Editorial

Kohikohia ngā kākano, whakaritea te pārekereke, kia puāwai ngā hua
Gather the seeds, prepare the seedbed carefully, and you will be gifted with abundance of food.¹

Ngā mihi i te wā o kōanga. As the warmth of te rā returns to us in Aotearoa it’s the perfect time to have our hands in the earth. With beds prepared and seeds shooting up, a crucial period of the gardener’s cycle is in full swing: prick out, pot on, plant out.

Hands-on experience is centred in issue 2 of Set in 2023, with honest accounts from those who don’t shy away from getting their hands dirty while shooting for the stars. Many of the authors work on the ground with students as teachers or practitioner researchers. Several articles offer user-tested teaching methods and units, which can be transplanted with care for local context. Others reflect on how to cultivate deep changes in praxis. Tuatahi, he mihi nui ki ngā kaituhi kātoa o tēnei hautaka. Tuarua, he mihi ki a koutou ngā kaimahi whakatupu tamariki.

He Whakaaro Anō explores learning about complex systems. Suzanne Trask and her colleagues offer food systems as a manageable entry point. They present a series of workshops and delve into students’ reactions so that teachers can either repeat wholesale, or adapt aspects to other socio-cultural systems and wicked problems. A key message is that lived experience can be leveraged to help students to understand dynamics at play across a broad system.

Philippa Antipas shares her doctoral research about teachers co-designing their own professional conference needs. A d.conference—similar to but more pre-planned than an unconference—results from a game-based development process trialled in two schools. Teachers yearned for professional learning and development to be purposeful, open-ended, playful, and spacious.

Many schools are on the journey to uplift the wellbeing of whānau Māori within formal education. Sally Boyd and Nicola Bright drilled down into national Wellbeing@School survey data and worked in depth with six schools that showed high levels of wellbeing for both Māori and non-Māori. Insightful interviews with multiple people—students, whānau, management, and teaching staff—uncovered principles and mechanisms that drove improvements overtime, with ways to support cultural identity and school belonging at the root.

Practitioner enquiry is elevated to a focus section in Issue 2. Holly Bodman, social studies teacher turned advisor, reflects candidly as she strives to decolonise her teaching and curriculum content. Her personal account of family history reveals patterns of Pakehā privilege, which Holly turns into motivation to address any unconscious bias that may disadvantage her Māori students. A before and after rendition of several social studies units exemplifies how she decolonised each topic to make room for mātauranga Māori and tinō rangatiratanga.

Following on from an earlier article about Pacific Advance Secondary School (PASS) printed in Set, issue 2, 2022, Trevor Bills and Ala’imalo Falefatu Enari present a second article “Fa’a Pasifika: Moving beyond culturally sustaining education”. A main point is that education of Pacific young people in Aotearoa should be “culturally encompassing and liberating” (p.34). Talanoa amongst talavou, aiga, and staff helps to demonstrate how PASS embodies Fa’a Pasifika in all that it does.

Online citizen science and artificial intelligence (AI) is the focus of an article by Cathal Doyle and his teacher and academic teammates. The article examines the steps, including specific learning tasks, that teachers followed to draw a citizen science project into the digital technology curriculum with careful attention to computational thinking. The article’s visuals and explanatory detail make their sophisticated programme (in this case aimed at Year 7–8 students) easy to follow.

Assessment News recognises that, with neurodiversity and learning disabilities on the rise, the demand for special assessment conditions (such as reader–writers) is higher than ever. Rose Hipkins and Janet Lee consider how principles of universal design for learning (UDL) can be applied to assessment to enable every student to demonstrate their capabilities and evidence their best work. The article ends with the output from ChatGPT to the question “What are the barriers to the application of UDL principles in assessment contexts?” Its answer is succinct and enlightening. Perhaps I’ll ask ChatGPT to write the next editorial!

I hope that Issue 2 plants seeds of thought that can help your practise and your students to blossom.

Poipoia te kākano kia puāwai
Nurture the seed and it will bloom²

Josie Roberts
Set Editor (Tangata Tiriti)

Notes

1. Selected from a beautiful collection of whakatauki that illuminate how children are adored and guided within te ao Māori. (Leonie Pihama, Hineitimoana Greensill, Donna Campbell, Rihi Te Nana, and Jenny Lee. (2015). Taku Kuru Pounamu. Te Kotahi Research Institute. Hamilton. https://www.waikato.ac.nz/__data/assets/pdf_file/0003/324129/Taku_Kuru_Pounamu_-_16x10_Portrait.pdf)

2. Embraced by many educators, this whakatauki guides the strategic direction of the school that my children attend.