Editorial
E te whānau ō tēnei hautaka, ngā mihi o Matariki ki a koutou. Nau mai haere mai ki tēnei rerenga tuarua a Set 2020. Greetings to you all. Pūanga and Matariki have risen and the Māori new year has begun. It is a pleasure to welcome Set readers to Issue 2 at this time of celebration, reflection, and renewal.
This winter will forever be associated with a sense of collective gratitude. Before moving to Alert Levels 2 and 3 in August, New Zealand celebrated Matariki as a nation free of COVID-19 along with empathy for those less fortunate; families suffering job losses, relocation, stresses, illness and death, both within and beyond our borders. As a country we have become more insular. Less interconnected—at least physically—with the globalised world. To me, the inward focus encourages New Zealanders, particularly non-Māori, to reflect on how lucky we are to be here and on what basis our forebears arrived. It coaxes us to live more in sync with the natural world, with maramataka Māori,1 and with one another.
Issue 2 is populated with articles about students being encouraged to get out into their communities and to understand who and what has come before. Part of the picture concerns the need for educators to find the time and space to look within, to reach out to their communities, and to take on roles that may not have been asked of them before. Issue 2 covers the work of school leaders, teachers, and external educators in bringing about an authentic curriculum—a curriculum embedded in each school’s cultural and physical context, offering a sense of belonging and challenge to everybody involved.
He Rangahau Whakarāpopoto provides a summary of Carol Mutch’s local and international research on schooling post-crisis. She draws from past events to support educators’ response to COVID-19. Schools play a crucial role due to their “historical, social, and cultural ties with the families in their neighbourhoods and beyond” (p. 5). Schools act as first responders, community connectors, and crisis managers. When taking up these roles many teachers and school leaders readily sacrifice their own health and wellbeing for the greater good. Carol sees a need for pre-event training with ongoing support. She calls for greater acknowledgement of the pressure crises place on teachers and school leaders, believing that the crucial role schools play is too often overlooked. Her research summary also covers research into “post-trauma emotional processing for children” (p. 8), with emphasis on imaginative, arts-based, and participatory projects. According to Carol’s crisis cycle, recovery can take longer than expected. For further research about principals’ experiences of leading through New Zealand’s first COVID-19 lockdown, we will pre-release an article by Kate Thornton in Set Online First.
Key strategies for successful school change are outlined in the two articles in Set’s Teaching and Learning section. Linda Bendikson and colleagues consider how school leaders can collaborate with staff and boards of trustees to set goals and monitor school-wide progress. Three strategies helped schools to effectively collect, track, and act upon data, ultimately leading to improved equity in student outcomes in their study schools. Sarah Keehan and Dianne Forbes explore collaborative teaching, and address implications for school leaders. Collaborative teaching is described as “actively working together as partners in every aspect of planning, teaching, and assessment” (p. 19), although a range of approaches and relationships operate across schools. Five keys to make collaborative partnerships successful are drawn from three schools.
New Zealanders have freedom of movement within the country under Alert Level 1 in a world hard-hit by COVID-19. Not only can students attend school, teachers are permitted to take students offsite into their communities and further afield. Issue 2’s focus section explores education outside the classroom (EOTC). Sophie Watson and her cross-university team recently completed New Zealand’s largest study of EOTC. Their article shows that “schools continue—despite many challenges—to champion EOTC and thus enrich both the curriculum and the lives of our students” (p. 26). For every barrier raised, a potential solution is offered. EOTC enables students to “connect more deeply with their local places and communities” (p. 26). Chris Eames and Claudio Aguayo’s study looks at how EOTC sites connect to students’ lives and learning. Mobile digital technology was used to build a bridge between a marine reserve visitor centre and the classroom. Mixed-reality tools enhanced students’ ecoliteracy far beyond the trip itself. Such technology may also safeguard EOTC learning plans if, under COVID-19, students become blocked from trips or even from school.
Just as there are obligations associated with maintaining our freedom to trip around within the nation, so too are there obligations associated with living in Aotearoa under the Treaty of Waitangi. The latter requires acknowledging our histories and upholding mana ōrite2 in our learning programmes. Liana MacDonald is part of a Marsden Fund project, He Taonga Te Wareware? Remembering and Forgetting Difficult Histories in Aotearoa/New Zealand. Her article is titled “Teaching the New Zealand Wars: Iwi- and hapū-led histories”. She shares her observations of how a Pākehā museum educator led a senior secondary class on a fieldtrip to Rangiaowhia, a Ngāti Apakura community that experienced “one of the most horrific acts of violence in the Waikato Wars” (p. 39). Through a partnership between Ngāti Apakura and the museum, the EOTC educator was entrusted to share the hapū’s experience. The article is timely given recent debates about colonial statues and partial histories, as well as the new requirement for all schools to teach New Zealand history by 2022.
For some teachers, the requirement to teach history will mark the first time they have had to navigate local history and build relationships with mana whenua. Building critical consciousness around one’s own identity, in relation to the positioning of Māori and non-Māori from 1840 to today, will help teachers to support students’ learning. One path that teachers have taken to explore the impact of their own and others’ cultural identities in teaching and learning is Poutama Pounamu. The programme, led by Mere Berryman, is an iterative development of Te Kotahitanga and Kia Eke Panuku. Teacher Melissa Corlett reflects on her journey through Poutama Pounamu in our practitioner inquiry section. She candidly shares how she came to recognise Pākehā privilege and her personal responsibility to disrupt the status quo. Melissa is building towards a future where Māori students, indeed all students, experience a deep sense of cultural belonging in their learning environments. She has begun to appreciate what it really means for Māori to achieve excellence as Māori on equitable measures of success.
We return to the pressures of COVID-19 and the recent shift to Alert Levels 2 and 3 in Assessment News. Charles Darr and Rosemary Hipkins explore opportunities to shake up common assessment practices given that we can no longer assume that school gates will remain open. They encourage teachers to make the most of evidence that can be generated from everyday self-directed learning. Emphasis is placed on how to collect evidence and moderate it appropriately.
August also marked the introduction of the Education and Training Act 2020, including its new objective for school boards to give effect to Te Tiriti o Waitangi through a clear set of expectations. The Treaty of Waitangi, also as a key principle in The New Zealand Curriculum (Ministry of Education, 2007), counts on education to help protect our bicultural and multicultural identity and to strengthen our integrity as a nation. I trust that the current is flowing in the right direction. I hope that in this new Māori year teachers will be supported to harness international and national events, and to coordinate with others outside of their school, to proactively guide students towards proud citizenship. The unique role that teachers play, and the huge sense of responsibility they feel towards their students and communities, could be seen so clearly in how children and whānau were welcomed back to school after the nationwide lockdown in May and the reset from Auckland’s Alert Level 3 in August. Along with gratitude and celebration it is a fitting time to renew commitments to reconciliation.
Kia tau te rangimārie ki a koutou kātoa. Ngā mihi manaakitanga ō te tau hou.
Josie Roberts
Set Editor
Notes
References
Berryman, M., Lawrence, D., and Lamont, R. (2018). Cultural relationships for responsive pedagogy: A bicultural mana ōrite perspective. Set: Research Information for Teachers, (1), 3–10. https://doi.org/10.18296/set.0096
Ministry of Education. (2007). The New Zealand Curriculum. Learning Media.