The Schools’ White Spaces Pandemic: When “Normal” is the Problem.
The beginning of this post is based on a blog post I wrote at in February, 2019 – and we have all moved on in terms of our awareness of racism since then, right? Unfortunately, no, not right at all!
The original post introduced this image. It’s my attempt to name the covert White spaces that permeate our thinking and drive our decision-making in education in Aotearoa New Zealand, the ones we passively accept as normal or traditional, instead of colonial, the ones that get in the way of any urgent action.
The image usually follows the slide below where I ask, what if this wasn’t a continuum? What if more generations of our Māori children didn’t have to wait while we tiptoe cautiously through these ‘stages’, becoming less racist, more culturally ‘responsive’, shedding our Eurocentric teacher training and those Pākehā-driven polices that have never worked for our Māori children, waiting for all the staff in a school to embrace change? Why can’t we dive in at the deep end? Who, and where, are the sharks and how much longer will we hide behind them, and our privilege, pretending we are ‘neutral’?
Fast forward to August 2021 and I felt this post was due for a makeover.
We would hope that no longer would most of us accept or tolerate the overt white spaces—the racial profiling, racist slurs, hate speech, at the tip of the iceberg, although all of these definitely still occur.
We only have to look at the barrage of racist slurs our Pasifika community in South Auckland have received during our current COVID Level 4 lockdown, and in previous outbreaks, to realise that this blatant in-your-face racism is alive and well. While many of us have called it out, that just moves it from the tip of the iceberg to below the surface, where it continues.
Beneath the surface lurk the covert white spaces that are even more dangerous. The spaces that emphasise white privilege, the spaces that we think are too hard to change, if we even recognise them as dangerous in the first place.
The perfect example of that type of racism was the recent letter from seven Auckland University academics, dismissing mātauranga Māori in proposed revisions to the Māori school curriculum and, in particular, to the science curriculum. We should be able to expect in 2021 that people in these positions have identified and taken action to change their racism. Not so, obviously.
In his article, Professor Stephen May, also from Auckland University, calls his colleagues’ position racist and arrogant, and uses an earlier example from “the most visible and vocal subset of this group - Michael Corballis, Elizabeth Rata, and Robert Nola” to show that this is far from the first time. He calls his colleagues “spectacularly wrong.”
Tina Ngata calls it “a tired and tiring act of privilege protection” that “can at least serve as bold evidence for the endurance of white supremacy within academia and science.” As she points out, these are all white academics writing about the Māori school curriculum. Why?
The stark contrast between those who know what they are talking about (Tina Ngata, Rangi Matāmua, and Melanie Mark-Shadbolt), and those who don’t, was very visible in this interview on The Hui where Michael Corballis, who clearly knew nothing about Mātauranga Māori, felt he was eminently qualified to pass judgement on it and double down on his racist position.
I have always said that the iceberg image would continue to be a work in progress. I keep finding more sharks, or they keep finding me! I played around with adding the sharks that are obvious in our education system’s response to COVID and found there were so many I needed either another iceberg or a different type of diagram with some different stages!
The truth is that despite us having been locked down last year when our education system’s inequities were forced into plain sight and we could no longer pretend they didn’t exist, we have done little to change this since then.
Now, forced into lockdown again, the students who suffered most before, are again in the same place. The schools who struggled to give students internet access, in spite of the devices that finally arrived from the Ministry too late to be of any use, still struggle to provide that type of connectivity. The senior students in low decile schools who had to find essential work to help put food on the whanau table and never returned to school will happen again. Students’ anxiety about “outcomes” and “academic” results is heightened again and will escalate as NCEA exams loom even if we think delaying them by two weeks is a rational response. Teachers’ workload and the stress of having to juggle their teaching load with the needs of their own families hasn’t changed and there are appeals to schools from whānau, from research (ERO 2021), and from the Secretary of Education herself, to put student and staff wellbeing first this time. Great idea, if we really meant it. Because, it doesn’t matter how many times we hear it, or how well we know it, ultimately, the impact of COVID on young people in schools will be measured by their literacy, numeracy, and NCEA outcomes. We have no idea how to do this any differently. The ERO report found that:
Māori students were more likely to have had to face significant challenges during and after lockdown because they are more likely to be enrolled in low decile schools, who reported facing more challenges than mid or high decile schools during the Covid-19 pandemic.
I really tried, honestly, I did, but the only words I could come up with to react to that statement were “No shit, Sherlock!” We KNOW this but we have done nothing to change it, and we have had a whole year to make change. We didn’t. Why not?
Impact articles, surveys, and reports are littered with language about “disruption to learning progress”, whether or not students will be able to “catch up” or whether they are “engaged,” completely ignoring the fact that for Māori and Pasifika students who never could see themselves in our learning programmes, it doesn’t matter much whether learning is coming directly from the teacher standing in front of you, or via your laptop, or Mum’s phone, it’s “distance” learning all the time. Lockdown is not all that different in that sense and why do we care about catching up to something that doesn’t work for everyone?
We seem to be oblivious to the key point that “normal” is light years away from best practice, yet we break our necks trying to either replicate it virtually or get back to it as soon as we can in person.
So, let’s play “what if.”
WHAT IF: We throw out NCEA exams and external assessment in 2021 (forever would be my choice) and we say to senior students, you are deemed to have passed? We can give out honorary doctorates, why not honorary NCEA passes? Who really cares? As an employer, I would be far more impressed by the CV of a young person who cared for their whānau, who contributed to their community, who looked after their elders, who became the whānau child-minder so parents could work, than the CV with the 95% pass rate or the Excellence grade for Maths.
WHAT IF: Universities accepted students on those stories in 2022? How well do you understand our racist society and how have you contributed to changing it would be a great question and story that students in South Auckland would excel at.
WHAT IF: The government took responsibility for equipping every student with a device and internet access – no excuses, no exceptions?
WHAT IF: Hauora, wellbeing, identity, whanaungatanga and manaakitanga actually came first as valid high stakes, end-point achievement with no ‘but’ that follows to diminish their importance and place them secondary to Western ‘academic’ hegemony and outcomes expressed in percentages or grades?
WHAT IF: We took a few pokes at Pākehā comfort zones and we said tools down on other learning and let’s all focus on learning te reo Māori across the country?
WHAT IF: We accept that our education system is colonial and, if we are serious about decolonisation then it’s the job of the 76% of our teachers and principals who are Pākehā to change it, to undo it, and start again, with Māori, to completely redesign it?
WHAT IF: The learning young people do during times they are not forced to attend school is the most valuable they will ever do? Learning that is connected to cultures, to whānau, to community, that is intergenerational, that is challenging and caring, and where the pressure to be someone else is gone.
We have zero excuses!
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 get the stress. I get the overload. I get the anxiety. I get that all over the country teachers and principals are running themselves ragged trying to do the very best that they can, and I know that some schools have made long-lasting changes.
I don’t get the missed opportunity. We are once again right at the fork in the road where we have the choice to do better. What will you choose?
