“As rangatahi Māori. We’re watching - and learning.

We’re watching Hana-Rāwhiti and learning that as the youngest person in parliament in the world - you can make people take notice.

We’re watching older people in parliament who don’t listen and don’t change their minds - and we’re learning that there has to be a better way.

We’re watching other young people who have helped organise this hīkoi - and we’re learning that we don’t have to wait until we’re older to find our voice and have something to say.”

I could not be prouder of Atareta, so I thought I’d follow her example and explore what other lessons adults in parliament are teaching our rangatahi. There is no shortage of cases.

The central focus of all of my work is identifying our whiteness, our personal and institutional ‘White spaces’, understanding how they alienate and marginalise children like my mokopuna, and eliminating those barriers in our schools and in our practice.

It is unfortunately no surprise therefore, to recognise the huge, glaring white hole in the Ministerial Advisory Group (MAG) Report: Redesigning the English and Mathematics & Statistics learning areas in the New Zealand Curriculum (Ministerial Advisory Group, 2024).

Let’s be clear, this is not ‘redesigning’ at all. It is yet another example of a system doing exactly what is has always been designed to do, to create, and even worse, tolerate, a social hierarchy, inequality, and inequity not far removed at all from our earlier policies of integration and assimilation that aimed to make us all the same i.e. all White.

As my photography knowledge has developed over the last three years, I have drawn many parallels with my teaching and leadership consultancy and background. I’ve often thought, “There is a blog in there somewhere,” but haven’t got around to writing one—until an experience over the weekend brought the similarities, to steal a photography term, sharply into focus!

I did learn from the speakers, and from the photos on display, but I learned even more from the silences. From my education and research background, I recognise that my alien and alienating experience at the photography convention is exactly the daily experience of Māori learners in our schools’ white spaces. Just as I did, Māori youth blame themselves first, we do little to allay that feeling, and it sticks. Like me, they too choose to disconnect and disengage, we blame them for that, and then they blame themselves.

I am not suggesting that teachers use the interview as a one-off activity in the classroom to educate their students, although that might be one great use of it for older learners. I am suggesting that teachers watch it over and over and use it to research further into events and attitudes in our society, historically and currently, that they may never have known about or thought of before, use it to grow, as Kightley calls it, their “waking-up-ness”

There is no way that I would send my kids or mokopuna to school, next week. I don’t care how old they are, or how threatened their (outdated & irrelevant) exam results might be, how much they miss their friends, or how keen their parents are to see them leave the house! It’s such a position of privilege to be able to feel comfortable with a return to school on Tuesday. Once again, which students benefit?

“Imagine if you will, 3 people —all the same goddamn size. The ground beneath them slopes, buckling beneath one person so significantly that person cannot see over the fence at all. The foundation on which these people stand is unequal, and that foundation, might we even say systemic, difference leads to some being able to watch the baseball game, while others cannot.” (Equity Coalition 2018)

WHAT IF our scientists, doctors, nurses, and health workers had said “We are in completely new territory with this pandemic. I know! Let’s tweak around the edges and dredge up an old approach that will keep some people alive but won’t work for others. Then, once everyone has either survived or died, we can get back to normal.” Sound familiar?

I heard, over and over again, from the principals and schools I was working with, their frustration with the costs of having to release teachers to use face-to-face PLD hours, and especially how hard getting to any PLD was for smaller schools. So, I thought, why not PLD at your own pace – and when it suits you, a sort of “PLD in your pyjamas” approach?

My question is, what stories are you telling and what stories do your students ‘read’ in your classrooms? I’m not referring to the texts you encourage students to read and write about or the genre you introduce. I’m talking about the covert texts that Māori and non-Māori learners receive if you don’t actively and intentionally eliminate them from your practice.

If you are thinking of enrolling in my online courses this term and trying to decide - here is a “sneak peek” with text excerpts from Courses One and Two.

My whānau asked my grandchildren and great-grandchildren to write their own citations. I’m disappointed that the official Honours citation makes no mention of my old age, my present-buying skills, or my really clean house and its toys. And I’m sort of secretly chuffed that a 23-year-old moko still thinks I’m “the shit”.

So, Chris Hipkins, Ministry of Education, Education Review Office, NZQA, Teaching Council, and most PLD providers – let’s just agree that your primary focus is assimilation and then stop talking about the programmes on offer until you get your own houses in order, and stop modelling, in fact requiring of schools and teachers, the very racism you purport to want to change!

Regardless of which side you come down on in relation to the Taskforce recommendations, my key questions are, do they significantly shift power, do they address white supremacy and racism in our system—and my answer is no, they don’t.

The Warrior-Researchers of Kia Aroha College have been in the news lately, as my previous two blog posts have shown. This post shares the video of the Warrior-Researchers’ keynote presentation to the NZARE Conference recently. Why “warrior”? Read and find out.

In an unprecedented two blog posts in two days, I’m following up my More than a Headline post yesterday, due to a second article in the NZ Herald, published this morning, External exams - An essential check, or a 'colonial system'?

And, right there, on the Herald’s Facebook page, the fork in the up-until-now positive pathway appeared. Down one path, were those who were in total agreement with the students’ findings, congratulating them on their courage and honesty.

Down the other path, the racist trolls came out to play.

Do we think White boys have an additional writing or reading gene that our Maori kids missed out on? Or do we think they had better parenting perhaps – you know, bedtime stories, books in the home, and all that? Or, here’s a thought, could it be that the whole system, benefits the children whose values match, and whose values are embedded in and reproduced by our schools?

When someone attacks a member of your family, all your protective instincts kick in and you want to do anything in your power to take the hurt away.