Russell Bishop

Researching in Maori contexts: An interpretation of participatory consciousness

Abstract A recent study of five research projects demonstrated how a group of researchers, both Maori and non‐Maori, had been re‐positioned within new ‘story‐lines’ that addressed the contradictory nature of the traditional researcher/researched relationship. The language used by the researchers contains the key to the new story‐lines; metaphor and imagery that are located within the research participants domain. The researchers either were or have moved to become part of this domain. In the narratives developed in this research project, the researchers demonstrated how they had been re‐positioned by the use of contextually constituted metaphor within the domain where others can constitute themselves as agentic. Within this domain there are discursive practices that provide the researchers with positions that enable them to carry through their negotiated lines of action. An examination of the language used by the researchers demonstrated researcher reflection on their somatic involvement in the research ...

The Centrality of Relationships for Pedagogy: The Whanaungatanga Thesis

Te Kotahitanga is a research and professional development project that seeks to reduce educational disparities between indigenous Māori students and their non-Māori peers in New Zealand secondary schools. While evidence of the impact of the project on teachers’ practice and the associated gains made by Māori students has been published previously, in order for the work of Te Kotahitanga to contribute to the broader educational research community, its pedagogical premises require empirical verification. To do so, we must first establish the validity of the pedagogical data by addressing two questions: (a) To what degree can the data gathered in the collaborative processes of Te Kotahitanga be used as a measure of pedagogical quality? and (b) Do these data support the foundational hypothesis of the project, that “extended family” relationships, as understood by Māori people when using the Māori term, whanaungatanga, are a central necessary component of overall pedagogical quality? This article provides an account of the context of this work then presents an analysis directed to these questions in turn. First, our analysis of the observational data gathered during the Te Kotahitanga professional development process is presented, followed by the measures that were developed for each of the main dimensions of pedagogy addressed in this work. Second, using these measures we present our analysis of the inter-relation among these dimensions of pedagogy to test the Whanaungatanga pedagogical thesis.

Te Kotahitanga: culturally responsive professional development for teachers

Te Kotahitanga is a research and professional development project that aims to support teachers to raise the achievement of New Zealand’s indigenous Māori students in public/mainstream classrooms. An Effective Teaching Profile, developed from the voices of Māori students, their families, principals and some of their teachers, provides direction and focus for both the classroom pedagogy and the professional development. While the authors understand that there are many institutional changes necessary at the school level, this paper focuses on the professional learning opportunities developed for classroom teachers within this project to support the development of more effective classroom relationships and interactions with Māori students. This has resulted in Māori students attending school more regularly, engaging as learners and achieving to levels where they begin to realise their true potential.

Freeing Ourselves from Neo-Colonial Domination in Research

One of the challenges for Māori researchers… has been to retrieve some spacefirst, some space to convince Māori people of the value of research for Māori; second, to convince the various, fragmented but powerful research communities of the need for greater Māori involvement in research; and third, to develop approaches and ways of carrying out research which take into account, without being limited by, the legacies of previous research, and the parameters of both previous and current approaches.

Freeing Ourselves from Neo-Colonial Domination in Public School Classrooms1

We are dealing, it would seem, not so much with culturally deprived children as with culturally deprived schools. And the task to be accomplished is not to revise, and amend, and repair deficient children, but to alter and transform the atmosphere and operations of the schools to which we commit these children. Only by changing the nature of the educational experience can we change the product.

Education Leaders Can Reduce Educational Disparities

This chapter is about how education leaders can act to reduce educational disparities for indigenous and other minoritized peoples through strategic goal setting, supporting effective pedagogies of relations, promoting distributed leadership, enacting inclusivity, using evidence and owning the need for reform. Examples are drawn from a large-scale, theory-based education reform project called Te Kotahitanga which is currently running in 50 secondary schools in New Zealand. Developing a model for effective leadership needs to commence with the understanding that the key to change is teacher action supported by responsive structural reform (Elmore 2004). In our earlier work (Bishop et al. 2003, 2007) we investigated what effective teacher action looks like. This chapter presents a model of what “responsive structural reform” looks like in practice and what leaders need to do to implement and sustain gains made in student performance at the classroom, school and system-wide levels.

Commentary on ‘Family obligations in Micronesian cultures: implications for educators’

The paper1 makes some interesting observations about the need for educators to understand the cultural positionings of Micronesian students and by implication challenges readers to extend these understandings to other migrant and minoritised2 student groups. I would like to take up this challenge and illustrate how useful it is to theorise from a relational discourse when seeking solutions to what many educators are suggesting as the greatest problem we face in contemporary education, i.e. the seemingly immutable and growing educational disparities that accompany the increasing diversity of our student bodies in association with the continuing dominance of monocultural and deficit explanations by teachers about the causes of the disparities. This problem negatively affects indigenous students and students of colour along with migrant students and the paper rightly points to the need for solutions. One such solution was suggested when we examined this very problem as presented to us by many teachers in a series of interviews we undertook in 2001 and again in 2005 (Bishop et al. 2003, 2007) about why they, with the best intentions in the world, were frustrated in their attempts to teach indigenous M[ amacr ] ori learners effectively. The teachers spoke of their frustration and anger as they fought to understand how the children themselves and/or their homes or the system and structures of the school limited the progress of these students. In effect, most of the teachers drew from deficit discourses, either about the children and their homes or about the structures of the school and/or the education system, to explain their experiences with educating M[ amacr ] ori students. In contrast when we interviewed students in their schools, they spoke about having negative relationships with their teachers and how these were an assault on their very identity as M[ amacr ] ori people and it was this that limited their educational progress. In other words, there was a variety of discursive positions pertaining to M[ amacr ] ori student achievement and in addition, the potential impact of these positions on M[ amacr ] ori student learning varied. The analysis of these narratives3 showed that among the teachers, the most pervasive explanation for the underachievement of M[ amacr ] ori students was that they are the victims of pathological lifestyles that hinder their chances of benefiting from schooling. The students, their wh[ amacr ] nau (extended families) and the principals and the teachers we spoke to (Bishop and Berryman 2006) gave us

Freeing Schools and Education Systems from Neo-Colonial Dominance1

Ultimately, the only way to reconfigure the schooling process so that it works for both Māori and Pākehā students is to reconfigure schooling around Māori ways of knowing, using a focus on Māori student achievement as the touchstone for evaluating changes to the processes and systems of education. What will emerge from a sustained focus on reconstructing classroom processes for Māori student achievement will be schooling that works better for both Māori and Pākehā students (Sleeter, 2005, p. 6).