Week 3 - Main Activity

Last year I attended the New Zealand Association of Maths Teachers national conference and listened to Melinda Webber from the University of Auckland as a keynote speaker. One line of her address had a profound effect on me and has been stuck in my head, reverberating and causing reflection, ever since. When talking about the success and achievement of Māori students, she said “they can’t aspire to be, what they don’t see” (Webber, 2023), in relation to the influence of role models. This sentiment is also relayed in her report about supporting tamariki Māori to be successful in learning and education where she says that tamariki look to their whānau “for inspiration as the people they want to emulate.” (Bright & Webber, 2024, pg. 25.)

When I relate this to my own education story, the influence of my close and wider family was immense. My parents were well educated, their parents were well educated and the expectation was that myself, my siblings and my cousins would be well educated as well. The dominant narrative (McAdams, 2011) was that to be successful in life you finished secondary school and moved into some kind of tertiary training, with particular emphasis on getting a degree of some sort. 

For much of my early life I lived in what Freire (1974) calls a magical consciousness, believing that the world I saw in front of me was a true representation of the world as a whole. Geography projects exposed me to some of the realities of other parts of the world but I believed that the rest of Aotearoa was the same as, or close to, my immediate surroundings. This narrative was normalised because it was the story I could see, every day, and became so ingrained that it seemed perfectly natural (McAdams, 2011). 

Even as I went through university I didn’t think about the large part of society that wasn’t represented in my lectures or on campus. These people were here because they had worked hard and had either got themselves a student loan or won a scholarship. Both the dominant narrative and my magical consciousness told me that tertiary study was achievable for everyone and that everyone has an equal opportunity to access education in Aotearoa! That really was quite magical and naive wasn’t it?

The stark reality is that 63% of the population aged between 25 and 64 years have some kind of tertiary education, but that number drops to only 37% of the population of that age holding a Bachelor's degree or higher (Ministry of Education, 2023). If we look at the figures for Māori and Pacific peoples, those percentages are significantly lower. 51% of Māori between the ages of 25 and 64 years old have some kind of tertiary qualification. In this same age group, just 42% of Pacific Peoples hold a tertiary qualification. If we then compare this to NZ European statistics, 67% of that population have completed tertiary studies (Ministry of Education, 2023).

As I progressed through my career as a teacher and worked in a variety of schools and communities, I started to notice the different aspects of our society. I started to question the dominant narrative that there was equitable access to education in New Zealand. I started to recognise and understand the significant barriers that people face when it comes to education. My critical consciousness (Freire, 1974) started to develop, and I wondered just what it was that I could do to be a change-maker. This conscientization started me on the journey of reflecting on the marginalised communities in our society and how as an educator I can be part of the transformation process to unveil a “pedagogy of all people in the process of permanent liberation” (Freire, 1974, pg. 54.).

References:

Bright, N., & Webber, M. (2024). Poipoia ngā tamariki: How whānau and teachers support tamariki Māori to be successful in learning and education. NZCER.

Freire, Paulo, 1921-1997. (2000). Pedagogy of the oppressed. New York :Continuum.

McAdams, D. P. (2011). Narrative identity. In S. J. Schwartz, K. Luyckx, & V. L. Vignoles (Eds.), Handbook of identity theory and research (pp. 99–115). Springer Science + Business Media.

Ministry of Education. (2023). Tertiary achievement and attainment. Education Counts.