Set 2020: no. 1

Over a 3-year period (2016–19), four Health and Physical Education teachers from Hobsonville Point Secondary School embarked on a project aimed at making learning more visible for their priority learners. With support from the Teacher-led Innovation Fund, the teachers worked with a group of critical friends—teacher educators, a visible learning expert, and Māori advisors—to develop and implement a range of innovative strategies to make learning more visible. This article backgrounds the… Read more

Pūrākau, or Māori narratives, have shaped the historical accounts of Māori throughout the generations. Yet they have historically been misappropriated, misrepresented, and misinterpreted as “fables” or anecdotes” (Lee, 2008). This article argues that pūrākau remain critical to Māori, as they preserve the cultural repositories of past generations. Not only that, pūrākau offer Māori huge pedagogical potential, as they allow us to transcend time and space (Lee, 2005). Drawing upon research with… Read more

In an exploratory project over 12 months, we investigated the role and impact of online citizen science (OCS) participation in primary school science education in four schools. Our inquiry focused on the potential of participation in online citizen science projects to support development of science capabilities for citizenship, teacher practices in embedding this new paradigm in their science units, and student behaviour when participating using different digital device setups. Our findings… Read more

The first two decades of the 21st century has heralded an unprecedented data revolution increasingly impacting our daily lives. Statistics education must continually update itself to prepare students for this new data-driven world. In this reflection on our research during this time, we discuss how fostering learning from data brought many challenges. We uncovered many gaps in the curriculum and consequently student understanding of the rich network of interconnecting ideas that underpin… Read more

Statistical investigations, a thread within the statistics strand of the mathematics and statistics learning area (Ministry of Education, 2007), are underpinned by the statistical enquiry cycle. As teachers introduce their students to the statistical enquiry cycle, they are supporting their students to become data detectives, posing and answering investigative questions using data. The statistical enquiry cycle in New Zealand schools is based on the PPDAC model. This article explores the… Read more

There is limited research about the experiences of teachers (kaiako) teaching paangarau (mathematics) in a Maaori-medium modern learning environment (MLE). This article presents the views of three kaiako (teachers) as they collaborated with researchers and one another to explore an alternative approach to teaching and learning paangarau with 60 Years 4 to 6 children, while taking advantage of the affordances of their MLE. Key findings from this teacher inquiry project indicate that a… Read more

Teaching Pasifika learners effectively to improve their educational outcomes is an education priority in New Zealand. New ways to maximise learning are needed. This article shows how dance, a cultural experience of many Pasifika learners, offers strong opportunities for enhancing learning across the curriculum while impacting positively on feelings of wellbeing and belonging. Drawing from the first author’s experiences of teaching secondary school mathematics and Poly club, and a wide range… Read more

As a result of COVID-19 and the government’s measures to control it, Term 2, 2020 began with New Zealand school students learning from home rather than at school. This article reports on the results of a survey that explored the experiences of some parents of Māori and Pasifika students during their first week of this school-led learning at home (Riwai-Couch et al., 2020). It uses some direct content from the original survey report and summarises other parts. The responses of parents of… Read more