Research paradigm choices made by postgraduate students with Pacific education research interests in New Zealand

Abstract

This paper explores the nature of postgraduate research in the broad area of Pacific education completed in New Zealand universities. First, a number of basic trends are identified in terms of institutional affiliation, area of educational research, MA and PhD balance, growth over time, national/ethnic focus and the expected beneficiaries of the research. Secondly, and more significantly, trends in the theorisation of Pacific postgraduate education research are identified using a positivist-interpetivist-emancipationist-deconstructivist paradigm typology as a basis for analysis, in particular the degree to which the latter two research perspectives have been embraced. It is argued that research done within emancipationist and deconstructionist paradigms has the most socially transformative potential. The completion of socially transformative educational research is significant given increasing calls from within Pacific communities to decolonise and re-indigenise both educational research agendas as well as systems of Pacific primary and secondary schooling influenced by educational research. The paper demonstrates, however, that very little emancipationary and deconstructivist education research has been completed. This apparent mismatch is explored in the light of the wider competing educational discourses of Pacific colonisation and indigenisation.

Keywords:

• Pacific
• paradigm
• Pasifika
• postgraduate
• research

Acknowledgements

Special thanks to Susan Pennock and Tanya Low from the University of Otago's Bill Robertson Library for assistance given in obtaining the many PhD and MA thesis interloans used for this analysis.

Notes

The first postgraduate research in education was an interpretive survey of Fijian education and development completed by Margaret Surridge in 1944.

The University of New Zealand was created in 1870 as the degree-granting body for all individual New Zealand tertiary institutions. It was only after its disestablishment in 1962 that individual institutions conferred postgraduate degrees in their own name (New Zealand Vice-Chancellors' Committee, 2008).

‘Pacific’ signifies research relating directly to the Pacific region, while ‘Pasifika’ refers to the educational experiences of Pacific peoples residing in New Zealand. ‘Pasifika’ is commonly used to describe the Pacific diaspora (Ministry of Education, 2009). However, as it is often used to refer only to Polynesian peoples, it is a contested term (Anae, Coxon, Mara, Wendt-Samu, & Finau, 2001).

It must be noted that 22 indexed theses were unavailable for closer examination because they were missing from a library collection, had an embargo placed upon them by researchers or were otherwise unavailable for loan.

The Solomon Islands Prime Minister from 2007 to 2010 completed an education-related PhD at the University of Waikato (see Sikua, 2002).