Teachers Responding to Pacific Community Voice: Supporting Relationships Through an Ecological Research Initiative

Abstract

Pacific education is an area of priority in Aotearoa New Zealand. It involves the teaching of Pacific students by a workforce that is largely of European origin. Pacific communities value education and have the capability to contribute to the understandings of teachers as they seek to provide the kinds of service that communities want to see. This article reports on a Teaching and Learning Research Initiative (TLRI), Learning From Each Other. Leveraging talanoa as a dialogic research approach, the initiative examines the change value of Pacific voice in enhancing teacher understanding and promoting deliberate action to improve Pacific education. We present findings organised by spaces in which educators enact change using a contextualised revision of Bronfenbrenner’s ecological model as a mapping tool. What emerges is a sense of how non-Pacific educators’ growing Pacific-informed understandings support Pacific learners in personal, classroom and institutional spaces.