The Dawn Raids Q&A Interview
This is the way dinner table conversations, or in this case text message threads, go in our whānau.
Education consultant daughter: (to Kia Aroha College principal daughter and me on Sunday morning two weeks ago):
“I just watched an amazing interview with Oscar Kightley on Q&A this morning. That should be/could be your entire term’s work for Lumana’i/Fonuamalu (the school’s Samoan and Tongan bilingual units). It’s REALLY good! So many different tangents – as well as the Dawn Raids. I couldn’t help but think OMG Kia Aroha could just FEAST on this stuff!”
Me: “Oh no! I missed it. I’ll watch it now on demand.”
Daughter: “Watch out! You’ll write a blog - or KAC’s curriculum!”
She knows me too well!
Lurking in the back of my head is a new book, an e-book this time, that spells out the ‘how’ of a critically conscious, culturally sustaining curriculum, to answer the question I am probably asked the most. This interview would be gold in the book! It could almost BE the book. I could build, not just a term, as my daughter suggests, but a whole year’s curriculum around the interview between Jack Tame and Oscar Kightley. You can watch it here.
This excerpt from a 2017 article (Scorza et al., 2017) explains the issue and the reason why a critically conscious lens has been omitted from our teacher training and is missing from our practice:
For decades, educators have wrestled with identifying what constitutes effective culturally and socially relevant pedagogy in urban classrooms. Lacking a critical lens, many teachers rely upon traditional modes of teaching and learning embedded in existing power relations. …Given that pedagogy is often a reflection of the political perspective and the condition of the pedagogue, urban youth frequently find themselves in the position of being dominated and silenced inside the classroom. Haberman (1991) calls this a pedagogy of poverty; that is, the delivery of a menu of teaching “services” that do not honor the cultural resources of the youth (Moll et al. 1992; Gutiérrez 2008), the critical faculties that can be further developed (Morrell 2008a; Watts and Hipolito-Delgado 2015), the recognition of the sociocultural conditions that exist which inform the learning environment (Noguera 2003), and the voice that must be given priority in the teaching and learning space (Torre and Fine 2006; Conner and Ebby-Rosin 2015; Kirshner 2015). This banking approach (Freire 1970), or deliberate deposit of sanctioned knowledge, is academically disempowering and facilitates oppressive classroom practices.
Without that critical lens, we could watch the Q&A interview and think it was an interesting piece promoting Oscar Kightley’s play, Dawn Raids, on stage in Auckland from 16 August- 3 September. We might find Kightley’s story and insight into why he feels the play is more relevant now than it was when he first wrote it 26 years ago, worth thinking about. We might consider going to the play. If you live in the Henderson-Massey Local Board area of Auckland you might be interested in Kightley as a candidate in the upcoming local elections, a role he sees not as a “full-time cushy position” but as a responsibility, “an addition, on top of your life you already have, to serve your surrounding community.” I’d vote for that!
History teachers, or all teachers of Years 9 and 10, introducing Aotearoa New Zealand’s Histories into their classrooms in 2023 might include, in the ‘Know’ context of Culture and Identity, that:
At different times, various groups have been marginalised in Aotearoa New Zealand. These groups have sought to remedy injustices associated with immigration policies and practices (e.g., through the Disability Action Group, the Polynesian Panthers, and petitions to governments). Governments have sometimes acknowledged these injustices (e.g., through the poll tax apology and the apology for the dawn raids).
Although I certainly hope that happens, that’s not what I’m talking about! The ‘gold’ in this interview is not confined to the Histories curriculum, to Years 9 and 10, or to the play, or the Dawn Raids themselves or, most importantly, to your students’ learning. The gold lies between the questions and answers, in the challenges made to our thinking and our comfort zones, in the white spaces and attitudes it lays bare, and in the further critical questions it poses for our teacher practice. What do I mean by that?
In a webinar about Critical Consciousness that I delivered to PLD providers for the Ministry of Education in 2020, I explained that critical consciousness is asking those deeper questions —not just the data, about how many Māori learners can access an education that is relevant, that sustains their culture and develops their identity “as Māori”? But asking, why are the numbers so low? What barriers exist in our system that deny all Māori children this opportunity? How do we as a system tolerate and perpetuate this situation? How am I as an individual complicit in this process? How can I contribute to dismantling the racism inherent in the status quo? What is my role and my responsibility? Critical consciousness is always the missing piece in our efforts to develop change because often it requires soul-searching we are not ready for. We all know we have to make change but mostly we have no idea of the size of the change we have to make. Critical consciousness refuses to let us off the hook! It requires we take action to make that change.
Critical Consciousness is defined by the Ministry of Education as, “reflecting critically on the imbalance of power and resources in society and taking anti-oppressive action to do something about it for the better.” YES!
For me, that means specifically naming colonisation, racism, assimilation, oppression, Whiteness – that’s privilege, supremacy, and fragility – hegemony, cultural reproduction, and intergenerational trauma – to list just a few – and actively working against them all. That’s what Oscar Kightley did in his interview and does in his work.
The guide to selecting meaningful topics in the Histories curriculum says:
How will the topic help students explore the big ideas: the foundational and continuous history of Māori, the impact of colonisation and settlement, the power people and groups hold, and the relationships that shaped our history?
How will the topic draw on stories, examples, and perspectives so that students learn about the history of their local area and of Aotearoa New Zealand?
I would ask:
How does the Q&A interview help teachers explore the big ideas: the foundational and continuous history of Pacific people the impact of colonisation and settlement, the power people and groups hold, and the relationships that shaped our society in the past and in the present?
And I would draw on the quote that I used earlier from Scorza et al., 2017 to ask:
How does the interview draw on stories, examples, and perspectives that guide teachers to identify the Whiteness and racism that dominate and silence youth in their classrooms and perpetuate the deliberate deposit of sanctioned knowledge, that is academically disempowering and facilitates oppressive classroom practices?
Because 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”
The ‘big ideas’—the gold— I would find in the interview would lead to deep critically conscious questions and understanding that would provide an integrated curriculum of Social Sciences, ANZ’s Histories, English, Languages, The Arts, Health & Wellbeing, Science, Maths & Statistics, that could be adapted to suit all ages. Here are just some examples:
You get the idea, I’m sure. Years ago, when I was the principal at Kia Aroha College, I taught Level 3 NCEA English to a class of Year 12 and 13 students while their regular teacher was on sabbatical leave. These were students grounded in their cultural identities and very accustomed to exercising their critical consciousness. They had experienced both as the basis of their curriculum from the time they entered the school in Year 7.
For the NCEA Level 3 English Standard: “Respond critically to significant connections across texts, supported by evidence,” we chose four short stories by Witi Ihimaera. These stories aligned with our wider class topic for the term of Māori sites of struggle and conflict. The students identified big ideas in the stories such as racism in New Zealand in the 1970s, assimilation, conscientisation, hegemony, cultural loss, loss of identity, and the “inner struggle for Māori characters vs their struggle against society.” The students chose language features, themes, writing style and structure, to support the connections they made. Two students concluded:
The stories talk about the loss of culture, loss of language, racism, hegemony, and assimilation, and have shown us these from different points of view and the different perspectives of Māori and Pākehā. I think that Witi Ihimaera is trying to make his readers understand that racism had many different faces in the 1970s and he was trying to make us aware of this. I don’t think that has changed.
Each of these four stories exposes the struggle and conflict Māori experienced in New Zealand in the 1970s as colonised and assimilated indigenous people. Our understanding of the racism embedded in the characters’ interactions and experiences in the Pākehā world grows with each story.
I thought they had done a great job and marked accordingly. Imagine my reaction then to the English NCEA moderator’s comment that the texts “were too simple” for Level 3 English. My terse response to NZQA pointed out the moderator’s complete lack of a critical lens compared with the students’ deep understanding of the relevance of the texts to their lives and realities. Oscar Kightley comments about criticism of his play, “Pākehās kind of don’t like hearing this stuff when you present it on stages as truth.” I think the same comment could apply to the English moderator who had holes poked in some of their comfort zones. To quote Kightley again:
It’s not for me to figure out where their criticism comes from. I can hazard a guess and say, well they are from outside the community, they see it through a surface superficial lens. And then they apply that superficial lens to stuff that’s a lot deeper and actually seeks to go further than that.
There is a wealth of rich material in the Kightley/Tame interview – all of which could be treated in the same way as the big ideas in the tables above, as the catalyst for wide-ranging research and investigation. Examples are:
Samoa’s struggle for freedom. The Mau Movement. Aotearoa as the coloniser
Bro’town – “was about a group of teenage friends, 14-year-olds growing up in the city being surrounded by less than ideal adults and role models but still finding a life through it. No one watches Simpsons and goes oh Americans from that part of America are all simple folk. No, no one thinks that about this family called the Simpsons. …I hate that our stuff gets that lens applied to it. That it can’t just exist as a story about these characters.”
Sione’s Wedding
Criticism – see the comment above – we don’t like seeing the truth.
Stereotyping – Kightley sees characters, not stereotypes. Why does he ‘totally reject’ that criticism?
“I feel like I'm telling stories about things and people I know and one way to shut those stories down is to throw the labels like ‘stereotype’ at it and to try and dismiss it in that way.”
Characters – Why is a “Pakeha Australian doing something like Jonah from Tonga?”
Audience – Kightley is not trying to reach a ‘broad’ audience. Who is his audience? Why?
Humour/Comedy – about real issues. “The comedy in the Dawn Raids doesn’t make [the dawn raids] palatable.”
“non-Samoans” – when pointing out the interviewer’s perspective in the question about stereotypes – “Why can’t Samoans write plays about characters that are real people? Why do non-Samoans go, oh you are stereotyping?”
Authenticity - Telling ‘real’ stories
Nationhood & Climate Change in the Pacific - what nationhood means if you don't have a nation, a physical landmass
Power – “These are sovereign states. Samoa is 3000 years old, way older than New Zealand, and we treat them like the little kid who needs help with their homework at our backyard.”
Freedom of movement between Aotearoa and the Pacific
NZ as a coloniser – Aotearoa New Zealand’s responsibility to the Pacific
Immigration – “60% of the Pasifika population of New Zealand were born here.” If you come to NZ for a better life for your family and, in the process, you lose your language and identity through the education system, is that better?
The Q&A interview is one rich resource for a critically conscious, culturally sustaining curriculum that deals with real issues that impact students’ lives. It’s a great example of topics and content where Māori and Pasifika youth can see themselves in your curriculum and where Pākehā students can learn how to do better than we have done in earlier generations. Social justice educator, Professor Patrick Camangian, from San Francisco State University, asks four questions that are central to humanising pedagogy:
WHO is teaching
WHO is being taught?
WHAT is being taught?
WHY is it being taught?
I add HOW is it being taught as a fifth question. My own answer to that question has been through Youth Participatory Action Research (YPAR). YPAR is a framework that supports the development of students’ critical consciousness. YPAR is a process that can be adapted to all age levels. It is definitely not just a secondary school approach. It achieves all the goals of critical pedagogy to be culturally sustaining, academically challenging in both Western and cultural knowledge, and requires learners to take action. It is pluralistic in that the outcomes are designed and driven by the students, and not by going straight to the curriculum’s achievement objectives. It, therefore, accesses student and whānau knowledge, Māori knowledge, community knowledge, as well as different perspectives, beliefs, and values and normalises these.
For more about YPAR in action:
Read: Milne, A. (2020). Colouring in the White Spaces: The Warrior-Researchers of Kia Aroha College. Curriculum Perspectives 40, 87–91 https://doi.org/10.1007/s41297-019-00092-2
Akom et al., (2018). Building Smart, Resilient Communities and Schools: Using a Technology Platform to Transform the Social Determinants of Education with our Nation’s Most Vulnerable Populations. http://catalyst.greenschoolsnationalnetwork.org/gscatalyst/september_2018/MobilePagedReplica.action?pm=2&folio=22#pg22 On p.31 it writes up the work of the Kia Aroha College Warrior-Researchers.
Watch: The full Warrior-Researcher’s Keynote to the 2018 NZARE Conference, Does Transformation Depend on our Postcode that is the work referred to in the Akom et al article and that includes a description of YPAR and how the students used it: https://vimeo.com/304548644
Research: YPAR sites, research, and resources e.g.