Curriculum Matters 7: 2011

In New Zealand the majority of students attend schools that reflect the dominant mainstream context, yet these schools include indigenous Māori and learners from diverse cultural and language backgrounds. By building on contemporary cultural knowledge and students’ own experiences, the arts have the potential to enhance educational outcomes for a diverse student population. This research examines the effects of an intensive programme of teacher professional development in culturally responsive pedagogies on classroom activities and learning experiences in the arts. The results reveal varying levels of implementation, with consequent effects on the teaching and  learning process for students. The implications of these findings are discussed with reference to the literature on arts integration and how the arts can build on students’ cultural knowledge and experiences.

This paper views key competencies through a sociocultural lens to discuss the role they have played as agents of change in The New Zealand Curriculum and their as yet unrealised potential to stimulate further change. It draws on several exploratory studies to describe broad types of action and change which the key competencies have afforded, tracing several recursive cycles of professional learning during which understanding of the role key competencies might play in curriculum change became elaborated in deeper and more nuanced ways.

Currently, the Māori word hauora is translated in New Zealand curricula as health and wellbeing or as health and physical education for Māori-medium education. “Hauora, wellbeing” is also an underlying concept within Health and Physical Education in the New Zealand Curriculum, where it is claimed that it offers a “Māori philosophy of health unique to New Zealand”. The use of Māori words and concepts in English-medium curricula is a source of tension, in as much as this usage involves a claim to represent a shared Māori perspective. Understandings of hauora need to go beyond their simplified interpretations within curricula.

In November 2007, changes to the New Zealand curriculum were published, with an expectation that schools would fully implement these changes by February 2010 (Schagen, 2011, p. 1). Among the changes were aspects that encouraged greater recognition of an entrepreneurial orientation. We set out to gauge the understanding preservice teachers have of entrepreneurship. We found divergent perspectives on whether entrepreneurship is more closely associated with economic processes and commercial activity, or can be more broadly applied to subject areas such as the arts, languages and music. However, a consistent finding across all groups was that preservice teachers are unaware of the requirement to teach entrepreneurship across the curriculum. Teaching entrepreneurship was seen as a “bolt on” subject and not as embedded in current subject matter. This indicates a lack of familiarity with the intent of the revised New Zealand curriculum, which has made it clear that teachers are expected to encourage New Zealand school students to have an entrepreneurial outlook.

The Ministry of Education is endeavouring to build an education system that is responsive to the challenges of the 21st century. This includes revising the school curriculum and a major investment in programmes of research and development. This paper examines the discourses relating to diversity and education that have become embedded in the very foundations of national education policy and subsequent practice. These are often assumed to be unproblematic and go uncontested, but this paper identifies a (dis)array of ideas and understandings, and argues that these arise from a lack of conceptual clarity. This has implications for decision making by implementers of policy, which can serve to restrict (rather than enhance) their efforts to improve the effectiveness of teaching and learning, particularly for groups of learners the education system has under-served.