Te Kotahitanga: culturally responsive professional development for teachers

Abstract

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.

Keywords:

• indigenous
• Māori
• pedagogy
• classroom interactions
• relationships

Acknowledgements

We wish to acknowledge the contribution made to the development of the professional development model described in this paper by the numerous students, teachers, facilitators, principals and the wider school communities of the schools in which we have been privileged to work.

Notes

1. Te Kotahitanga literally means unity of purpose but is increasingly being used in its figurative sense of promoting the self‐determination of individuals within non‐dominating relations of interdependence.

2. Kaupapa Māori is a discourse of proactive theory and practice that emerged from within the wider revitalisation of Māori communities that developed in New Zealand following the rapid Māori urbanisation in the 1950s and 1960s. This movement grew further in the 1970s and by the late 1980s had developed as a political consciousness among Māori people that promoted the revitalisation of Māori cultural aspirations, preferences and practices as a philosophical and productive educational stance and resistance to the hegemony of the dominant discourse.

3. For example, in comparison to majority culture students the overall academic achievement levels of Māori students is low; their rate of suspension from school is three times higher; they are over‐represented in special education programmes for behavioural issues; enrol in pre‐school programmes in lower proportions than other groups; tend to be over‐represented in low‐stream education classes; are more likely than other students to be found in vocational curriculum streams; leave school earlier with fewer formal qualifications and enrol in tertiary education in lower proportions. These patterns of the inequitable distribution of the benefits of education coupled with the continued privileging of the children of the powerful groups in society are replicated in Australia, North America, Europe and many Asian countries.

4. In 2006, the first full cohort of students from the 12 participating schools reached Year 11. This provided an opportunity to assess the impact of Te Kotahitanga on National Certificate of Educational Achievement (NCEA) Level 1 results (the first level of standardised external qualifications in New Zealand). An independent analysis by the New Zealand Qualifications Authority statisticians (Johnston 2007) demonstrated that in 2006, the results showed that the increase in the percentage of Māori students gaining NCEA Level 1 from Te Kotahitanga schools (a 16.4 percentage point gain, ppg) was greater than the increase for students from non‐Te Kotahitanga schools (8.9 ppg) (comparing 2006 results with 2005 results and weighting for decile). In addition, Pasifika students made similar gains (15.4 ppg) compared to Pasifika students in a non‐Te Kotahitanga decile‐weighted comparison group (6.1 ppg). This finding indicates that teachers implementing the Effective Teaching Profile may benefit other previously marginalised students, as well as Māori. Overall, in 2005 prior to Te Kotahitanga, the percentage of Māori students in the Te Kotahitanga schools who gained NCEA Level 1 was significantly lower than the national percentage for Māori – in 2006 it was significantly higher. In one of the schools involved, 18.8% of Māori gained NCEA Level 1 in 2005 (n = 64) – the following year the percentage was 63.9% (n = 61) (Timperley et al. 2007). Evidence from 2007 shows that the gains made by Māori students in 2006 have been maintained in the original 12 Phase 3 schools and Pasifika students have improved again to match the percentage reached by Māori in 2006, that is, 48%. In effect, the 12 schools now have a new status quo where almost half of their Māori and Pasifika students gain NCEA Level 1, whereas prior to the project, only one third and one quarter of Māori and Pasifika students respectively did so.

5. Intermediate schools are public schools for students in levels 7 and 8, those aged between 10 and 12 years of age.

6. In our analysis of the frequency with which secondary school teachers drew upon a range of discourses to explain their experiences of educating Māori students (Bishop et al. 2003), we found that teachers tended to problematise Māori students’ achievement and to locate the source of these problems outside of their own interactions with Māori students. That is, over half of the identified influences are explained in terms of student/home deficiencies (58%), while a smaller number explain the problem in terms of structural issues (27%). Overall, some 80% of teacher utterances explained the problems in terms of deficiencies of the students, their homes or the structure of schools or the education system; factors over which they feel they have little, if any, control. Another study by Morgan and Morris (1999) of teachers’ and pupils’ perspectives on teaching and learning in secondary schools in England made similar findings. A similar proportion of teachers to our New Zealand study (62%) reported that learning was mostly affected by ‘something to do with the pupil or his or her home background’. In contrast, only 18% of the response statements reported that student learning had ‘something to do with me, the teacher’ (68).

7. Decile ratings of high decile to low decile, where the lowest decile draws students from areas of greatest socio‐economic disadvantage and the highest decile draws students from areas of least socio‐economic disadvantage.

8. The Māori students are selected collaboratively: three purposefully by the teachers, two randomly by the observers.