This article describes the journey of a Māori early childhood centre towards an assessment framework that embeds Māori epistemologies, ideas of valued learning and cultural norms and understandings.

In the first edition of Politics in the Playground, Dr Helen May chronicled the ups and downs of early childhood in postwar New Zealand, including both periods of significant growth and change. She deftly wove an historical and cultural narrative of attitudes, ideas, events, campaigns, personalities and policies related ...

This article examines the status of Te Ātiawa histories of place in Port Nicholson Block secondary schools’ history classes. It describes the research participants’ experiences of cultural continuity and discontinuity experienced in familial and secondary school settings when learning about the past. It also describes their history topic preferences, and ...

The study reported in this article trialled the effectiveness of cases as a teacher-education tool with a class of preservice history teachers. The collaborative critical analyses of cases, in a learning community of peers, enabled the teachers to develop their pedagogical content knowledge for history teaching, and helped them to ...

The integration of Number and Algebra into one strand in The New Zealand Curriculum (Ministry of Education, 2007) raises questions about the relationship between these two branches of mathematics and about suitable approaches to teaching. This article argues that arithmetic and algebra are intimately linked and should not be taught ...

It is likely that 16 percent of the New Zealand population will be Asian by 2026. Asian secondary school students desire more contact with local students; local students are unfamiliar with Asia. Asian students are a rich and largely untapped classroom resource. Could carefully structured classroom tasks with social and ...

This article aims to prompt discussion about thinking in the school curriculum. It begins with a brief exploration of thinking, in which the difficulty of defining and classifying thinking is acknowledged. The notion that the brain is a complex “living” and emerging system is at the core of this. A ...

The experiences of disabled students and the teacher aides who support them in accessing the New Zealand curriculum form the focus of this article, which begins with an overview of the legislative and policy context regarding students’ educational rights. Participants’ experiences are conceptualised as a continuum, in which students may ...

This article compares the 1997 New Zealand social studies curriculum statement with The New Zealand Curriculum, in terms of the location of Pacific knowledge and experience, and argues that teacher decision making is a political process that has become an even stronger determinant for whether or not Pacific topics ...