In July 2015 Alfriston College—a Year 9–13 secondary school—was successful in winning funding from the Teacher Led Innovation Fund. Karyn White led the school’s inquiry and Rosemary Hipkins supported the in-school team with advice about research processes as needed. In this short article Karyn describes one aspect of what the ...

Developing activities which are effective in assessing what counts in social studies and showing progress is challenging for social-studies teachers. In this article, we explore the three dimensions of the social studies learning area which were identified in the Nature of Social Studies (NSS) scale developed by the National Monitoring ...

In Aotearoa New Zealand we need an informed educational response to the environmental crisis within and across all learning areas in the curriculum. One way of organising that response is through the concept of eco-literacy. This article explains the concept of eco-literacy developed within the TLRI project Tuhia ki Te ...

An important aim of the Tuhia ki Te Ao—Write to the Natural World project is to investigate ways in which the cultural and ecological perspectives of Māori can be recognised and developed within literacy practices in secondary schools. In this article we propose four significant aspects to engaging with Māori ...

Tuhia ki Te Ao—Write to the Natural World is a Teaching and Learning Research Initiative-funded research project that considers what it might mean to read and write about/to/for the natural world within the secondary school context. This article explores ways in which students communicate a relationship and kinship with the ...

This article describes and discusses a unit of work taught by Maria Iki, a Social Sciences teacher at James Cook High School in South Auckland. The unit was taught as part of the TLRI project Tuhia ki Te Ao—Write to the Natural World. The project is concerned to develop students’ ...

In a time of environmental crisis we need a language to speak for nature. In our TLRI project Tuhia ki Te Ao—Write to the Natural World, we have been working with teachers to develop “3D literacy” practices responsive to both culture and environment and located in a rich language and ...

New Zealand has faced an unprecedented series of disaster events in recent years. The Canterbury earthquakes provided an opportunity to document the role that schools played in supporting their communities to respond to and recover from such events. It is important that we capture what we have learnt from these ...

This article stems from a 2016 research project that examined the leadership experiences of 20 primary principals in greater Christchurch. The study was based on the belief that the nature of successful leadership needs to change in a post-disaster setting. The article focuses on what principals learned about leadership from ...