Saldo y transacciones con entidades relacionadas

The learning model based on the concept of Power Lenses (Milne, 2004) to support the development of cultural identity, and a pedagogy of whānau aligned to this intent, were initiated in 2003. Throughout 2004 and 2005 staff debated the issue of assessment of the self-learning lens. In the Education Review Office report for Clover Park Middle School in February, 2003, the following comment was made as a suggested “Area for Improvement.”

The teachers have not yet collected data on all aspects of the cultural competence of students. This review observed high levels of achievement in cultural performance that is tracked under the performance arts. However, similarly high levels of achievement in areas of manaakitanga, group work and co-operation were not acknowledged in the database. The managers are not yet optimising the potential of the essential skills of the New Zealand Curriculum Framework to monitor cultural competence. The collection of more data on cultural literacy would enable a closer fit between student

37 _{Letter from the Minister of Education, Anne Tolley, to Shirley Maihi, Principal of Finlayson Park School, Manurewa, 21}

achievement reporting and the kaupapa of the school. (Education Review Office, 2003, p.9)

In the Plan of Action required by the Education Review Office to explain how we intended to address issues raised in the report, the Board of Trustees responded:

Māori and Pacific staff are not convinced that the essential skills, developed for the Framework38 _{from a Eurocentric perspective, are the best tool with which to monitor}

cultural competence, and therefore are not sure we wish to ‘optimise their potential.’ The school will continue to explore relevant assessment practices, in consultation with community elders, to measure and feedback to students their achievement and progress in their cultural knowledge and skills.

In our follow-up discussions regarding the ERO comment, the first question we asked ourselves was why should we ‘measure’ cultural skills and competencies? Surely this was an area where teachers and families, experienced in their respective cultures, would be the best judges? To establish any measure would surely be perpetuating the Eurocentric model? Were there Māori, Samoan, Tongan or Cook Islands Māori ways of knowing our children were developing these competencies and ‘self knowledge’ that didn’t require us to quantify them? Why wouldn’t we just see this development through observation? Wasn’t that enough? Why ‘write it down’? That was one school of thought. The other side of the argument asked, if we are as serious as we say we are about the self-learning lens and about self-knowledge being legitimate, high stakes learning, valid in its own right, and of equal status with school or academic learning, were we devaluing it ourselves by not being able to describe it? The two sides of the discussion are evident in these staff comments:

As soon as you do anything different – up goes the anti and up goes the requirement of having to prove it. Why do we have to prove stuff all the time? We are proving it when they go out to other schools and they are more confident, and we are proving it when they come back as ex-students who show that they can’t leave, that they have that connection still. We are proving it by the fact that they are coming to school every day—I mean, we’ve got kids who are coming to school every day and not going home every day. We’ve got kids from pretty significant, traumatic backgrounds who are at school every day. Do we buy into the requirement of having to justify, or do we actually start saying we don’t need to justify—we know what we are doing is right? (Haley)

Ann has asked an interesting question because I think for all of us the dream would be that Te Whānau o Tupuranga and Clover Park Middle School are not unique but rather the norm, so how do we achieve that? That’s about promoting ourselves. In some ways we do need to qualify achievement and we do need to quantify success, because those are going to be the hooks for the rest of the education community. (Willie)

This debate highlights what Wilkie (2010 p.215) refers to as the ”exclusion and rendering invisible of Māori worldviews through the dominant Pākehā discourse of success and failure.” In a personal communication to Wilkie, Ngāti Porou kaumātua Dick Grace explained a Māori viewpoint that is relevant to our thinking throughout the five years’ action research to develop the self-learning tool:

[In] tikanga Māori every individual is unique and they have their own time in which to know. … A Māori perspective on this difference is the equality of mana, that applies to poutama; if a person is on Level 1 of knowing in a certain area and another is on Level 6 that person on level 6 has no greater mana than the one on Level 1, that mana is equal, they both have that special power which is the same. (Dick Grace, February 2007, cited in Wilkie, 2010, p.216)

This respect for every person’s mana (prestige, authority, power) and dignity, the “time to know,” the necessity for face to face interaction in any assessment, the tuakana/teina relationship where those with knowledge have a responsibility to share with those who don’t, were all concepts that had to underpin this development. These distinctly different worldviews of Māori and Western cultures to sharing knowledge are aptly summed up and starkly contrasted in Waka Rorohiko, a poem by Sullivan (2007 p.5):

Waka Rorohiko

I heard it at Awataha Marae in te reo – waka rorohiko –

‘computer waka’, about a database containing whakapapa. Some tapu information, not for publication. A dilemma for the library culture of access for all, no matter who, how, why. A big Western principle stressing egalitarianism. My respects.

However Māori knowledge brings many together to share their passed down wisdom in person to verify their inheritance;

without this unity our collective knowledge dissipates into cults of personality.