MOOC explores meaning in mountains

Victoria University of Wellington’s latest unique Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) explores New Zealand's mountain landscapes through the lens of Māori and Pākehā cultures.

Mount Taranaki

Aotearoa New Zealand is a country dominated by mountains that play an important role in the cultural, emotional and social life of our country, but how we view them depends on our cultural perspective.

To Māori, Mount Taranaki can be seen a grief-stricken and jealous being, forever brooding—according to the legend of how he came to be on the west coast. While for Pākehā, it is more likely to be seen as merely a dormant volcano with a great hiking trail.

Victoria University of Wellington’s latest Massive Open Online Course (MOOC), as part of its VictoriaX programme on the prestigious edX platform, explores these cultural perspectives of landscape in New Zealand Landscape as Culture: Maunga (Mountains).

From the volcanic fury of the northern mountains to the frozen heights of the Southern Alps, course instructors Dr Maria Bargh (Head of School, Te Kawa a Māui) and Emeritus Professor Lydia Wevers (former Director of Stout Research Centre, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences) will introduce learners to the country’s maunga (mountains) and the cultural identities attached to them.

“Europeans tend to think of mountains in terms of their size, or who has climbed them, but for Māori a mountain is a being and part of who they are,” says Maria.

“For Māori, the relationships with mountains are personal and collective; they represent who each one of us is, where we belong, what we belong to, and what our responsibilities are. We look after our mountain and it looks after us.”

It is the second course in New Zealand’s first-ever bicultural series of MOOCs exploring landscape as an expression of culture, and follows on from New Zealand Landscape as Culture: Islands (Ngā Motu).

“We want learners to be able to transfer the idea of landscape as an expression of culture to the landscape they live in, and mountains everywhere are richly loaded with metaphorical, moral and emotional meaning,” says Lydia.

“Perhaps because mountains make us think again about the meaning of human life, they measure us in some important ways, they occupy a deeply felt place in our cultural hierarchies and thinking about them can make us see how profoundly cultural those hierarchies are.”

New Zealand Landscape as Culture: Maunga (Mountains) starts on 15 August, 2018 and is now open for free online enrolment.