an organisation to “define its purpose, maintain integrity … prevent burnout and sustain vitality” (p. 438). The model supposes a school culture in which there is constant reflection on why certain methodologies are favoured over others. Leithwood and Riehl (2003) suggest that educational improvement often means making personal changes to the way responses have been undertaken in the past, and in order to achieve this, effective principals must respect staff and show they are concerned for their feelings. Therefore, as Bolman and Deal (2003) note, effective leaders need to learn how to cope with power and conflict, and how to build coalitions, hone their political skills, and deal with internal and external politics. A questioning culture is one that will best support such developments. It is a way of challenging people more inclined to being negative about a reform to re-focus their attention on constructive criticism that “could more clearly define the purpose of the school”. In turn, it is argued, re-focusing resistance can foster “purposeful dialogue” (Holloman, Rouse & Farrington, 2007, p. 438). However, these ideas presuppose reform that is theoretically well informed and supported by valid empirical data. Robinson (2007) considers that “[p]eople cannot adapt descriptions of effective practice to their own contexts unless they understand the theoretical principles that explain why they work and under what conditions”. Further, “[i]t is the combination of description, practical example and theoretical explanation 97

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that makes for powerful professional learning” (p. 5). To this end, leaders are reliant on robust evidence to support the direction of the reform initiative (see below). This means that any attempts to weaken the connection between research and practice can be expected to seriously compromise school leaders’ capacity to support sustainable reform. Whatever the case, it is important that as many teachers as possible are included in the reform, because “effective professional development is likely to involve teachers investigating pedagogy and analysing data within their own settings” (Alton-Lee, 2004, p. 10), and because “quality of teaching is critical to … a shift” in student achievement (p. 4). 5. Effective Leaders Develop the Capacity of People and Systems to Identify, Gather and use Evidence “Effective leaders assess how well the school is performing, ask critical and constructive questions, emphasize the use of systematic evidence and encourage careful monitoring of pupils’ progress” (Leithwood & Riehl, 2003, cited in Atkinson, 2006, p. 7). Fundamental to Collins’s (2001) study of what moves an organisation from good to great is the understanding that effective leaders work continuously to select the right people, and work to support and develop them. For example, Te Kotahitanga professional development facilitators as leaders of professional learning develop the capacity of teachers to identify and continually question their discursive positioning and theories of action by providing professional learning opportunities that use alternative theories, evidence, and vicarious experiences. Leaders also provide the necessary resources and tools for teachers to be able to engage effectively with the reform goals and processes. Robinson et al., (2009) note that leaders of sustainable educational reform are able to reshape the situation in which they work so that others can learn to do their job strategically by selecting, developing, and using tools that will assist their own learning and promote student learning. They found that such tools include physical qualities such as classroom furniture and smart whiteboards. However, of primary importance is what they termed “smart tools”, which include software for student management systems to provide teachers with differentiated data about student attendance and achievement, formative assessment packages such as asTTle and PAT, school’s strategic plans, policy documents, and the means of reporting student progress to the students, their families, and the community. Leaders also support the use of reform-specific smart tools such as those that enable teachers to critically reflect on their practice and theorise in such a way as to bring about changes in practice. One such example from Te Kotahitanga (elaborated in Chapter 2) is the PSIRPEG model, which, following the intervention elements of observations, feedback, co-construction, and shadow-coaching, affords teachers the opportunity to plan for their next learning activities, choose appropriate strategies, identify appropriate interactions, identify the relationships that are likely to develop the positionings that will be supported, and the positive student experiences that will lead to reaching the goals of improved student achievement. As Te Kotahitanga grows and develops in each school, systemic and institutional developments are necessary to support the changes taking place in the classroom. 98

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An area that needs to be developed is that of accurately measuring student attendance data, stand-downs, suspensions, early-leaving exemptions, retention rates, and achievement data. There are two reasons for this. First, it allows teachers the opportunity to reflect collaboratively on these data to inform their ongoing practice. Second, they can use the same data for summative purposes to identify if there is a relationship between the implementation of the educational reform in question and positive changes in student participation and achievement. In order for these objectives to be met in the sequence of formative preceding summative purposes, it is important that the project schools be able to undertake the task of data gathering and processing themselves in real time. To do so they will need to continue to develop the use of electronic student management systems (SMS) so that the schools can use the data for formative purposes in collaborative settings, and then aggregate the data for summative purposes. Probably more important than the systems for providing the evidence on the basis of which teachers can collaboratively make practice-changing decisions is the need for capacity building, in the sense of leaders of the reform providing professional learning opportunities for teachers to learn how to both identify and gather appropriate evidence for learning, and to be able to use evidence of student learning to ascertain where and how to modify their classroom practice through the ongoing provision of appropriate and responsive professional learning opportunities. 6. Effective Leaders take Ownership of the Reform Effective leadership that aims to sustain an educational reform takes ownership of the reform. The first characteristic of ownership is a leader taking responsibility for the performance of students who are currently not benefiting from their school/ system. This involves careful disaggregation of data to identify the learning outcomes of specific groups of students and the implementation of processes to ensure that this information is disseminated and acted upon. To do so, leaders must work towards building a school culture that focuses on an ongoing reduction in educational disparities through the ongoing improvement of student learning and outcomes. To ensure this happens in an ongoing manner, leaders must take responsibility for ensuring that the integrity of the means of producing increased achievement gains for the target students is not jeopardised by conflicting and competing interests and agendas. Leaders also need to take the responsibility for building capacity among students, staff and other leaders so that they are able to take responsibility for student outcomes, rather than focusing totally on accountability systems. This aspect of leadership is often at odds with national policies that limit the time available to develop support for the development of in-school capacity. Nevertheless, persistence in pursuit of the goals of reducing disparities is the hallmark of effective leadership. The unrelenting pursuit of goals that will also involve leaders in creating classrooms, a school culture, and education systems where new situations are addressed from an in-depth understanding of the reform’s aims and approaches rather than from past practice. Past practices have led us to a situation of educational disparities being 99

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based on ethnic lines. Effective leaders express their dissatisfaction with this situation and are prepared to own the consequences of promoting and sustaining educational reforms to reduce disparities through targeting and raising the achievement of students who are currently not well served by the education system. Table 7. GPILSEO: A summary of effective leadership GPILSEO

Tasks associated with each GPILSEO element: leaders

Leaders establish and develop specific measurable goals so that progress can be shown, monitored over time, and acted upon.

– build from the dissonance that is created when the difference between the current reality and the desired state is highlighted – learn how to set smart goals for student participation, and achievement in its widest sense – develop specific goals to ensure that all involved can judge their progress toward the goals and responsively adjust their practice or learning – have the capacity (self-belief) to meet goals from their current understanding, or be able to learn what is needed to meet the goals – communicate with others about performance in terms of goals

Leaders support the development and implementation of new pedagogic relationships and interactions in the classroom

– support the means of embedding the conceptual depth of the reform into the theorising and practice of the classroom teachers, principals, and national administrators (teachers’ conceptual depth is a major indicator of sustainability) – focus their relationships, their work, and their learning on the core business of teaching and learning, which increases their influence on student outcomes – create learning contexts in which learners gain the capacity and self-belief that they will be able to meet goals from their current understandings, or will be able to learn what is needed to meet the goals – promote the cultural identity of learners as being fundamental to learning relations and interactions – engage in classroom observations and provide specific feedback and/or co-construct with teachers ways to improve classroom practice – provide specific professional learning opportunities for the consolidation of content and strategy learning – create and sustain effective school-wide professional learning communities – build capacity for teachers to take collective responsibility for student outcomes and collective action for changing teaching practice based on student experiences and academic performance – ensure collective action for changing teaching practice is based on student experiences and academic performance

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Table 7. (Continued) Leaders change the institutional framework, its organisation and structure, to support the reform within the schools

– create opportunities for connections to, and collaboration with, other teachers (including teachers in other schools) engaged in similar reform – institutionalise the means for teacher collaborative decisionmaking in a systematic manner – prioritise the establishment of new institutions so that they are seen to be supportive of the efforts of teachers and are aligned with school plans and policies, and which inform national policies – modify structural and organisational arrangements to accommodate new institutions (such as Cycle Plus components of Te Kotahitanga) and staffing (re)allocations – (re)prioritise funding to support the ongoing implementation of the reform’s professional learning processes beyond the initial project funding phase – ensure the reform is symbolically represented within the school

Leaders need to be knowledgeable about their role in the reform

– focus on improving the performance of those least well served by the system – have a sound understanding of the theoretical foundations of the reform and of what that theoretical basis means for classroom practice, school structure, and culture – accept responsibility for student learning outcomes – demonstrate their understanding that: – a focus on MƗori has strong benefits for other students – pedagogic leadership has powerful effects on student outcomes – no one person can provide all leadership needs – proactive, responsive and distributed leadership is essential for the sustainability of a reform in a school

Leaders need to spread – spread the reform to others, within and outside the school, the reform to include so as to align the new norms of the reform within the school all students, teachers, and within the norms of supporting institutions, and within and the community communities in association with the school – spread the reform so that parents, whƗnau, and community are engaged in a manner that addresses their aspirations for the education of their children Leaders develop the – develop the capacity of teachers to identify and continually capacity of people and question their own discursive positioning and theories of action systems to produce and – provide professional learning opportunities for teachers that use evidence of student use alternative theories, evidence, and vicarious experiences experiences and – develop and grow systems in their schools that accurately progress to inform measure student attendance data, stand-downs, suspensions, change early-leaving exemptions, retention rates, and achievement data for formative and summative purposes – develop the capacity of teachers to learn how to both create appropriate evidence for learning and be able to use student evidence to modify their classroom practice 101

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Table 7. (Continued) Leaders ensure that – identify and take responsibility for the performance of the ownership of and students who are currently not benefiting from their responsibility/authority school/system for the goals of the – take responsibility for ensuring that the integrity of the reform must shift to the means of producing increased achievement gains for the school/system target students (the Cycle Plus and the facilitation teams) is not jeopardised by conflicting and competing interests and agendas – take responsibility for building capacity among students, staff and other leaders so that they are able to take responsibility for student outcomes – work towards building a school culture that focuses on an ongoing reduction of educational disparities through the raising of student learning and outcomes – work to create classrooms, a school culture, and an education system in which new situations are addressed from an in-depth understanding of the reform’s aims and approaches rather than from past practice.

(Source; Bishop, O’Sullivan & Berryman, 2010) On the one hand, leading school reform is difficult, basically because “[t]he complexity of interacting contextual variables ... is enormous” (Lindahl, 2007, p. 328). On the other hand, a great deal is known about the conditions that are necessary to support student learning, and this is a good starting point. Among the keys to sustainable reform is leadership that is cognisant of these conditions, and is willing to support the purpose of all school routines, procedures, and practices and to shape a school culture centred on reform. The fundamental changes that are needed in classroom relationships and interactions and in the culture of schools, through the institutionalisation of schools as professional learning communities focused on improving student learning, depend on leaders having a sound understanding of the theoretical underpinning of the reform while simultaneously being responsive and proactive about supporting and promoting reform processes and goals. To this end, principals’ leadership is essential. However, principals’ leadership to the exclusion of others is ineffective. Principals, therefore, in Kouzes and Posner’s (2002) terms, need to inspire a shared vision, model the way, enable others to act, and challenge the status quo. Overall, a measure of the effectiveness of leadership will be seen in the actions and beliefs of teachers. Ineffectively led schools foster and support teachers who are likely “to attribute student achievement to global factors or student traits, such as experience and knowledge, socio-economic conditions, inexperience with the English language, academic ability, lack of readiness, and inadequate parental involvement” (McDougal, Saunders & Goldenberg, 2007, p. 74). Effectively led schools are characterised by teachers who attribute “student achievement toward specific, teacherimplemented, instructional actions and planning processes, and away from teacher and student traits, and non-instructional explanations” (p. 74). In other words, effective leaders support and foster committed, agentic educators. 102

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PART C: THE ROLE OF POLICY IN REDUCING EDUCATIONAL DISPARITIES

New Zealand is one of many wealthy, first world countries who feature an economic structure where there are obvious disparities between those sectors of society who enjoy a relatively high standard of living and relative prosperity in contrast to portions of the population who live in what are socially-constructed conditions of hardship, significant poverty and its attendant ills. Although some progress has been seen in recent times, MƗori people, the indigenous people of New Zealand, continue to have higher levels of unemployment, are more likely to be employed in low-paying work, have much higher levels of incarceration, illness and poverty than do the rest of the population, and are generally under-represented in the positive social and economic indicators of society. The question here therefore is whether and how the substantial financial and other resources of the more affluent segment of society within New Zealand is able to bring better standards and opportunities to those in the poorer sections of the populace, especially the members of the indigenous population. This chapter posits that radical changes can be manifest for those members of society who have traditionally occupied positions of social and economic marginalisation. The argument rests on the substantial body of evidence that demonstrates that while there are other factors that contribute to the continuation of this situation, it is clear that students who are not well served by our current education system are heavily disadvantaged in later life. The answer lies in the institution of measures to repay the significant educational debt that is owed to those students who have been mistreated by our education system through the implementation of educational reform that is successful, sustainable and scalable. It is therefore necessary that education reform that seeks to raise achievement and reduce disparities is part of a broad system-wide attempt to address systemic minoritisation. While it is clear that classrooms are the most effective sites in which to commence educational reform (Alton-Lee, 2003; Hattie, 2003), it is vital to remember that classrooms are situated in, and inextricably linked to, the school, the wider education system and are agents of the powerful, dominant discourses in society. As Fullan (2003) says, “only small-scale, non-lasting improvement can occur if the system is not helping” (p. 219). This suggests the need for reform to include the systemic level, because, as Coburn (2003) suggests, teachers are better able to implement and sustain change when there are “mechanisms in place at multiple levels of the system to support their efforts” (p. 6). In other words, teachers are further strengthened in their ability to sustain change if it is supported by a broader systemic focus on reform at school, and when this is reflected at the district and national level. Governments, as the primary policy-making arm of the wider education sector, must lead and support educational reforms by creating appropriate and responsive policy frameworks within which reform can flourish. Other agencies, such as researchers, professional developers, evaluators, teachers’ professional bodies and schools, must also play their part in informing and working within these policy frameworks. This paper sets out a model that these agencies can work within so as to support educational reforms.

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GPILSEO at the System Level This chapter focuses on actions that individuals at the systemic level need to undertake in order to develop, implement, sustain, and extend theory-based reforms. At the system level there needs to be: – goals: the establishment of national policy goals to realise the potential of those least well served by the system by raising their overall achievement, thereby reducing historical disparities – pedagogy: a means whereby in-service professional learning opportunities and professional development for teachers is onsite, ongoing and dialogic, and where pre-service teacher education is aligned with in-service professional development so that each supports the other in implementing culturally responsive pedagogies of relations – institutions: the development of supportive policies and infrastructure that provide incentives for teachers, and support for schools that is ongoing, interactive and consistent – leadership: national-level support and professional development for leaders to promote distributed, instructional/pedagogical leadership models – spread: collaboration between policy funders, researchers and practitioners that is responsive to community needs and aspirations, in an iterative process of interaction, feedback and adaptation – evidence: national-level support for the production of appropriate evidence that will enable collaborative, formative problem solving and decision making that is ongoing and interactive, and from which grow supportive policies regarding standards, assessments and the mix of accountability and capacity building – ownership: national ownership of the problem and the provision of sufficient funding and resources to see solutions within a defined period of time, and in an ongoing, embedded manner. 1. Goal Setting; The Education Debt The New Zealand Ministry of Education currently has as its mission “to raise achievement and reduce disparities” (p. 17). This dual approach is seen as necessary because, although by international standards average student achievement is high, “we still have one of the widest gaps between our highest and lowest achievers” (p. 17), and this situation exists within schools rather than between schools (AltonLee, 2003). In addition, according to Hattie (2003) and Ballard (2008), it exists despite, rather than because of, the socioeconomic status of the school. Reducing disparities and raising achievement have long been conflated with addressing the achievement ‘gap’ in many ‘western’ nations, but recently in New Zealand, the policy focus for reducing disparities has shifted to one of “realising MƗori potential”2 where every individual is to be given the encouragement, support and opportunity to realise their educational potential, regardless of their social or cultural background, their location or their individual needs (Ministry of Education, 2008). 104

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However, this shift in focus is problematic as it shifts the focus from educators needing to address the clear pattern of disparities in outcome that exist between MƗori and non-MƗori students, to a situation where those who actually have traditionally held the power over defining what constitutes MƗori potential, the non-MƗori majority, are able to retain this power. As the vast majority of teachers are non-MƗori (91%), and the majority of these define MƗori potential in deficit terms, it is likely, that without intervention, they will continue to define what constitutes MƗori potential in deficit terms on a day-to-day basis, thus maintaining the status quo (Bishop et al., 2003; Shields, Bishop and Mazawi, 2005). Further, fundamental to current policy frameworks is the notion that increasing MƗori student achievement can be achieved primarily in the nation’s classrooms3, that is there is a strong emphasis on the power of quality teaching to bring about change in historical educational disparities. This approach to policy is problematic at least two levels. The first is where Thrupp (2008) suggests “overemphasising the power of quality teaching has the effect of scapegoating teachers for wider problems” (p. 2). The net effect is that an overemphasis on quality teaching has the potential to be divisive and can lead to everyone involved “constantly sniping at one another” (Fullan, 2007, p. 249) rather than their playing a collegial part in solving what after all is a collective problem. The second level is where it is vital to remember that classrooms are situated in and inextricably linked to the broader school and its systems, and also reflect the wider society. Patterns of discrimination and inequality that exist in the wider society may well be reflected in the arrangements of the education system, schools and classrooms. Although this need not be a limitation on teachers’ or schools’ potential for change, it does signal that policies that address the wider context are necessary. Therefore it is vital that policies do not underplay the part the government and other agencies at this level can and need to play in addressing contextual issues that have an impact on schooling. For example, Ladson-Billings (2006) identifies that long-term, system-level attention needs to be given, not only to achievement disparities, but to the accumulation of achievement disparities, which she terms the “education debt”. Using the notion of the national debt as a metaphor, LadsonBillings (2006) suggests that it is the annual accumulation of achievement gaps, as has been seen in New Zealand since educational disparities were first identified in the Hunn report in 1960 that needs to be addressed rather than any one gap. By this she means that just as the accumulation of annual fiscal deficits produces an economic debt, so the accumulation of achievement gaps over time has produced an education debt; a debt the education system owes to MƗori children who have been short changed by the education system for generations. In other words, it is the long-term intergenerational effects of the legacies of an education system that is oriented to the interests of the dominant group that has created this education debt. She quotes Robert Haverman, an eminent economist, who suggests that the education debt is: the foregone schooling resources that we could have (should have) been investing in (primarily) low income kids, which deficit leads to a variety of social problems (e.g., crime, low productivity, low wages, low labor force 105

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participation) that require on-going public investment. This required investment sucks away resources that could go to reducing the achievement gap (p. 5). However, it is not just a matter of more funding. Ladson-Billings (2006) argues that the “historical, economic, socio-political, and moral decisions and policies that characterize our society have created the education debt” (p. 5). Christine Sleeter (2005) agrees: Like the US, New Zealand has spent over a century building an educational system, infrastructure, and set of beliefs around the education of students of European descent. The severe underachievement of MƗori students reflects this history. Although it is not clear that conventional teaching processes that emphasize transmitting knowledge didactically promote the most optimal learning among students of European descent, it is clear that this system has been abysmal for MƗori students. Conventional classroom processes and their supporting beliefs have a very strong weight of tradition and ongoing institutional support, which makes them extraordinarily difficult to change (p. 4). After visiting seven Te Kotahitanga4 schools in 2005, Sleeter (2005) went on to warn of the danger of shifting the direct focus of the Te Kotahitanga project from MƗori student achievement toward a focus on all students. Should this happen, the traditional ways of developing relationships and interactions will reassert themselves, to the detriment of MƗori students. She then suggested that policy makers need to be very courageous and continue “to intentionally and explicitly maintain its primary focus on MƗori student achievement, evaluating the potential benefit of any proposed action in relationship to its impact on MƗori students” (p. 5). Sleeter continues by suggesting a way forward: Ultimately, the only way to reconfigure the schooling process so that it works for both MƗori and PƗkehƗ students is to reconfigure schooling around MƗori ways of knowing, using a focus on MƗori student achievement as the touchstone for evaluating changes to the processes and systems of education. What will emerge from a sustained focus on reconstructing classroom processes for MƗori student achievement will be schooling that works better for both MƗori and PƗkehƗ students (p. 6). Denying MƗori culture and ethnicity a significant place in New Zealand educational theorising and policy making has long been the norm and has played a major part in developing the education debt. As G. H. Smith (1997) has argued, the marginalisation of MƗori cultural aspirations, preferences and practices in education has occurred alongside the economic and political subordination of MƗori. Denial of the lived realities of MƗori people and the role education has played has also been a common feature of educational theorising. G. H. Smith (1997) and L. Smith (1999) see the consistent underachievement of MƗori as a struggle between MƗori rejecting a schooling system that does not fit them and the persistence of educators’ attempts 106

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to convert MƗori to the mainstream way. This struggle is represented as that between educational institutions as agents of social reproduction while also being seen as places that can achieve social change, and policy makers not attending to this tension. 2. Systemic Support for Pedagogic Reform to Depth the Provision of Effective Learning Opportunities for Teachers Given the caveats identified above, there have been a number of improvements in a positive direction in New Zealand in recent years (Wylie, 2007). It has been recognised at a policy level that providing effective professional learning opportunities for teachers so that they understand the basis of their core business is probably the most effective school-based change initiative that any policy maker and funding agency can undertake. Building the capability of those currently working within the education system will increase the capacity of the whole system to bring about effective educational reform (Elmore, 2004). However, currently professional developers are mainly external to the schools, and they tend to provide professional development opportunities externally or on a limited in-school basis. However, as Timperley et al., (2007) state, in a detailed investigation of the provision of professional learning opportunities for teachers: it is generally accepted that listening to inspiring speakers or attending oneoff workshops rarely changes teacher practice sufficiently to impact on student outcomes. Yet, at least in the United States, this type of activity is the predominant model of professional development. The popularity of conferences and one-day workshops in New Zealand indicates that it is not too different in this country. (p. xxv) Timperley et al., (2007) also warn of a number of other common assumptions about the efficacy of providing professional learning opportunities for teachers. They discovered a number of extended opportunities for teacher learning that were having an impact on student outcomes, but they found that these are not necessarily more effective than one-off opportunities because it is more the quality of the interaction than the time involved. Indeed, they found no evidence that the provision of sufficient time and money for teachers would see them engage in effective professional learning that would have a positive impact on student outcomes, a common assumption made by many associated with New Zealand schooling. Nor did they find evidence that the opposite extreme was effective; that is, where outside experts develop strictly prescribed practices for teaching “with an underpinning rationale and monitor their implementation carefully to ensure integrity” (p. xxvi). The meta-analysis by Timperley et al., (2007) supported a more dynamic model of teacher professional learning and development that had substantive student outcomes, including personal, social and academic attributes, that is on-site, ongoing and collaboratively reflective. Such approaches suggest an iterative, spiralling approach that involves the development of dynamic interactions that develop from powersharing relationships between professional developers and teachers as participants 107

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and further identified seven elements in the professional learning context that have positive impacts on student outcomes: providing sufficient time for extended opportunities to learn, and using the time effectively (i.e., the quality of the use of time is as important as the amount of time); engaging external expertise, which requires funding; focusing on engaging teachers in the learning process, which is more important than being concerned about whether they volunteered or not; challenging problematic discourses, which involves iterative cycles of teachers considering alternatives and the impact on student outcomes of a range of discursive positions; providing opportunities to interact in a community of professionals that focus on analysing the impact of teaching on student learning in an iterative, ongoing manner; ensuring content is consistent with wider policy trends; in school-based initiatives, having leaders actively leading the professional learning opportunities (p. xxvi). These findings were published in 2007 as part of the Best Evidence Synthesis programme of the New Zealand Ministry of Education, which was developed in response to the need for policy development to be based on evidence rather than rhetoric. This movement to policy that sees the Ministry of Education “strengthening its approach to use evidence to make decisions” (Ministry of Education, 2008, p. 37) has seen the publication of seven best evidence syntheses since June 2003, all aimed at providing the Government, its agencies and schools with an evidential base from which to develop policy, introduce new practices through its service providers, and support schools to assess and modify their own practices. Alongside this new focus on evidence is the policy of focusing research, development and evaluation on student achievement rather than the implementation of programmes. This focus has been supported by the development of a number of initiatives that are evidence based and where the focus on enhancing student achievement is central. These include the National Education Monitoring Project (NEMP), which has been examining what achievement looks like across the curriculum and across the schooling sector since 1995 (see http://nemp.otago.ac.nz). The researchers and developers of this project use teacher experiences at all levels, including the development of test items, marking and evaluation. Teachers also undertake the testing, providing them with valuable professional learning opportunities they can take back into their own classrooms and schools. Along with NEMP, national education exemplars have been developed, which provide examples of authentic pieces of evidence of student achievement at each level across the curriculum for teachers to match their students’ progress and to inform the next learning steps. These exemplars have been developed for both English- and MƗori-medium schooling. Finally, asTTle (Assessment Tools for Teaching and Learning) is a large, flexible, electronic bank of test items that teachers can draw on for formative and summative use in English and MƗori, again developed and trialled by teachers in conjunction with researchers. The development of these national smart tools helps teachers to implement the policy of teaching as achievement focused and evidence based. These tools are being implemented with professional development support at a national level by 108

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programmes such as AtoL (Assess to Learn), a professional development programme that works with schools to gather and analyse student data and to introduce more effective learning programmes based on the analysis of student performance. These approaches and understandings, along with the appropriate smart tools, have been used and applied in other research and development programmes such as Te Kotahitanga. The professional development programmes both inform and implement the findings of the Best Evidence Synthesis programme in an iterative way. In other words, alongside the shifts in policy has been the development of the smart tools and the professional development programmes that inform, support and implement the policies that seek to make education for MƗori and other marginalised students more effective.5 There have been some promising gains made as a result of the changes in policy by the Ministry of Education. Wylie (2007) argued that: It is only recently, after the Ministry of Education took the lead in providing research-based professional development, new assessment tools that could quickly identify gaps in student learning, and resources that teachers could use to meet those identified needs, that New Zealand saw gains at the primary level, particularly for low-performing students. MƗori student achievement has shared in these gains: but 53 percent of MƗori boys still left school with no qualifications in 2005.6 (p. 2). Alignment between Pre-service and In-service Teacher Education In a recent international study, Cochran-Smith and Zeichner (2005) identified the lack of links between pre-service teacher education and in-service practice and the perceived hierarchies within the education sector as major impediments to comprehensive educational reform. In New Zealand there is need for a policydriven rectification at a systemic level of this misalignment between pre-service teacher education and in-service professional development so that each can support the other in implementing the benefits of large-scale, theory-based educational reforms. Such alignment would also create ongoing systems to support teachers as life-long learners; as Smylie (1995) notes, “[w]e will fail … to improve schooling for children until we acknowledge the importance of schools not only as places for teachers to work but also as places for teachers to learn” (p. 92). One example of this misalignment was seen recently when 422 teachers in the Te Kotahitanga project (Bishop et al., 2007), 60 percent of whom had been to teacher education institutions in the previous five years, were surveyed. They stated that they were keen to implement a wide and effective range of classroom interaction types. That is, they aspired to actively engage their students in the lessons, use the prior knowledge of students, use group learning processes, provide academic feedback, involve students in planning lessons, demonstrate their high expectations, stimulate critical questioning, and recognise and include the culture of students in their lessons. However, detailed measured observations of their classrooms showed that 86 percent of their interactions were of a traditional nature, where they were 109

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engaged in the transmission of predetermined knowledge, monitoring to see if this knowledge had been passed on, and providing behavioural feedback in order to control the class. Only 14 percent of their classroom interactions allowed them an opportunity to create the sorts of learning relationships to which they themselves aspired. In short, despite these teachers’ aspirations, the dominant classroom interactions remained active teacher and passive students, the very learning environment that MƗori students identified as limiting their opportunities to engage with learning (Bishop & Berryman, 2006). Elmore and Burney (1996) and Bishop (2007) suggest that pre-service teacher education programmes need to emulate those practices outlined for the implementation of theory-based educational reforms in schools. For example, pre-service teachers should be organised into professional learning communities so that they are able to become familiar with modes of assessment that will allow them to collaboratively analyse the multitude of data that are routinely collected about children to inform and modify their practice. These findings signal the need for pre-service educators to integrate the theory and practice of teaching and learning (using evidence of studentteachers’ instructional practice and student achievement for formative purposes) in a systematic manner so that they can practise what they learn. It also signals that schools that are receiving the new teachers need to provide pre-service teachers with opportunities to receive similar classroom support to in-service teachers. They need to do this by providing ongoing objective analysis and feedback on their classroom interactions, which they critically reflect on in a collaborative problem-solving setting. In other words, because “teaching consists of a repertoire of behaviours or teaching methods and … student learning follows more or less directly from the frequency with which teachers use specific behaviours or apply a specific method” (Nuthall, 2004, p. 286), there is a need to “translate … outcomes-linked evidence into policy and into teacher education in ways that fairly represent what is actually known from the research and attends to the needs of teachers and policy-makers” (Alton-Lee, 2006, p. 623). Pre-service programmes that are conducted at universities are well placed to support ongoing teacher learning by developing a programme and culture of teacher research, because teacher research “is a way of organising professional development in such a way that it remains closely related to what teachers acknowledge as their domain of professional autonomy” (Tillema & Imants, 1995, p. 142). Introducing such practices at both the pre- and in-service levels would allow the reform and its associated paradigm shift to become self-monitoring on a day-to-day basis. The research may also enhance the status of the reform because it would be “closely related to meaningful school development in which there is a close connection among development, reflection, professionalization, and school renewal” (Tillema & Imants, p. 146). 3. Institutionalisation Systemic-level support is necessary for those structural and organisational changes that schools will need to undertake in order to support the sustainability of the 110

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educational reform. That is, policy makers will need to look at the way in which reform projects and schools are funded so that changes in personnel, resourcing for in-school professional developers and the overall structure of the school can be made by the school’s governance and management. Fullan (2007) points to the example of the Ontario Literacy and Numeracy Strategy, which sought to substantially improve literacy and numeracy within one election period for all 72 school districts and all 4,000 or so elementary schools in the province (p. 246). One of the eight interlocking strategies that were developed to implement the policy was that the budget for education for the province of Ontario be increased by 22 percent (12 percent accounting for inflation) in the first three years of the initiative. “Much of the new money is devoted to capacity building, with all those in challenging circumstances receiving additional earmarked resources. All this as the government is working to reduce an overall budget deficit” (p. 255). This example shows the level of commitment that is needed at the funding level to support large-scale educational reform. It is not sufficient to promulgate policies that are responsive to identified needs, such as the plight of MƗori students, and then not provide sufficient funding to make the reform a reality. The danger of embarking on a reform and its foundering due to lack of funding is too great. As we have seen, many teachers are wary of what Fullan (2007) calls “initiative-itis”, where more and more programmes are promulgated, many without sufficient long-term funding support. Similarly, schools will be loath to reprioritise their own funding until they have firm evidence that the professional learning programme they are engaged in is going to be productive in terms of enhanced student outcomes. Hence the Government needs to provide substantial upfront and long-term monies to get the whole process going in such a way that the reform will be able to be successfully embedded. The Government needs to see this initial and long-term funding as an investment rather than a costʊan investment that will be financially beneficial for society in the long run in terms of the reduction in costs for downstream services such as welfare, health, and crime prevention and incarceration needed by the students currently not well served by education. Where the funding is to come from is a major debating point. Elmore (2004) suggests there is substantial evidence that there is considerable money available in most system-level budgets that could be used to finance large-scale improvements that use professional development effectively. He is in no doubt that the money is there. That, he says, is the good news. The bad news is that “[i]t’s already been spent on something else” (p. 123) and the money has most probably been allocated to programmes that do not focus on improving student achievement. He maintains that the question is not one of funding, but of the will to reallocate funding to programmes that have a demonstrated track record of success. Supporting Schools to Reform their Organisational Structures The recent evaluation (Hindle, Marshall, Higgins, & Tait-McCutcheon, 2007) of the role of in-school facilitators in effectively implementing professional development 111

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found that these skilled and knowledgeable people are essential to support the implementation and sustainability of educational reform programmes. Drawing on two case study projects, Te Kauhua and Te Kotahitanga, Hindle et al., (2007) found that at the school level it is essential that a permanent position of professional development facilitator becomes confirmed within project schools so as to sustain the gains made. Hindle et al., (2007) drawing on Fullan (2005), Hall and Hord (2006) and Hargreaves (2006), suggest that policy makers should identify effective reform initiatives through robust qualitative and quantitative means and then continue to support these initiatives on an ongoing basis so that they become normal and embedded into the system and culture of the schools. Just as schools are funded for maths teachers and guidance counsellors, so too there needs to be an allocated fund for professional development facilitators so that teacher capacity building remains ongoing. Hall and Hord (2006) and McLaughlin and Mitra (2001) go further and suggest that removal of the funding and materials from those responsible for educational reform within the schools (e.g., from the in-school professional development facilitators) will mean the end of the project and the waste of all the money expended on the project. McLaughlin and Mitra suggest that “[m]aking provision for the resources necessary to sustain a reform effort is a ‘bottom line’ reformers need to negotiate at the outset with the implementing site or with funders” (p. 305). These findings indicate that the development of a cadre of professional developers within schoolsʊrather than at present, where they are externalʊwill become a necessary feature of schools’ staffing entitlement in the near future. Just as classroom teachers have been joined by, among others, guidance counsellors, social workers, RTLBs and teacher aides, professional staff developers will be among the next group of support staff that will need to be added to the staffing entitlements of schools because, as Elmore (2004) and Guskey (2005) explain, change in teaching practice is incremental and teachers need ongoing support to work through the steps in implementing reform practices in line with reform principles. The necessity for ongoing in-school professional development support is illustrated by Elmore (2004). He observed a guided reading programme in which, although the intervention itself was being implemented successfully, there was little coherence with the work the target students were doing when they were not in the programme. In other words, the intervention was not successful in a cumulative sense, and despite initial student gains the results soon went flat. Clearly the next step was to “increase the level of intensity, cognitive demand, and coherence for all students” (p. 239). However, expecting teachers to consistently identify and rectify this problem on their own is problematic, for as Elmore noted, it often takes another pair of eyes to see what the teacher or principal just cannot see because they are busy solving the current problem rather than identifying the next one. Just as with students in classrooms, all learners become more powerful in their learning when a barrier or problem is identified for them and knowledge and/or skills about how they might address the problem are either provided or co-constructed with them. Hence the need for the initial intervention to morph into something that will allow teachers to continue 112

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to grow. To do so requires ongoing professional development support, and this support needs to be staffed adequately. The message for national policy makers is that once a reform project is proven to be successful in addressing the goals that were established in the first place, then it is important to see it as an integral part of schooling and no longer as an adjunct. In effect, system-level support is needed for the development, at both national and school levels, of what St John (2002) terms the “improvement infrastructure”. In this way, the project becomes a programmeʊa normal part of what schools are funded to provide to their communities. The message is clear: unless this essential step takes place, unless the project becomes funded as part of the normal part of schools’ ongoing core business, then the project and its goals will always remain peripheral to schools’ business, and the national goals of addressing educational disparitiesʊlet alone the education debtʊwill always remain as goals and will never be realised. 4. Leadership: Accountability and Capacity Building According to Fullan (2007), governments can support the development of systemic leadership by promoting accountability, providing incentives (such as pressure and supports) and/or fostering capacity building, and it is getting the right balance between these three approaches to policy development that is crucial to supporting large-scale reform. He, along with Elmore (2004) and Guskey (2005), argue that systems that promote accountability and/or provide incentives at the expense of capacity building are systems that do not see successful educational reform. In the US, No Child Left Behind, an accountability-heavy policy, was legislated for in 2002. As part of No Child Left Behind all states were required to establish a series of annual standardised reading and mathematics tests for Grades 3 through to 8, and reading and mathematics tests in Grades 10, 11 or 12. Tests are to be administered to at least 95 percent of all students enrolled in each grade level. The legislation requires that each school demonstrates annually adequate progress according to a set of targets that are predetermined by the policy. If a school fails to meet these targets, there is a sequence of consequences, culminating in their being placed in a “restructuring” category after year 5, when they may be closed down or merged with a more successful school. There are a number of problems with such approaches to national testing. Fullan (2007) reports that so much time is taken at the school and classroom level complying with assessments for students to measure their proficiency in terms of the goals set by No Child Left Behind that there is “little time left for doing the actual work of improvement” (p. 241). However, more problematic is the situation where an external accountability scheme does not allow for building the capacity of the staff to learn how to undertake the “work of improvement”. As Elmore (2004) argues, no external accountability scheme can succeed in the absence of internal (school-level) accountability, which he defines as “the capacity (knowledge, skills, resources) of the entity for individual and collective responsibility to engage in daily improvement practices” 113

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(p. 241). In other words, an overemphasis on accountability systems seriously underestimates the importance of the need for school-based capacity building. Indeed, capacity building needs to precede accountability, or at least be part of a dialogue, with a realistic time frame so that both can be present. Elmore (2004) and Fullan (2007) are both very critical of policies that promote accountability-focused systems, the latter author reporting that in the US “the gap between high and low performance has widened since 2000, precisely the opposite of what [No Child Left Behind ] so forcefully intended” (p. 242). What is essential in New Zealand is that we learn from these experiences and do not introduce policies of national testing for students that are not supported by appropriate capacity-building programmes. Fullan (2007) also warns of the tendency over the past decades of governments to implement centralised high-stakes accountability systems without providing for appropriate supportive capacity building linked to results. Such scenarios have not produced ownership. Capacity building as a means of guiding and directing people’s work “is carried out in a highly interactive professional learning setting. All else is clutter. Policies need to be aligned to minimize distractions and mobilize resources for continuous improvement” (p. 263). 5. Spread From their detailed examination of a number of large-scale reform projects in North America, Glennan et al., (2004) distil some general lessons that can be learnt about producing widespread, deep and lasting educational reform. The first point they make is that “No matter the target of reforms or the design construct, the scale-up process is necessarily iterative and complex and requires the support of multiple actors. This is likely to remain so for the foreseeable future” (p. 647). Secondly, from an examination of the core tasks for scaling up the respective reforms in their study, they identified that “If the scale-up is to succeed, the actors involvedʊincluding developers, district officials, school leaders, and teachersʊmust jointly address a set of known, interconnected tasks, especially aligning policies and infrastructure in coherent ways to sustain practice” (p. 648). In other words, as Datnow and Stringfield (2000) also identified, collaboration between policy funders, researchers and practitioners in an iterative process of interaction, feedback and adaptation is part of the wider picture that supports the sustainability of theory-based educational reforms. Communities of Practice These authors are describing what Wenger (1998) terms a “community of practice”, which is a community of practitioners who share practice and understanding in order to be effective in certain specified domains. Surrounding community practices are boundaries across which “brokers” may transfer understanding and procedures. In this light, the education system may itself be conceptualised as comprising a “constellation” of communities bound together by the overall institutional enterprise(s), and 114

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in this way achieve transfer between the various groups in ways that foster a collective response to MƗori and national aspirations for effective educational reform for MƗori students at all levels of the system. Wenger, McDermott and Snyder (2002, as cited in Wearmouth and Berryman, 2009) define “communities of practice” as: groups of people who share a concern, a set of problems, or a passion about a topic, and who deepen their knowledge and expertise in this area by interacting on an ongoing basis … These people … meet because they find value in their interactions. As they spend time together, they typically share information, insight and advice … They discuss their situations, their aspirations and their needs. They ponder common issues, explore ideas … They may create tools … manuals and other documentsʊor they may simply develop a tacit understanding that they share … However they accumulate knowledge, they become informally bound by the value that they find in learning together. This value … accrues in the personal satisfaction of knowing colleagues who understand each other’s perspectives … Over time, they develop a unique perspective on their topic as well as a body of common knowledge, practices, and approaches. They also develop personal relationships and established ways of interacting. They may even develop a common sense of identity. (pp. 4–5) Communities of practice are “important places of negotiation, learning, meaning and identity” (Wenger, 1998, p. 133). Successful communities support their own members to address the wider aims of the community. For individuals, community membership can offer access to expertise in the core function and purpose of that community, confidence in approach to problems and challenges, and a sense of purpose and belonging to both the community and the institution. Schools cannot thrive where students are not clear about the way in which they as individuals will benefit, because they will make no personal investment. Similarly, at a system level, unless all are involved in a reciprocal, iterative manner then ownership of the reform is unlikely. Schools as institutions can do a lot to create the kind of context in which communities of practice can thrive: overtly valuing their knowledge production and learning, giving them resources (including time), encouraging participation in community work, integrating such communities into the institution, and enabling their voices to be heard in decision-making at the top level. Combining the needs of students (and staff and the local community) and schools is crucial in the knowledge that institutions succeed if they engage the creativity and strengths of their own stakeholders. System-wide communities of practice are those that gather round a common agenda, share understanding and practices that go towards the effective application of the reform in question and also go beyond the specific project to both co-construct new policies and practices in other areas. It is through the actions of such communities that Coburn’s (2003) normative coherence (i.e., spreading the reform norms, beliefs and principles within schools and beyond) may be achieved. 115

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6. Evidence to Enable Collaborative Formative Problem Solving and Decision Making Different forms of assessment of learning and behaviour in schools produce evidence that can reinforce or undermine the motivation of students to strive for future achievement. Assessment practices can affect students’ sense of themselves as having the potential to be effective, and so student achievement may be constructed and/or constrained by the forms of assessment used (Murphy, 2002). Assessments should therefore acknowledge the importance of students being able to develop positive learning identities. There is a strong argument for assessment whose prime purpose is formative and designed to offer constructive support towards achieving competence. There is also a need to acknowledge that learning takes place in multiple localities (Gee, 2000; Street, 1993), which means that processes that seek to assess the learning and behaviour of students need to take into account students’ real-life experiences. This emphasis implies a broader conceptualisation of what needs to be assessed beyond simply the characteristics of the individual learner and what has been achieved over a particular period of time. If evidence is to effectively inform educational reform, assessments need to be responsive to the different knowledge, experiences and cultural understanding within the diverse communities in which students live and are educated. Therefore, we need to question whether some government-supported assessment policies and practices serve to keep students in a marginalised position. Some of the assumptions associated with the identification of individual difficulties in learning through norm-referenced testing intrinsically contradict notions of inclusion. For example, statistical, norm-referenced tests often lead to deterministic views of ability and a resulting restriction in expectations of achievement for some student groups. This identification of a few problem students results in the reproduction of underprivileged groups in society. Furthermore, poor scores on normative tests are often associated with blaming student attributes rather than opening up discussion about amending pedagogy to support learning and behaviour. Access to available resources and the need to determine eligibility for additional services (special educational provision) are typically argued as the need for norm-referenced assessments. Such assessments are designed to compare individual students’ achievement against that of their peers (Cline, 1992). Standardised tests such as these reflect a view of intelligence as an innate capacity, which is assumed to be randomly distributed throughout populations. Norm-referenced tests of ability and attainment can “determine selectively the way in which issues are discussed and solutions proposed” (Broadfoot, 1996, p. x). However, the underlying assumption discounts a view of students as having the potential to achieve very highly given the right learning opportunities. The influence of psychometric approaches to measuring human achievement can therefore lend support to deterministic views of ability and achievement. Goldberg and Morrison (2003) warn of the harmful effects of using standardised tests if these are not well managed and if teachers do not have an in-depth understanding of their uses and pitfalls. They warn that teachers must understand the statistical concepts necessary to interpret test results, must be able to interpret 116

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results within the context of other data, and must work in an environment in which such results are taken seriously. They argue that the judicious use of standardised testing is more likely to occur where there is a strong professional community which examines data “with a good mix of curiosity and scepticism” (Goldberg & Morrison, 2003, p. 73). Unless teachers are provided with appropriate learning opportunities to understand how these mechanisms work, such views can limit teachers’ expectations of what to expect of certain students, which in turn restricts the future contributions of these students. In this regard, Tomlinson (1988) argues that, for some students from poor or disadvantaged backgrounds, lowered expectations can lead to a reproduction of underprivileged groups in schools and society. The function that such assessment practices serve in maintaining the power of the privileged and dominant groups in society may be interpreted as a powerful determining factor in explaining their continued use. A similar problem is that of measuring MƗori students against progress made by non-MƗori students, especially those in the same class. Durie (1995) warns that to measure MƗori progress against non-MƗori is to perpetuate non-MƗori being seen as the norm, the standard against which all others are to be measured, ignoring the advantage that non-MƗori students have had over MƗori during their entire education. He suggests that MƗori student progress should be seen against their peer group. However, this continues to beg the question of how we are to address disparities if we do not make wider comparisons. In Bourdieu and Passeron’s (1973) terms, such practices are the means by which schools help to reproduce the patterns of control and subordination within society which are linked to the economic context. The rhetoric of education to promote equality is not supported by the reality that the system of education functions to maintain the children of underprivileged groups in powerless positions in society. Seen from this perspective, “success” and “failure” are social categories whose labels serve the vested interests of dominant, powerful groups in society. However, they are not simply givens; rather, some students’ lack of achievement in the education system may be understood as a function of the societal, economic and political status quo which requires some children to fail in the education system. Learning is “a fundamentally social phenomenon, reflecting our own deeply social nature as human beings capable of knowing” (Wenger, 1998, p. 3). However, the competitive climate encouraged currently by some governments, intent on target setting and narrowly conceived achievement, is in tension with policies that seek to create an inclusive classroom environment where all students have the potential to achieve. Ironically, such conflicting aspirations can be seen in the same policy documents. Assessment can be a powerful contributor to the promotion of effective learning if used in the right way. However, there is little evidence that increasing the amount of testing will enhance learning. Rather, the focus needs to be on helping teachers to use assessment and to promote teaching and learning in ways that will raise the achievement of students. To be successful, learners need to be able to take ownership of their learning, and to understand the goals they are aiming for and the 117

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motivation and skills to achieve success. Ongoing formative assessment can provide teachers with formal and informal opportunities to notice what is happening during learning activities, and to recognise where the learning of individuals and groups of students is going, and how they can help to take that learning further. Formative assessment can generate evidence to enable teachers to ask questions about what they should or can do differently, thus placing teachers in a better position to use their professional knowledge, their knowledge of a range of pedagogical strategies, and evidence about their students’ current knowledge and understanding to be responsive to and connect to students. The focus and process of assessment of students in minority cultures needs to include pedagogical strategies that are culturally safe, responsive and effective. Assessment that does not take cultural sense-making factors into account may lead to inappropriate classifications and, therefore, faulty understanding or interpretation of the problem. It may also lead to educators looking for solutions that try to remedy perceived deficits in individuals and families, rather than solutions that try to remedy deficits in the classroom and school-learning contexts and practices. This in turn can lead to placing individual students in inappropriate and culturally unsafe programmes, with long-term adverse consequences (Wearmouth & Berryman, 2009). Ladson-Billings (1995) points out that attempts by Western European educational professionals to educate children from minority cultures are shaped by theorising about principles such as cultural appropriateness, cultural congruence and cultural compatibility. However, these approaches aim to fit the child (and their communities) into the preconceived educational programme by selecting those cultural aspects of the children’s culture that seem most useful to the educator. Ladson-Billings seeks instead to operate from the principle of cultural responsiveness, a concept that reflects the need to respond to minority culture values, needs and preferences, acknowledges the legitimacy of practices in the child’s background, and adapts the programme to the child. 7. Ownership There are two major implications for government policy from this analysis. The first is that in order for our country to address the current educational crisis that is afflicting MƗori and that is also affecting the potential of our whole country to realise the aspirations to become a “knowledge” society, there needs to be national ownership of the problem. This would be seen when policy makers intentionally and explicitly maintain the primary focus of educational policy on MƗori student achievement in ways that make sense to MƗori. Policies that promote the whole range covered by the GPILSEO modelʊgoals, pedagogies, institutions, leadership, spread and evidenceʊneed to demonstrate national-level ownership. Evaluation and support of the potential benefit of any proposed action should be undertaken with reference to its impact on MƗori students. The second implication is that policies regarding funding needs to be specific. To address the economic marginalisation of MƗori associated with the education 118

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debt, current government policies such as that outlined in Ka Hikitia (Ministry of Education, 2008), to “realise MƗori potential”, need to be amended to set specific government funding targets for outcomes for MƗori. The Government has been able to set specific dates and has allocated specific resources (albeit limited) to see an end to the process of addressing historical grievances under the Treaty of Waitangi. In a similar vein, the Government needs to set specific dates and allocate specific resources in association with its education policy documents to see an end to educational disparities within a set period of time. Current approaches to professional development by the New Zealand Ministry of Education generally run to a short-term funding timetable, where initial funding is provided for a limited period of time, reduced, and then withdrawn. The expectation is that the schools will reprioritise funding to support the long-term implementation and maintenance of the reform from their own resources. The reality is that this rarely happens. Sarason (1990) identifies this as one of the main causes of what he terms “the predictable failure of school reform”; that is, the failure to provide schools with sufficient ongoing funding to support effective reforms in the face of competing claims for limited funding. A number of common outcomes result from this type of policy. The first is that schools shift from reform to reform as the funding becomes available from the central government agency, not one of which is ever embedded to depth in the school. The second is that there is never enough money invested in schools to develop the necessary infrastructure that will allow the reforms to flourish. The third is that there is a lack of opportunities to provide responsive support for schools in a climate that promotes curriculum content reforms such as those that focus on literacy and numeracy. Current government policies that seek to reduce educational disparities through raising the educational achievement of those students who are not currently well served by the education system is a necessary, but far from sufficient, condition for addressing the long-term education debt, as seen in the long-term educational statistics of educational disparities in this country. What is needed is a long-term policy that is not subject to the electoral cycle, one that in Fullan’s (2001) terms provides an expansive rather than a contracting resource base for individual schools, and that seeks to reallocate to MƗori people their fair share of the benefits that our society has to offer. Such a vision needs to be taken on board by the nation as a whole in an approach that goes beyond party politics and the three-year electoral cycle, to acknowledge that beyond the calls of justice, our society and economy cannot survive with an increasing demographic of non-participating young people. In many ways, MƗori people’s future is New Zealand’s future. The questions that stand out for our political leaders are: Who has the courage to take on this challenge? Who has the courage to address the education debt that is owed to MƗori and the nation as a whole? We as a nation have addressed similar “debts” in the past, through the enfranchisement of women in the late 19th century, the establishment of the welfare state in the early 20th century, and affirmative action policies for women in the 1980s. In these areas our nation has been a world leader. We have also had the courage to stand up for our nuclear-free position, we have 119

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ceased whaling, and we join peace-keeping forces rather than armed incursions into the territories of others. We as a nation had the courage to undertake these actions. We now need to call on that courage again to address this long-term debt that will otherwise cripple us as a people and a country unless we attend to it with haste and determination. NOTES 1

2

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5

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This chapter is reproduced with permission from Bishop, O’Sullivan and Berryman (2010) Scaling up Education Reform: Addressing the politics of disparity. Wellington. NZCER Press and Bishop, R., GPILSEO; A model for sustainable educational reform. New Zealand Journal of Educational Studies. 43(2). pp. 47–62. The disparities between our highest- and lowest-achieving students are evident in truancy, suspension, and participation rates, which identify groups that are disengaged from the education system. Young children missing out on the opportunity to participate in quality early childhood education, too many people leaving schools and tertiary education without qualifications, MƗori and Pasifika people and those from low socioeconomic backgrounds receiving less value from education and being overrepresented among students who underachieve, learners with special education needs, and people for whom English is a second language are other groups which evidence suggests are achieving at a lower level than they ought to be. The Ministry of Education is clear in its 2004 document that the first means of addressing educational disparities is quality teaching. “The research is unambiguous—effective teaching is the single biggest influence over a student’s learning and success. Good teaching is powerful and can offset many factors that can exert a negative influence in a student’s life” (Ministry of Education, 2004, p. 5). The second is to support families and communities to play a greater part in the education of their children: “Supportive families and communities are also powerful influences on learning outcomes. The better the formal learning environment respects and affirms the learner’s home environment and community, and incorporates this into the learning process, the higher the level of likely achievement” (p. 5). The third means of improving learning outcomes is to support quality providers that are first and foremost focused on student achievement: “We need to help create a culture of professional debate and provide professional support that helps make a real difference for students” (p. 5). Te Kotahitanga is a large-scale, theory-based educational reform, funded by the New Zealand Government which aims at reducing educational disparities for indigenous students. It is currently being implemented in 50 secondary schools in New Zealand. However, currently there are no structured ways of introducing the best evidence synthesis documents themselves into schools other than simply posting them out and providing lectures on their content. Part of the irony of this approach is that it is these documents that have synthesised what we know about the approaches that best support teacher learning. There is a need to use this knowledge to effectively introduce these publications to schools in ways that best reflect this learning. This figure was reduced to 37 percent by 2007 (Hood, 2008).

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INDEX

A Accountability, xiii, 1, 3–5, 7, 8, 13, 15, 20, 28, 34, 37, 52, 53, 71, 76, 84, 87, 91, 99, 104, 113–114 African–American communities, 6 Agency, 9, 15, 18, 37, 46, 48–50, 52, 59, 61, 62, 70, 91, 93, 107, 119 Agentic, 15, 18, 47, 63, 91, 102 position, xiii, 7, 11, 46, 69 thinking, 49, 65 Ako (reciprocal learning), 35–36 American Indian scholars, 5 A model for scalability, 78–83 Aotearoa/New Zealand, xiii, 2–4, 6, 28, 30, 52, 70, 84 Authorising student experiences, 40

Connectedness, 9, 11, 12, 19, 24, 27, 37, 39 Conscientisation, x, xiii, 7, 31, 33 Context for learning, 9, 10, 51, 54, 61, 63, 64, 68, 69, 71 Counter-narratives, 73 Critical ethnography, 20 Cultural affirmation, 58 Cultural differences, 1, 57 Culturalist position, 49 Culturalist theorists, 48 Culturally-constituted educational intervention, 70 Culturally responsive pedagogies, 49, 84, 85, 104 Culturally responsive pedagogy of relations, xiv, 39, 68, 71, 72, 83, 85 Culturally responsive research, 2, 8–12 Cultural responsiveness, 41, 118 Culture, x, xii, xiv, 1, 2, 4, 7, 9, 12, 17, 20, 21, 25, 33–35, 38, 39, 42, 49–53, 56–60, 62, 68–73, 81–84, 89–93, 97, 99, 101, 102, 106, 109, 110, 112, 118, 120n3 Culture counts, xiv, 38, 39, 70, 91 Current policy frameworks, 105 Cycle of conscientisation, resistance and transformative praxis, 33

B Banking model, 53 Best evidence synthesis programme, 108, 109 Biculturalism, xiii Black box, 49 Black power movement, 22 C Classroom observations, 63, 100 Classroom relationships and interactions, 36 Coburn, C., 76–78, 80, 103 Co-construction meetings, 63 Collaborative formative problem solving and decision making, 84, 87, 104, 116–118 Collaborative storying, xiv, 10, 20–22, 37, 40, 44, 51–58, 70 Colonisation, x, 14, 25, 29n4, 30n6, 59 Colonizing discourse, 25 Communities of practice, 114–115 Concept of discourse, 51–52 Connected knowing, 51

D Deficit theorising, 46, 52, 62, 64, 69, 72, 91 Deficit thinking, 26, 47, 49, 62, 65, 70 Discourse of relationships and classroom interaction patterns, 43 Discourse of structure and systems, 43 Discourse of the child and their home, 42–44 Discursive classrooms, 53–56, 72 131

INDEX

Discursive positions, 47, 71, 108 Discursive repositioning, 48, 49 Distributed leadership, 81, 83, 84, 86, 92, 101 Diverse student populations, xiv Diversity, xiv, 4, 5, 8, 35, 52 Diversity within MƗori peoples, 8 Dominant discourse on selfdetermination, 32 E Educational reform, xiii, xv, 40, 47, 49, 60, 75–78, 82, 89, 91, 94, 96, 98–100, 103, 107, 109–114, 116, 120n4 Education counts website, xi Effective leadership of sustainable educational reform, 89 Effective teaching profile, 10, 63–66, 71 Epistemological version of validity, xiii, 24 Ethnic revitalization movement, 6 F Formative assessment processes, 70 Freire, P., 72 G GEPRISP model, 61 Goal setting, 38, 84, 90, 93, 94, 104 GPILSEO, 79, 80, 88, 89, 92, 100, 118 at the classroom level, 83 at the school level, 83 at the system level, 84, 104 Grounded theory, 21 H Hattie, J., 104 Hegemony, 6, 22, 29n4, 31, 54, 72 Heshusius, L., 11, 12, 19, 26, 27 Hispanic schools, 50 Hui, 12, 16, 17, 20, 24, 25, 30n6, 30n7, 30n8, 33, 35, 62, 63 132

I IBRLA model, xiii Ideology of cultural superiority, 2, 4 Improvement infrastructure, 113 In-depth, semi-structured, interviews as conversations, 44 Indigenous education, ix Indigenous people, xiv, 2–6, 8, 25, 26, 28, 28n2, 30n6, 33, 46, 103 aspirations for self-determination, 32 epistemologies, xiii Indigenous position of selfdetermination, 32 Indigenous researchers, 5, 6, 22 Initiation, x, xiii, 1, 3–5, 7, 8, 20, 28, 34, 37, 52, 53, 58, 71 Initiative-tis, 111 In-school professional development, 96, 112 Insiders/outsiders, 4 Institutional and organisational framework, 88 Institutionalisation, 78, 80, 96, 102, 110–113 Interaction, x, xiv, 9, 13, 19, 33–41, 43, 46, 47, 49–53, 55, 57, 58, 60–72, 76, 83–92, 94, 98, 100, 104, 106, 107, 109, 110, 114, 115 Interactive feedback sessions, 63 J Judge Andrew Becroft, xi K Kaupapa, x, xiii, xiv, 1–41, 44, 52, 58, 60, 61, 70, 73, 73n1 Kaupapa (collective vision, philosophy, agenda), 37–38 Kaupapa MƗori pedagogy, x, 64, 72 Kaupapa MƗori research, x, xiii, xiv, 6–12, 14, 17, 19, 24, 25, 27, 29, 39, 70 Knowledge-in-action, 34, 35, 53, 57

INDEX

Knowledge-out-of-context, 35, 53 Kura Kaupapa MƗori (MƗori medium schools), 29n5, 31, 33, 36, 60 L Ladson-Billings, G., 105, 106 Leadership, 15, 78, 79, 81, 83, 84, 86, 88–90, 92–97, 99–102, 104, 113–114, 118 Leadership: accountability and capacity building, 113–114 Learning is interactive and dialogic, xiv, 39, 70 Learning relationships, ix, 35, 38, 42, 59, 63, 66, 91, 110 Legitimacy, xiii, 3–4, 7, 23, 40, 118 Legitimation, 1, 4, 5, 7, 9, 20–22, 28, 34, 37, 53, 58, 64, 67, 71 M MƗori cultural metaphors, xiii, xiv, 18 MƗori discursive practices, 13, 15, 17, 35, 53, 58 MƗori-medium education, xii MƗori people’s concerns about research, 2–4 MƗori research, ix, x, xiii–xv, 1–4, 6–8, 11–14, 17, 19, 24–27, 29, 39, 70 MƗori sense making processes, xiv, 9, 20, 35, 38, 39, 41, 52, 53, 58, 71–73, 91 Marginalization of MƗori students in mainstream classrooms, ix Metaphoric whanau, 15, 16, 25, 36 Ministry of social development, xii Minoritised, x, xii–xv, 1, 46, 59, 62, 75, 84 Multiculturalism, xii, 29n2 N Narrative approach, 20–22 Narratives, xiv, 10, 14, 19, 25, 29n6, 40–45, 48, 51, 52, 58, 61–63, 66, 70–73, 81

National Education Monitoring Project (NEMP), 108 Neo-colonial discourses, 25 Neo-colonial dominance in research, 1–30 Neo-colonial domination in public school classrooms, 31–73 Neo-colonial hegemonies, 70 Neo-colonial oppression, xiii Neurophilosophy, xii No child left behind, 113–114 Non-deficit thinking, 49, 65 Non-indigenous researchers, 5 Non-MƗori researchers, 2, 25, 26 O Objectivity, 3, 22, 25, 26 Ontario Literacy and Numeracy Strategy, 111 Oppressed peoples, ix Othering, 19, 26 P Paradigm shifts, 8, 25, 26, 58, 110 Participant-driven research, 14 Participatory and collaborative action research, 14 Participatory consciousness, 26 Pathologising practices, 62, 70 Pathologising theories and practices, 46 Patriarchy, 22 Pedagogic or instructional leadership, 89, 92, 101 Pedagogic reform, 59, 94, 107 Pedagogic relationships and interactions, 89, 94, 100, xiv Pedagogy of hope, xiv Pedagogy of power sharing, 34, 50 Positivist, 23, 25, 26 Post-positivist, 23 Power imbalances, 2, 22, 37, 40, 49, 52, 59, 60, 62, 91 Power is shared, 39, 70, xiv 133

INDEX

Power relations, 1, 2, 6, 18, 22, 27, 32, 34, 39, 51, 53, 54, 56, 71 Powhiri, 16, 30n8, 33 Preservice teacher education programmes, 110 Professional developers within schools, 112 Professional learning communities, 95, 96, 100, 102, 110 Progress at school (1991), 60 PSIRPEG, 63, 78, 98 Q Qualities of effective leadership, 92, 93 Questions in teaching and learning, 56–58 R Racialised social context, 59 Racism, xiii, 24, 26 Rangatiratanga: relative autonomy/ self determination, 33–34 Relational discourses, xiii Relational theory, 61 Relational trust, 90–92 Representation, xiii, 1, 3–5, 7–10, 20, 24, 25, 28, 29n2, 34, 35, 37, 39, 41, 44, 52, 53, 58, 71 Research, ix–xi, xiii–xv, 1–30, 36–39, 43, 44, 52–54, 56, 58, 59, 62, 70, 71, 83, 84, 86, 88, 90, 98, 103, 104, 108–110, 114, 120n3 Researching with respect, 2 Research issues of initiation, benefits, representation, legitimacy and accountability, xiii, 5, 7, 8 Research metaphors, 24 Response ability, 69 Responsive structural reform, 77 S Scaling up, xv, 75, 76, 114, 120n1 Scaling up theory-or principle-based reforms, 76 134

School mix, 59 Self-determination (tino rangatiratanga), 7, 9 Self determination of MƗori, xiv, 10, 40, 63 Self-determination within nondominating relations of interdependence, 34, 40, 70 Shadow-coaching, 63, 98 Sidorkin, A.M., 19, 22, 39, 59 Sleeter, C., 22, 48, 58, 75, 106, 129 Smart tools, 98, 108, 109 Smith, G.H., 31, 33, 59, 60, 106 Smith, L.T., 3, 5–7, 106 Smithfield, 60 Social pathology research, 2, 4 Spiral discourse, 16–17, 19, 22, 37, 44 Spread, xv, 78, 79, 81, 84, 86, 88, 89, 96, 97, 101, 104, 114, 115, 118 Standardised tests, 81, 116 Stimulated recall interviews, 9 Structuralist position, 49, 59, 60, 84 Subjectivities/objectives, 25–27 Sustainability, 76, 78, 81, 82, 85–87, 94, 100, 101, 110, 112, 114 Systemic support for pedagogic reform, 107–110 T Taonga tuku iho (cultural aspirations), 34–35 Tapu, 16, 18, 24, 30n8, 33, 35 Te Hoe Nuku Roa, 8 Te Kohanga Reo (MƗori medium pre-schools), 29n5, 31 Te Kotahitanga: Improving the educational achievement of MƗori students in Mainstream schools, 10, 39 Testimonios, 26 Te Toi Huarawa: Effective teachers and learning in total immersion MƗori language settings, 9

INDEX

Te Whare Wananga O Awanuiarangi, xv The education debt, 104–107, 113, 119 The effective teaching profile, 63–73 Theories of practice, 47, 58–61, 71, 83, 85 Theory-based reforms, 76, 77, 104 Theory or principle-based educational reforms, ix, 75–77, 109, 110, 114, 120n4 The professional development process, 61–63, 78, 88 The role of policy in reducing educational disparities, 103 The Treaty of Waitangi, x, 2, 7–9, 28n2, 29n3, 29n5, 32, 119 Traditional/discursive classrooms, 53–56 Traditional method classroom, 54, 55 Transformative leadership, 89

W Waananga MƗori (MƗori tertiary institutions), 29, 31 Western-defined research, 17 Whakawhanaungatanga as a Kaupapa MƗori research approach, 12–13 Whakawhanaungatanga: Collaborative Research Stories, 8 WhƗnau, x WhƗnau: (extended family), 30, 36–37 Whanaungatanga, 12, 24, 29, 29n6, 36 WhƗnau of interest, 15, 16, 21, 25, 37 WhƗnau relationships, 12, 13, 36–38 Whare Kura (MƗori-medium secondary schools), 29, 31 Whare Waananga (MƗori-medium tertiary institution), 29

V Vicarious experiences, 48, 61, 98, 101

Y Young, R., 54, 55, 57

135