Becoming Educators in Oceania: From Ridge to Reef to the Region and Then Returning Home

Abstract

Becoming Educators in Oceania:From Ridge to Reef to the Region and Then Returning Home Rosarine Rafai (bio), Jiokapeci Qalo-Qiolevu (bio), Maca Radua-Stephens (bio), Debra McDougall, David Oakeshott, and Rachel Emerine Hicks, Special Issue Editors The Oceania Centre for Arts, Culture and Pacific Studies at the University of the South Pacific (usp) became a flourishing hub of creative thought and practice under the direction of founder Epeli Hau'ofa. Much has been written about the visual and performing art that has emerged from the center—work that has helped to realize Hau'ofa's vision of usp as a "hatching ground" for a powerful new sense of regional identity (2008, 51). This dialogue piece focuses on an aspect of the center's work that has received less attention: academic teaching. It is based on a conversation between Rosarine Rafai, Jiokapeci Qalo-Qiolevu, and Maca Radua-Stephens, three educators who teach a compulsory second-year class called "Pacific Worlds" (uu 204), which is run through the Oceania Centre and enrolls thousands of students across thirty-three million square kilometers of ocean and four time zones on usp's fourteen regional campuses and at its ten smaller in-country centers.1 Their conversation shows how some of the creative and relationship-building processes that have been described in relation to the center's artistic production are brought into the classroom and maintained amid the challenges of online delivery. The Oceania Centre was indelibly shaped by Hau'ofa's own mana as Oceania's most celebrated scholar-storyteller. Its creative production was also enabled by its position on the margins of the formal structures of the university. As Lea Lani Kinikini Kauvaka observed, the center "was a learning space that showed us just how, for the large majority of learners, classroom-style brick-and-mortar learning imported by nineteenth-century missionaries was not working as well as it ought to" (2016, 144). [End Page 442] Hau'ofa's students and colleagues have recalled that he was determined not to ask for too much from the university administration so that the center could fly under the radar, welcoming artists without formal training or accreditation to learn and work together (Naidu 2019, 27; White 2008, xvii–xviii; Teaiwa 2010). Katherine Higgins observed that "Hau'ofa had a limited budget but plenty of time to imagine something unique: a home for Oceanian arts and culture" (2009, 41). In her rich descriptions of the work of the Red Wave Collective, a group of painters and sculptors working at the center in the 2000s, Higgins highlighted how the center's physical space and architecture helped create an environment that "fosters the potential of each individual while simultaneously forming a dedicated community of artists who learn from one another" (2009, 39). Situated on the geographic edge of the university's Suva campus, the center features meeting spaces without walls that draw on Pacific vernacular architecture. Over the years, these open spaces have brought together a range of creators—dancers and welders, musicians and painters—to work across genres and generate a unique contemporary Oceanic vision. The openness of the center's physical structures has been mirrored in broader approaches to Oceanic identity. In 1996 and 1997, Hau'ofa declared, "As far as I am concerned, anyone who has lived in our region and is committed to Oceania is an Oceanian" (2008, 51). His words were particularly powerful in the context of the deeply divisive racialized politics of Fiji and Solomon Islands at the turn of the millennium. Artists at the center have also grappled with their own hybrid identities and have sought to articulate visions of a more inclusive Oceania in song, dance, and images (Higgins 2009, 45–46). Some observers praise the Oceania Centre for maintaining integrity in an era when larger forces were undermining usp's core mission. Vijay Naidu described changes in the university in response to the rise of free-market approaches to education, the growing influence of donor nations on usp's administration, and constraints on discussion of politics, economics, and policy on usp's Suva campus in the years since Fiji's interim government came into power after the 2006 coup...