New tool developed to help build engagement with Māori students
Associate Professor Robin Averill and Dr Hiria McRae have developed a first-of-its-kind assessment tool to help teacher trainees identify their attitudes towards te ao Māori and grow towards fully engaging with Māori learners during their teacher training.
“The Ministry of Education had tools regarding cultural responsiveness, but we found these pretty broad, and there weren’t specific enough examples of practice for our students to be able to identify where they are at themselves and make shifts in what they’re wanting to achieve,” says Dr McRae.
The tool focuses on student teachers tracking their responses to engaging with te ao Māori from different stages identified in the tool such as accommodation, reformation, then transformation, and ultimately, representation. Dr McRae wants to see student teachers going into schools and being provided opportunities to understand the needs and aspirations of Māori communities that those schools are in as well as how they interact with local iwi.
She says it is important that the schools themselves know who the tangata whenua are, the whakapapa, “all of that mātauranga that’s associated with that community”.
“We can only achieve this if we model it ourselves, which is why it is important that the faculty is building our relationship with mana whenua such as Ngāti Toa.”
All teacher trainees at the University do a compulsory Mātauranga Māori paper but it’s not currently compulsory for them to do an optional reo paper called Kōrero Mai. Dr McRae says that may change because of new Teaching Council expectations that students enter teacher training with a knowledge of te reo Māori equal to Level 1 te reo Māori in English medium curriculum, and on completion be at a Level 3 standard.
“We just don’t have that capacity and that’s a wider issue for making te reo Māori compulsory—that’s all well and good, but we need to get the teachers ready to do that,” she says.
Dr McRae and her faculty have created the Māori Education Advisory Committee, to better meet their commitment to the Treaty of Waitangi. The committee includes past students, principals, heads of department, and current students, and they re-configure the committee each year. They are currently re‑establishing relationships with Ngāti Toa, and seeking further connections. Please seek out Dr McRae if you are a teacher who wishes to contribute.
Culturally Sustaining Initial Teacher Education: Developing Student Teacher Confidence and Competence to Teach Indigeneous Leaners, by Robin Margert Averill and Hiria Stacy McRae, was published in The Educational Forum in July 2019.