Eve Tonkin: Everyone Benefits - indigenising our curriculum to create a more inclusive pedagogy for our students and their families
Eve Tonkin
Everyone Benefits: indigenising our curriculum to create a more inclusive pedagogy for our students and their families
When I began the process of decolonising our school curriculum with my learning community five years ago, I knew that it would improve teaching and learning and make our pedagogy more inclusive. What I didn’t realise was how transformative it would be for the school curriculum and community, nor how challenging and unwelcome it would be for some.
From 2012 to 2025 I had the good fortune to be the teaching principal at Timatanga Community School, a state-funded democratic school in Aotearoa New Zealand. Democratic education is an inclusive and freedom-centred pedagogy and I was able to teach and learn in accordance with my humanist values. Over time I became aware of the many points of philosophical connection between te Ao Māori – the worldview of the indigenous Māori of Aotearoa New Zealand – and democratic pedagogy, and I wanted to create a localised curriculum for the school that made these connections explicit. As I went through the process of doing this with my learning community, it became clear that we needed to decolonise some aspects of our existing ethos in order to create a more inclusive and holistic curriculum from which everyone would benefit.
This chapter shares our process and the insights gained.
1 Who are We? What is Democratic Education?
Democratic pedagogy equips children to participate in true democracy by empowering them to be self-responsible and self-governing within a supportive and safe environment with adult mentors (who in Timatanga’s case, are both teachers and parents). Children learn at their own pace, decide what and how to learn, and make decisions about the day-to-day running of the school. Since the 1990s, this pedagogy has become widely known as “democratic”, a term coined by progressive educator Yaavov Hecht to describe the various educational settings based on this philosophy around the world. Democratic education is a decentralised movement, with each school or learning community adapting the pedagogy to their local context.
Timatanga Community School is a small semi-rural learning environment for students from Years 1-8. It is a secular, parent co-operative with trained teachers, founded in the early 1970s on the pedagogy of A.S. Neill (who founded the democratic school Summerhill, in England) and the play-centred pedagogy of Peter Gray (2013) and the New Zealand Playcentre movement. Free spontaneous play is seen as ‘children’s work’ and valued as a primary way in which to learn necessary life skills. Children are free to play all day, but they typically choose to attend teacher-led classes as well. These are offered in response to student interests and/or needs. Emotional intelligence learning is prioritised and human rights are taught both explicitly and through the self-governing school culture. Parents participate weekly in the school, support student learning, and help to run the school.
As a result Timatanga Community School is usually able to support students who have experienced feeling unsafe and/or excluded in mainstream education. (All democratic Schools have this in common.) For example, neurodivergent students relax and excel when they are able to focus intensively on an area of interest for as long as they choose, and they benefit from being able to govern themselves, teach others, and play with others in a consensus-based culture that normalises diversity and respects each and every perspective and need.
Similarly, children who have been ‘othered’ for perceived difference(s) (e.g. ethnic, gender, or physical characteristic or ability differences) and bullied or not seen accurately as a result, are restored to themselves by the connectedness and relational safety that this kind of democratic learning community provides. This enables them to thrive as learners. For example, a young Māori student came to us from a state school diminished and disengaged from learning, certain that he was “dumb” and “bad at reading and writing” but “pretty good at sport” (his words). Gentle questioning and discussions with the family led me to realise that he had been on the receiving end of deficit thinking from his previous teacher, who assumed that he would be ‘behind’ and slow to learn because he was a Māori boy. His self-esteem rose dramatically when he was able to learn with his family members present, supported by caring relationships and adults with high expectations for him, and the freedom to follow his own interests. He became a highly academic student with exceptional leadership abilities who went on to excel through high school and beyond. A big turning point occurred in his sense of himself after he decided to find out more about what might happen after we die. He studied understandings from different cultures and created a large and complex artwork to share what he learned, visually unifying its elements with traditional Māori patterns symbolising spiritual concepts. He shared that he was surprised by how good it was and he realised that he prefers to learn and feel at a depth. He came to see this as a strength that he had due to being Māori.
Timatanga Community School’s roll is typically 22-25% Māori (by self-identification) despite being in an area where Māori make up about 9.9% of the population by self-identification. (Māori make up about 19.9% of the national population by descent, and about 17.8% by self-identification) (Statistics New Zealand 2023). Parents say that this is because the democratic pedagogy is a good fit with Māori ways of being. The father of the boy that I talked about above noted that he and his son’s mother chose the school over the local Māori language immersion school (in which te reo Māori is the language of instruction) because, “the philosophy here is more Māori… they are still very authoritarian and competitive, in a Pākehā way over there, and that would have made it tougher for him. We’d like him to learn the reo [`Māori language] but the way of living and learning is the most important.”
2 Why did our school curriculum need changing?
Timatanga Community School became state-funded in 1997 and school staff were required to follow the state educational curriculum from then on, in accordance with our democratic pedagogy. Until recently the only full-time staff was the principal, who typically remained with the school for longer than the part-time staff and parents. This centralised knowledge about what and how to teach with the principals. When I became a principal myself, I saw that our learning community would be more democratic if this knowledge was shared more effectively with everyone, because people can readily understand, participate in and critique what they can see clearly. We created several ways to improve knowledge sharing and decision-making with parents and staff, including pedagogical guides and regular meetings, but over time I came to realise that we needed our own comprehensive curriculum to fully achieve this aim.
At the same time, I wanted to make the connections between democratic pedagogy and indigenous Māori pedagogy explicit, and in the context of this indigenising work, consider ways in which te Ao Māori (the Māori worldview) could improve our current pedagogy. I and others saw that creating our own comprehensive curriculum was an opportunity for us to look at our pedagogy through a de-colonising lens. Doing so would make the curriculum more inclusive, as well as more intentional.
3 What were my foundational understandings about the nature and purpose of curriculum before I began this work?
When thinking about a curriculum, it is important to consider both its visible and hidden aspects. While educators need to look at the curriculum content (what is taught explicitly), we also need to unpack its ethos (what is taught implicitly). This hidden curriculum conveys the assumed norms and unconscious biases of those in power in the existing social hierarchy–the “silent messages about priorities and values” (Robinson & Aronica 2015, 134, also Jain and Boban & Hinz democratic-inclusive education in this book) that rationalise the status quo. These “messages” replicate those found throughout society (for example in health, economy and politics) and they include understandings about what learning is, what society is, and what is most highly valued. Some simple examples of hidden curriculum in state education in Aotearoa New Zealand include:
● the notion that a successful economy is based on competition, with winners and losers – which underpins the school practice of constant testing and ranking wherein students develop a sense of themselves as competitors who are failures at certain things;
● the idea that English language and culture is superior to indigenous language and culture – which underpins the school practice of compulsory teaching and learning being done in English, while learning te reo Māori is a non-compulsory extra; and
● the notion that citizens should conform with instructions whether the action or task is relevant to them or not, because the workforce requires them to have this capacity – which underpins the school practice of taking away children’s autonomy and training them to comply with instructions in order to gain rewards or to be successful.
Unless its ethos is markedly different from one’s own way of being in the world, a hidden curriculum can be hard to identify, not just because it is implicit, but because changes in curriculum content can obscure hidden curriculum further. While improving content can be positive for students, it can cause parents and staff to consider that their curriculum needs no further improvement. For example, a curriculum can be amended to contain human rights education but a hierarchical school culture that normalises compliance with an authoritarian power structure and that disempowers students from governance undermines their human rights and provides the structural encouragement for students to ‘other’ and bully students with less power. Racism, sexism, homophobia and other forms of prejudice and discrimination will tend to be systemic, despite deliberate classroom teaching.
People who can see the hidden curriculum most clearly are those whose ethos is different from it, and generally, also those who are most disadvantaged by the prevailing social hierarchy: “those from majority cultures tend to find it harder, and those from minority cultures easier, to cope well in new overseas cultural contexts… due to the fact that minority group members have had more opportunity to practise ‘ethnic identity negotiation’” (Kiddle 2021, 94).
The education system is a “key institution in the maintenance of social advantage and disadvantage” because it provides “credentials, an important advantage in an advanced technological society, and therefore [defines] success” (Spoonley 1990, 86). Consequently, “as well as overt behaviours and ideas, we need to look at underlying systems and processes that unfairly benefit Pākehā. For example, dominant ideas about education reflect Pākehā ideas about how things should be, to the detriment of Māori. Pākehā will naturally have a headstart in such an education system” (Thomas 2021, 108, emphasis mine).
Thus, education is never neutral. It functions either as an instrument to bring about conformity with the current system, or freedom from it through critical and creative thinking (Freire 1970). This was exemplified in Aotearoa New Zealand recently, when the previous government engaged educators who hold deep Māori knowledge to create a new national curriculum, Te Mātaiaho, which was launched in 2023. The foundations of Te Mātaiaho were embedded in te Ao Māori – the Māori worldview – and linked student achievement with wellbeing rather than capitalist market needs. Thus, its principles were inclusive, holistic and relationship based, and its benchmarks for progress measured concept and competency acquisition, rather than content acquisition – and competencies included cultural and critical thinking. Benchmarks were assigned to “phases” of 1-3 years duration, rather than consecutive year levels, in recognition of the fact that children develop in different ways and take different time periods to reach progression markers. This enabled schools to reduce competitive ranking dramatically, and the negative stereotyping of learners that goes with it. Te Mātaiaho also supported localised community-based curriculum development, enabling freedom of choice for students and their teachers. The requirement to teach about our colonial history was brought in at the same time, and Te Mātaiaho included a new, more critical framework for this. Tragically, Te Mātaiaho had little impact on the culture of the majority of schools, which had neither the time nor the inclination to implement it before national elections were held at the end of 2023. The government was ousted by a right-wing coalition who were quick to replace Te Mātaiaho with its predecessor before beginning to implement a more prescribed syllabus approach that purposes education to meet the needs of a neoliberal economic system, prioritising conformity, standardisation and constant measurement. As a result, Māori ways of being have been sidelined or removed from the current state curriculum.
Decolonising work understands education to be a process with a history, in which schooling was “historically used as a tool of colonisation by settlers” (Riki-Waaka 2023). Learning the ways in which the hidden ethos of state curricula continues to benefit the priorities and values of those settlers and their descendants in post-colonial society today enables educators to identify who is most disadvantaged and in what ways. We are also able to decide whether or not we agree to perpetuate the hidden ethos, and to think creatively about alternatives. Indigenous understandings, solutions and ways of being in the world are uniquely suited to provide these alternatives. Thus, “decolonising does not mean the removal or withdrawal of colonial occupiers so much as a fundamental shift in the ideas, knowledge and value sets that underpin the systems that shape our country” (Mercier 2021, 51).
4 My foundation: what grounds did I stand on in leading the process with my learning community?
I am a Pākehā, or non-indigenous New Zealander, whose ancestors came to Aotearoa New Zealand in 1859 with the first English settlers to the Timaru region. As such, I am guided by Māori educators and other experts working to decolonise and indigenise education and society. Many Māori educators, academics and activists have called on Pākehā to participate in this work, in which we can move beyond the dialectic of “coloniser and colonised” into “dream[ing] and conceptualis[ing] a way beyond this dialectic” (ibid, 78). For Māori this involves “dreaming…past our justified mourning, to the changes that might follow our decolonising actions… we need to… let our guard down so that we can work as allies” (ibid). For non-Māori this involves giving up privilege: “a colonised society was created through Pākeha ideas about how things should be, so it is our responsibility as Pākehā to step back from these outdated ideas, take cues from Māori leadership and do the work of decolonisation… Pākehā can be powerful allies and workers in these battles, and use our energy and social capital to get things changed” (Thomas 2021, 121).
My life experience has informed my work, too. As a child of progressive hippy parents in the 1970s, I was bullied and bored during my first two years of school, which I attended in a small conservative town in the South Island surrounded by Pākehā and English students. (No Māori lived in the area.) I experienced school as a series of largely pointless tasks full of coercion and devoid of creativity. I never felt accepted as who I actually was because there was no space for me to make my own connections or choices in my learning, and I was largely learning the norms of a culture that felt foreign given my upbringing. Just before my seventh birthday, my family moved to a remote rural community in the far north of the North Island. We lived in the bush without electricity about half an hour’s walk from a small village and school. I was one of 5 Pākehā students at the otherwise Māori school, and I had never heard the language before. I’m not sure if I had ever even met a Māori person! My peers spoke a mix of Māori and English, and our teacher was Māori and spoke in Te Reo often. I assumed that this would mean I would feel a stranger as I had at my previous school, but this did not end up being my experience.
While other children disparaged me for my difference and cultural ignorance, particularly at first, the inclusive and accepting values in Māori culture gave me the space to be myself and, before long, to feel connected. I discovered that the ‘counterculture’ values I had grown up with (such as an understanding that we are part of nature and must care for it) correlated with Māori cultural norms. I was appreciated for my emotional intelligence and creativity which were seen as a worthwhile contribution to the group. Our teacher held space for us to be ourselves. She shared many stories about local history, including that she and her friends had been strapped for speaking Te Reo at school when she was a girl, which made a big impression on me because I knew nothing about systemic racism in Aotearoa New Zealand. She started a programme whereby we regularly learned Māori culture and language on the local marae (meeting house), and she took care to nurture me through the various faux pas that I made, by reassuring me that I belonged and remarking on how I might benefit from what I was learning. (I remember her saying, “you might marry a nice Māori man one day, so you’ll need to speak Te Reo”!) As I learned experientially about the Māori worldview, I felt a powerful connectedness between my inner self and that world. While remaining aware that I wasn’t Māori, I was deeply nurtured by the acknowledgement of spiritual and emotional ways of being within Māoridom. I knew, without having the words for it yet, that the prevailing culture of my earlier school was spiritually and emotionally illiterate and therefore separative, isolating and unsafe for anyone ‘different’.
Later, I was able to attend a democratic high school which further developed my understanding of why things are as they are, and of how to participate with others to create positive change. I was able to continue to study Te Reo Māori and to learn more about philosophical and spiritual concepts, and I began to learn about our history and the legacy of colonialism.
Through the experience of existing outside society’s hidden norms when young, I developed a culturally relativist outlook. Of course, there is much that I still cannot see and have never had to see – this is part of my Pākehā privilege –, and staying aware of this is a personal responsibility.
My young years informed my foundational understandings for the work of writing a new curriculum, which I summarised and shared with my learning community. These foundational understandings, or matauranga pūtake, were as follows:
1. Education was used as a primary instrument of colonial control in Aotearoa New Zealand. This had a devastating impact on tangata whenua (indigenous people) that is continuing today.
2. Colonisation “excludes holistic and Māori experiences and ways of knowing” and continues to assert a deep, dominant and dominating influence on “knowledge systems and ways of living and being” (NZCER 2017) in Aotearoa NZ today. This exclusion and its ill effects can be seen in education, health, society, economics, ecology and politics.
3. It is my ethical responsibility to ensure equity at Timatanga Community School. Thus, holistic and Māori ways of knowing should be normalised in our ethos and practices. This may involve making changes to our curriculum and/or learning culture.
4. Māori understand that a child has physical, emotional and spiritual aspects and needs, and this aligns with my life experience. Our current curriculum is not holistic in this way.
5. The proverb “Ka mua, ka muri” (“walking backwards into the future”) reminds me to be informed by our colonial history, and my own childhood experiences as I ‘look back in order to look forward with clarity’.
5 First Steps: how did I begin the work of decolonising and indigenising our curriculum?
In beginning this process, I had two primary questions:
1. Is the European democratic education model a ‘perfect fit’ in Aotearoa New Zealand as a post-colonial country? In what ways might traditional democratic education be challenged by indigenous perspectives on reality, and how might we benefit from these perspectives?
2. Are we at Timatanga Community School unconsciously continuing any of the ethos (hidden curriculum) or practices used to colonise first peoples now or in the past? What changes (if any) do we need to make?
In considering the first question, I consulted with parents, staff and our governing board (made up of school staff, parents, and founding community) to create a clear description of our existing democratic pedagogy and then, supported by a Māori educational consultant, I linked these elements to tikanga ako (Māori pedagogy) and related concepts from the Māori world. Part of this involved describing knowledge about teaching and learning that I held in my being, either learned in childhood or from children as a mother and teacher in a democratic context. I never had time to write this down fully before, and in doing so, I found that Māori pedagogical concepts expressed and deepened my lived understanding. This work became my professional development for the year. As the first draft went through staff, parent and governing board review, most people were excited to see these riches being included in our new curriculum, particularly Māori, who contributed significantly. A small number did not feel comfortable with specific elements and this needed to be resolved democratically, as I discuss later in this chapter.
In considering the second question, I began by analysing our existing curriculum in the light of the work of the constitutional lawyer and Māori rights activist Moana Jackson. He identified two primary impacts of education on Māori – both historically and to the present day (2016, 40-41, emphasis mine):
“The first may be called the educational or pedagogically specific impacts that result in the ‘failures’ of too many of our mokopuna [grandchildren] at school and so on. The second are the culturally deliberative impacts, which are the broader ways that it has redefined or diminished our knowledge, and thus our sense of self. Together they are fundamental parts of the whole colonising process that has dispossessed us.”
Jackson and many other Māori educators and academics have elucidated what each of these impacts include in detail, so I was able to assess our curriculum against clear criteria, asking: “are we perpetuating any of these impacts?” I discussed my initial assessment with staff and held further conversations with parents and children. In summary, we found that our democratic approach causes none of the educationally or pedagogically specific impacts of state education on Māori, but it perpetuates several culturally deliberative impacts. These can be grouped into two key impacts.
The first fundamental impact is that a post-colonial and capitalist Pākehā worldview, and Pākehā ways of being, are the norm. The Māori worldview and Māori ways of being are treated as secondary or excluded entirely. For example, the English language is used in mainstream New Zealand schools; while Māori have established Māori language immersion kura, these schools take much time and effort to establish and are not available everywhere. Māori language might be spoken by individual teachers, and it might be offered as a curriculum subject, but this depends on the school. As a result, the Māori worldview is typically tokenised and reduced to ‘myths’ and ‘beliefs’ viewed against Pākehā materialist norms. Fundamental Māori knowledge is omitted. In this light, our learning community could see that our curriculum needed to normalise both Te Reo Māori and English language use, and the Māori worldview, throughout.
Similarly, our learning environment includes both Pākehā and Māori norms of what a learning environment is, but individual parents and teachers who are ignorant of the Māori elements undermine them and need additional training and support. A more bi-cultural curriculum that makes our cultural practices clear would improve this.
The second culturally deliberative impact of state education on Māori has been the imposition of Pākehā notions of identity. For example, in te Ao Māori, individual consciousness is formed in relationship to people and place through time, so it is fundamentally collective and deeply connective through past, present and future. Education is relational and reciprocal, and children are raised to be self-responsible members of a community and guardians of the natural environment. Ocean Ripeka Mercier draws on the work of Brendan Hokowhitu to locate “indigenous existentialism” in “the everyday and in the immediacy of an Indigenous body able to play and imagine,” contingent upon “choice, freedom and responsibility” (2021, 81). State schools typically offer little choice, freedom or responsibility free from incentivised compliance, and notions of identity are individualistic and largely focused on achievement against curriculum, or school, criteria.
While “indigenous existentialism” is supported by our democratic pedagogy, some of us reflected that when conflicts arise between individual wants and collective rights, the former is often prioritised in school meetings, particularly by parents, due to the uninspected individualism of the majority. In addition, while we teach human rights, the context is largely based on student interest, so our children can end up entirely ignorant of their own colonial history and how it relates to them, their families, and our society today. We saw that our curriculum needed to redress these issues.
Another important notion of identity held in te Ao Māori is that every person has a physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual aspect, because reality has a spiritual element. State education focuses on developing the physical and mental aspects of a student. Emotional education is strong in some mainstream state schools but weak in most, and typically undermined by the hidden curriculum. Anything pertaining to the spiritual is eschewed and only ever framed in Pākehā terms. For example, normalised ideas about the spiritual include that it is ‘unscientific’, ‘imaginary,’ ‘superstition,’ and ‘made up to provide answers to things that we don’t understand, or to make us feel better’. These ideas have a historical context, for example, Christian religion and its historical role in supporting social control and colonial domination, including suppressing and denying science, and normalising class, ‘race’ and gender oppression – but it is a Pākehā context, not a Māori one. While the Māori concept of ‘wairua’ is generally translated as ‘spirit’ or ‘spiritual essence’, this needs to be understood within the Māori world.
As a democratic school, we prioritise emotional-social learning and our educational processes align with Māori ones. However, we have eschewed the spiritual under our secular mandate and as a result, Māori spiritual understanding and related cultural protocols has been minimal in the school. Over the years, this has been a major point of debate for the adults in our learning community and in recent years the majority have wanted more Māori spiritual perspective to be included. My decision, supported by the teaching staff, parents and governing board, was to write the curriculum draft in a way that normalises the existence of the spiritual in Māori terms, and then to work through the implications, reactions and feelings as a community with this as our basis. This, I reasoned, would be a more equitable starting point, and one that might enable people to see invisible norms more clearly. Sometime after this, the national curriculum changed to include the Māori spiritual dimension in the context of health education.
In summary, my initial questions led to useful conclusions that informed the new curriculum. Identifying ways in which our curriculum was perpetuating colonising practices enabled us to see changes that we needed to make that were previously invisible to at least some of us. Connecting Māori and democratic pedagogy enabled us to see the wisdom from the Māori world that could ‘fill in the gaps’ and enable these changes. At this point, we could sense the potential for positive transformation inherent in what we were considering together, and our focus could move beyond ‘decolonising’ our curriculum and into ‘indigenising’ it in an authentic way for our learning community. At the same time, we still had some big discussions ahead!
6 What were the final results? Moving into a potentially transformative pedagogy
After two and a half years of intermittent writing (while teaching full time), I completed the new curriculum in June 2025. It is now being used and discussed by teaching staff and parents, and the practical pedagogical section for teachers is being fleshed out by them within the framework that I have provided. As a ‘living document’ the curriculum is under regular participatory review.
The Māori worldview is embedded throughout the design and pedagogy, both at the visible and the hidden level (Fig. 1), and democratic pedagogical concepts are strengthened and enriched by their counterparts from the Māori world. While a complete summary of what this looks like is beyond the scope of this chapter, I will share two examples. Firstly, the individual is seen as both an “authentic self” and as part of a whole. Individualism is protected and balanced by “connectedness”. Individual autonomy and liberty is upheld but not at the expense of collective wellbeing, and our chosen hidden norm for what this means is detailed. This includes identifying where individual freedoms are curtailed by the needs of the collective and how children can negotiate within the collective.
Fig. 1: The information design of the Curriculum (Tonkin 2025, 12-13)
Secondly, and relatedly, children are seen holistically as physical, emotional, mental and spiritual beings, as defined in Māori terms. Therefore, to support and enable “authentic self”, or being, the curriculum identifies three primary forms of connectedness that must be provided for our children:
● “Māuritanga”, connectedness with vital force, or life essence;
● “Whanaungatanga”, connectedness with other people; and
● “Wairuatanga”, connectedness with spiritual essence.
The English translation of the last is still under discussion with the wider school community due to conflicting understandings of what the English word ‘spiritual’ means, and what is acceptable within a secular school. However, the definition of wairuatanga in our curriculum was agreed to by consensus after several discussions with parents, staff and governing board, and the children had input as well. Our definition is essentially a Māori one, in which spirit is understood to be the unseen energy that connects ‘things’ in space and in time. For Māori, being connected to wairua is imperative for wellbeing, and many non-Māori also find this to be true.
Alongside this, the new curriculum clearly defines what being secular means in the light of secular humanism. Within this tradition, tolerance and inclusion are paramount and spacious enough to include people who do and do not feel that life has a spiritual aspect. “Scientific, philosophical, or spiritual inquiry can be supported,” within key parameters (Tonkin 2025, 20) while ensuring that notions from particular religious traditions are not applied to our norms about reality or definitions of ‘spiritual’.
Connection with māuri is most readily provided by nature-based learning and outdoor experiential education. Relationship with others is best provided by learning in free spontaneous play and learning groups, as well as by a democratic and self-governing culture in which children have real agency. Connection with wairua is supported by traditional Māori cultural forms and stories, and by priorising wellbeing – which includes providing peace, quiet contemplative spaces, mindfulness practices and philosophy. While the curriculum provides comprehensive details of what all of this can look like in practice, the ‘Three Forms of Connection’ framework supports the “dreaming” that Ripeka Mercier talked about, in which children, parents and teachers can experiment, play, discover and learn from one another, in the lifelong learning journey of being who you really are in the world-as-it-is, before and beyond the current neoliberal capitalist paradigm.
7 What work lies ahead? What are the challenging issues and how are we dealing with them?
As discussed above, the new Timatanga Community School Curriculum is a living document, and staff and parents are now focusing on improving teaching and learning with it as the pedagogical guide. As such, it is functioning as an inspiring and clarifying support to the daily life of the school. At the same time there are a few issues to resolve before the school community can implement the curriculum as fully as they would like to.
Some of the adult children of the original founders are challenging the inclusion of the ‘spiritual’ in the document and asking the school community to remove anything pertaining to this concept, including the concept of ‘wairua’. They argue that it does not belong in a secular democratic curriculum despite the fact that current parents and staff have approved its inclusion. While the democratic pedagogy and how it is applied in the United Kingdom and Europe bears this out, I have noted the Pākehā privilege inherent in their assumption that this is necessarily superior to indigenous knowledge in post-colonial countries. Currently a group of us are working on our translation of ‘wairua’ to see if it can be inclusive enough to sit comfortably with people to whom the concept is alien or immaterial. At the same time, indigenous concepts cannot be denuded to the point where they become divorced from their original context (this is cultural appropriation), or fundamental meanings are lost: “Our decolonising agenda [is] a constant challenge to ourselves that we don’t get caught up in a no-man’s land and no-win space of trying to be everything to everyone but ending up being nothing of relevance” (Tiakiwai 2016, 63). It will be interesting to see how this is resolved.
In addition to the ongoing considerations about ‘spiritual’ and what it does and does not mean in our curriculum, the Timatanga Community School learning community is also grappling with how to bring more Māori language and cultural practices into the environment. While this is much wanted by current parents and children, there are two issues that need to be resolved in order to make it a reality.
Firstly, as a small parent co-operative, we are dependent on the knowledge in the community at any given time. Integration of language and culture depends upon having enough parents and staff who are at least somewhat fluent in both, and this fluctuates with changes in staff and school roll. Historically our teachers have found it difficult to increase their knowledge because they have very little free time, and available courses are fewer than the number of teachers in line for them. This places quite a burden on our Māori families.
Secondly, because we are a democratic school, no instruction is compulsory. Some students and families have had little or no experience of the Māori world or of our colonial history and its legacy in the present day, so they don’t see the value of learning Māori language or culture and don’t choose to attend. This can be frustrating and painful for Māori students and their parents – sometimes deeply –, particularly if a significant number opt out – which is rare. In my teaching practice at the school I found two successful strategies to redress this. I made space for Māori students to share these feelings when they come up (particularly during curriculum planning with my class), and this almost always caused their friends to join in after all. Also, I found creative ways to provoke student interest in our colonial history.
In 2023, children asked to learn more about “colonial times” (their phrase) for a term, and they got so much out of it that they chose to focus on this topic for the rest of the year. Each student made connections to their own family history as they studied key themes and events together. Each was powerfully affected. For example, a 10-year old student who had said at first that she wasn’t enjoying the Māori language learning component of the topic shared that she now wanted to work hard at it because, “it wasn’t fair that people lost their language because of school and we should help bring it back.” Another student reflected on how the emotions that were coming up during the learning were powerful and important: “we all have the feelings of what happened. We all have to feel them.” In response to this, another student suggested that they create a performance for the end of the year to share their learning, which they threw themselves into. This had many attendees in tears, with one visitor remarking to me that they had no idea about the events that the children chose to dramatise. The learning carried forward into 2024, when those same students chose to participate in political protests against the government’s repeated attempts to remove Māori rights from legislation and policy. This led to deeper real-world learning, including studying persuasive language in order to be able to craft their protest signs!
In closing, let us remember that inclusive education is about more than being fair and redressing structural imbalance. It is also about enabling our children to benefit from the wisdom about learning, being and interbeing that is found in our indigenous traditions. The implications of this kind of inclusive education are belonging, co-operation, learning and balance, and increased understanding, tolerance, diversity, freedom and joy – in other words, a better society in which everybody benefits.
References
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