Joanna Kidman

Imaginary subjects: school science, indigenous students, and knowledge–power relations

The perspectives of indigenous science learners in developed nations offer an important but frequently overlooked dimension to debates about the nature of science, the science curriculum, and calls from educators to make school science more culturally responsive or ‘relevant’ to students from indigenous or minority groups. In this paper the findings of a study conducted with indigenous Maori children between the ages of 10 and 12 years are discussed. The purpose of the study was to examine the ways that indigenous children in an urban school environment in New Zealand position themselves in relation to school science. Drawing on the work of Basil Bernstein, we argue that although the interplay between emergent cultural identity narratives and the formation of ‘science selves’ is not as yet fully understood, it carries the potential to open a rich seam of learning for indigenous children.

The Land Remains: Māori youth and the politics of belonging

This paper extends recent work in the geography of youth and childhood with an exploration of the ways that indigenous Māori teenagers who have grown up in regional tribal environments deploy land narratives as they construct a range of fluid socio-spatial cultural identities. The discussion is based on the findings of a multi-tribal study undertaken in the aftermath of government legislation that had led to widespread Māori political protest. Data generated in the course of the study took the form of digital photographs taken by the participants coupled with their explanations about the images. It is argued that Māori young people who are immersed in these environments draw on an extensive repertoire of tropes about the land which in turn influences a territorialized politics of belonging. These politics of belonging become particularly evident during periods of heightened political tension between indigenous peoples and the Crown.

A People Torn in Twain: Colonial and Indigenous Contexts of University Education in New Zealand

This paper examines the development of the university system in New Zealand and explores the impact of colonisation on the development of research priorities.The paper covers four main areas. The first area discusses the question of identity and location in the early settler colonies and how early contact between Maori and Pakeha led to significant shifts in cultural codes; the second area concerns the historical foundations of higher education in New Zealand and the establishment of Victoria University of Wellington. It includes a discussion of colonial and indigenous identities in the academic context; the third area deals with the contemporary university with particular reference to Victoria University of Wellington; the final section offers some reflections on the ways in which colonisation and local identity are presently influencing educational research priorities.

Settler colonial history, commemoration and white backlash: remembering the New Zealand Wars

ABSTRACT When students from a North Island secondary school began a petition to Parliament in 2014 seeking a national day of commemoration for the victims of the New Zealand Wars, they sparked a national debate about how, why and whether New Zealanders should remember the wars fought on their own shores. Although the petition attracted significant support, it also drew its share of criticism. This paper considers the subsequent debate through the lens of public submissions to Parliament on the petition. A particular focus is on the nearly three-quarters of submissions that opposed the petition. These are examined within the context of wider Pākehā (non-Māori) unease at the unravelling of settler colonial forms of national identity since the 1970s, and the emergence of more nuanced and diverse kinds of identification. For many Pākehā New Zealanders these developments were deeply troubling. The backlash that followed was one that harked back to what some Pākehā saw as simpler, more homogenous and harmonious times. By contrast, the young New Zealanders responsible for organising the petition highlighted the need for a more honest owning up to the nation’s settler colonial history.

Representing Youth Voices in Indigenous Community Research

Advocates of participatory research with young people frequently use the language of democracy, emancipation and inclusiveness to argue their case. In New Zealand, various agencies have allocated funding for research reports and resource kits aimed at eliciting and understanding more clearly students’ “voices” as a means of increasing young people’s educational and civic participation. While there is widespread agreement that the inclusion of young people’s voices in educational research is to be desired, the practice is often poorly understood and highly contested. This chapter explores some of the tensions that arose during a study involving groups of Māori youth who created photographic representations of their social, cultural and tribal environments. During the course of the research, questions emerged about how members of tribal communities and researchers, respectively, think very differently about matters of voice, partnership and inclusiveness in relation to Māori young people. Ultimately, the research processes were adapted to encompass the priorities and protocols of the participants’ communities.

Questioning the canon: Colonial history, counter-memory and youth activism

Social memory is inscribed by power relations that both produce and contain canonical state narratives. In settler nations, where indigenous and state relationships remain unresolved, tribal memories of violent colonial histories that are passed on to successive generations expose ‘official’ silences in foundational stories about a nation’s origins. In this article, we examine a public debate that occurred when a group of secondary school students took a petition to the New Zealand Parliament calling for formal recognition of the difficult history of the New Zealand Wars – a series of nineteenth-century clashes between British imperial troops and their colonial allies against indigenous Māori. Drawing on Hirsch’s concept of postmemory, we show how the young activists’ public acknowledgement of difficult histories exposed simmering tensions between competing historical narratives throwing light on how political struggles over representations of the colonial past are shaped in many settler nations.

Intercultural PhD Supervision: Exploring the Hidden Curriculum in a Social Science Faculty Doctoral Programme.

ABSTRACT International knowledge markets rely heavily on a ready supply of highly mobile doctoral students, many of whom are from the global South, to bring in revenue. The supervision of these PhD students, however, can reproduce neo-colonial knowledge relations, often in subtle ways. In settler nations, international PhD students may find that they are assigned subaltern status in their university departments and this can have a significant impact on their learning. This paper explores the experiences of a group of international PhD students in a social science faculty in a New Zealand university during the first two years of their doctoral studies. It examines how they responded to the displacement of their cultural values and priorities, the way they navigated intercultural engagements with supervisors, and their ensuing relationships with indigenous and ethnic allies in the faculty. Despite considerable pressure to conform to the dominant modes of academic knowledge production that characterise universities in settler nations, it is concluded that international students find ways of speaking out, often in highly coded forms, that complicate their subaltern academic status.