(Re)-Constructing Māori Children as Achieving Learners.

Abstract

Since early European settlement of Aotearoa New Zealand Māori children have been constructed as deficient learners in the education system, and this construction continues to undermine their learning at school today (Butchers, 1930; Macfarlane, 2005; Ministry of Education, 1998, 2005). Educational assessment practices have largely contributed to this discourse, because they reflect western ideologies regarding the reasons for testing, who does the testing, what counts as important to test, how results are interpreted and so on (Bishop & Glynn, 1999). Further, the tests used have been developed with monolingual and monocultural European children. Reading acquisition and language development have been implicated as major learning deficits for Māori children (Crooks & Flockton, 2005; Ministry of Education, 2006; Wagemaker, 1992). And a body of research signals that the reading related language skills for phonological awareness and narrative ability are linked to reading acquisition for English (Adams, 1990; Botting, 2002; Rollins, McCabe & Bliss, 2000). My research is an enquiry into how Māori children respond to reading related language assessments for narratives and phonological awareness, taking into account their lived experiences and cultural practices. My aim is to create possibilities for alternative discourses to the deficit discourse. With support from a local Kaumātua and school whānau I worked as a participant-observer in two classrooms in two schools for one year, following 17 Māori children. Critical theory, socio cultural theory and Kaupapa Māori theory informed my position. The techniques I used to approach my research practice and analyse my data reflect the influence of these frames as I understand and interpret them. Throughout the year of field work, I undertook a range of activities, including conversations with parents, children and school personnel, observations of class 'lessons' and the teaching strategies used by the teacher, visits to the children's homes, collection of school records, and administration of assessments related to reading, narrative tasks, and phonological awareness according to a standardized English test, the Preschool and Primary Inventory of Phonological Awareness (PIPA) (Dodd, Crosbie, MacIntosh, Teitzel & Ozanne, 2000) and a specifically designed set of Māori language tasks. I used video and audio recording for some activities, and wrote my observation notes while observing or immediately following an event or session. My findings showed that the home and school contexts for the children were largely bicultural and bilingual. The children were living their lives in ways vastly different to monolingual and moncultural Pākehā (European) children. Those who had been at school for approximately five years were reading at or above their age, in line with traditional reading norms, despite showing relatively poor phonological awareness skills determined by the 'standard' test procedures. The 'standard' testing process for both phonological awareness and narrative…