“Ma te huruhuru, ka rere te manu”

“Adorn the bird with feathers so it may fly” — Maori proverb

HAWKES BAY, NEW ZEALAND—Unlike many teenagers, the 13 young leaders who have gathered in the school library have good things to say about their school.

“This is my seventh school and it’s my favourite,” said one.

“Everyone is comfortable — it’s family-based. Like, if I need a ride or I’m in trouble I can go to a teacher,” said another.

There was more.

“Our principal is so inclusive. He’s not Maori but he acknowledges different cultures.”

“No one here is ashamed to be who they are.”

“In other schools, there is still a lot of racism. They can feel left out and be ashamed, and they don’t have any opportunity to speak their language.”

“There’s a student support centre so if we’re hungry or need clothing we go there. There’s also a lot of help mentally — a school guidance, a nurse.”

William Colenso College in the eastern city of Napier on New Zealand’s North Island is a Decile 2 secondary school — meaning a school where families are low-income — where 70 per cent of the students identify as Indigenous Maori and 10 per cent as having a Pacific Nation’s heritage.

Flaxmere College in nearby Hastings is a secondary school classified as Decile 1(A) (even more student families are poor), with a student body that is 90 per cent Maori and 10 per cent Samoan.

Both schools have transient populations; both schools have students who come in below curriculum expectations.

Both schools have Teen Parenting Units that act like a daycare for children of teenage parents from all schools in the area, so the parents can continue their education. But the units stigmatize the schools that host them.

In other words, neither school enjoys a good reputation in the Hawkes Bay area.

Yet both schools have excelled on standardized test scores.

Both schools have won the Prime Minister’s Education Excellence awards; last year Flaxmere won the Supreme Award while William Colenso won the Excellence Award for inclusive education. William Colenso also won that award for leadership in 2017.

Both schools embed the principles of a professional development program called Te Kotahitanga.

Flaxmere College saw academic achievements skyrocket once it adopted Te Kotahitanga principles. Part of the Toronto Star's Atkinson series on Education without oppression.

In 2001, professors Russell Bishop, Mere Berryman and a team of researchers from the University of Waikato set out to do something unusual. In looking for solutions to vexing questions on underachievement of Indigenous students in English-language schools, they spoke to teachers and principals of secondary schools, but they also went to the students, and their families.

What they found formed the basis of Te Kotahitanga, a program that eventually so transformed school cultures, and student achievement, that in 2013 Saskatchewan asked Berryman to lead similar research on Indigenous students in the province.

Yet New Zealand’s government scrapped it in 2013 because it was deemed expensive.

Today, Berryman, who is Maori, heads a research and professional development unit named Poutama Pounamu at the university’s faculty of education in the city of Tauranga. Its team of 20 bridges the gap between the ivory tower and the field.

She is adamant that any examination of student success in New Zealand go beyond Te Kotahitanga. “I say you need to really look at what we’ve learned since then.”

Her team put what had been learned while the program operated into a blueprint on guiding educational transformation, with family an essential part of the mix. They submitted this blueprint to the government that had come to power in 2017 on a platform that promised to restart Te Kotahitanga.

Separately, they partner with school clusters in the country offering professional development training to staff for months at a time.

Since the team members couldn’t be on the ground all the time, they puzzled over how to accelerate training across schools and still make the learning process slow enough that teachers would absorb their own reflections and apply their new understanding every day. How to scale up but also create a “slow burn learn” that is more effective than a one-day professional development?

The result is an 18-month “Blended Learning” course conducted online and face to face that educators say moved them from powerlessness to confidence, from fatigue to vitality, and revolutionized their teaching practices.

Poutama Pounamu has about 160 school contracts across the nation that range from six months to two years.

Meanwhile, a cost-benefit analysis by the education ministry in 2015 found that to be effective any intervention would need to bring about a change in achievement for at least one in 30 Maori students. Te Kotahitanga Phase 5 made a difference for around one in eight.

On June 1, the ruling coalition government of the centre-left Labour Party, nationalist New Zealand First and left-wing Green Party came through in its budget, announcing $38 million (Canadian) over three years to test the new blueprint.

New Zealand is a tiny country with mostly uninhabited spaces. Blue waters of the South Pacific Ocean crash on black sandy beaches. Hot springs and geysers gush out of the grounds — the still-smouldering remnants of volcano eruptions from millennia ago. And during the month of May, its countryside undulates with looming hills lush with native trees that remain steadfastly green through the autumn season.

Seafaring Polynesian Islanders arrived in New Zealand in the 13th century and lived in isolation, developing over time their unique culture and language. The Maori say when Europeans came, they were asked “What are you?” and they responded “Normal. We are normal.”

In their language, the word for “normal” was “Maori.”

That’s the word that now describes the 600,000 Maori, or 15 per cent, of the estimated resident population of almost 4.2 million people, according to the last census in 2013. The majority, or 74 per cent of the population, identify as Pakeha or white European settlers, 11.8 per cent as Asian, and 7.4 per cent as Pasifika or Pacific Islanders.

New Zealand’s official languages are Maori, sign language and English.

It’s quite common in New Zealand to hear words from Te Reo Maori mixed with English by people of all backgrounds. Apart from the ubiquitous “kia ora” greeting, one might hear about whanau (extended family) or whakapapa (lineage) or kaupapa (agenda). “Wh” makes the sound “Fa.”

Maori protocols include respectful introductions that begin with describing the features of the region the speaker’s ancestors come from, who they are in relation to their tribe, a recitation of their lineage or ancestry and finally their name.

Still, underneath the progressive international image of New Zealand and a national attitude of “we’re not as bad as Australia,” Maori experiences of historical trauma mirror those of Indigenous peoples in Canada, the U.S., Australia and other colonized nations.

The Maori are undergoing a crisis of suicide at the rate of 23.72 people dying per 100,000, almost double that of non-Maori suicides.

A Child and Youth Mortality Review Committee report in 2018 found that 20 Maori children aged 10 to 14 killed themselves in a five-year period, which makes up about 60 per cent of all suicides in that age group.

The Native School systems established in 1867 sought to “civilize” the Maori and banned cultural practices and language in schools. Funding was conditional on the employment of English in schools. That legacy continued even after the system closed in 1969.

“We have had to leave our culture at the school gate to achieve in schools that marginalized and belittled our cultural identity,” said Berryman.

There are 2,500 state-run schools in the country and every school is a Crown entity. While New Zealand performs above average among OECD nations, or rich countries, a disproportionate number of Maori and Pasifika students perform below OECD levels.

If school reforms are making strides toward restoring Maori excellence, they are thanks to decades of Maori resistance. This ranges from demanding a return to New Zealand’s foundational document — the Treaty of Waitangi in 1840, which promises equal benefits to Maori as well as Europeans — to activists such as the group Nga Tamatoa, which in the ’70s drove the broader discussion to include Maori identity and language. It also includes the emergence of academics such as Bishop and Berryman, pushing for equity.

Donna Sanders was comfortable in her role as teacher in Raureka School in Napier. After all, she had been a dedicated teacher at that school for about 30 years. Although she was a white woman who grew up in Blenheim on the South Island, where there was one Maori family and no Pasifika children, she cared for her students equally. Heck, she didn’t even see the difference in their skin colours.

“I’ve said it. I know I’ve said it. I hear myself saying it, that I don’t see colour in my classroom. Well, it’s wrong. And I’ve realized that — it’s one of those epiphanies I’ve had — what are you saying, Donna? You should, in fact, see colour.”

Sanders is about halfway through the Blended Learning course and already, she said, “I think I’ve had the biggest change in my whole attitudes and thoughts and teaching than I’ve had in 40 years of teaching.”

The course begins with a two-day face-to-face session at a marae (pronounced maar-eye) — a compound for Maori gatherings that contains open grounds as well as a large meeting house with intricately carved woodwork in statues, doorways and along the edges of long sloping triangular roofs.

In a marae, many teachers enter a rare space where their culture is minoritized. That discomfort and vulnerability opens up opportunities to make connections. There are two such gatherings during the course.

Online, the first activity of nine modules is around looking at images, artwork, cartoons and reflecting on questions such as “Is this right or is it racist?” and “What can I do about it?”

Berryman said that “when you could discover ideas in the privacy of your own head first, you can test your own assumptions out and you’re in a better place to have a conversation with others.”

Discuss it in front of an audience and there is likely to be pushback.

“You can’t see any way except from your own upbringing and culture,” said Chris Meynell, a principal of six years at Marewa School in Napier, where 60 per cent of students are Maori and 18 per cent are Samoan.

“I was brought up in a Pakeha middle-class farming family where all that stuff just wasn’t on my radar. I would never have considered myself a deficit thinker (viewing certain students as inherently inadequate) by any stretch of the imagination …

“But then you start some of the challenging material that’s in the Blended Learning and … you know, it’s not an even playing field. Society is not set up like that.”

Facilitators act as a sounding board, and provide feedback. They ensure participants have the time and space to do the work, leaning on the school leadership when needed.

About midway through the modules, the participants convene an akonga — a group of learners — in this case four or five colleagues with whom they hold group discussions. The university facilitators ensure they are available to participate.

In Sanders’s case, the principal gives the group time for discussions during the workday. These discussions help the teachers make connections between theory and practice. It also turns participants into leaders-in-training.

This distribution of leadership was a key learning from Te Kotahitanga.

The team ditched what Berryman calls a “colonial top-down model of imposition,” where the university trained a leader who then trained teachers who then taught students. Instead, they created a strategic change leadership team — principals, middle-level leaders and teachers. All of them taught, “so they weren’t people who sat on the outside on their butts and telling teachers what to do.”

In the classroom, “power sharing is a huge, huge change,” said Mary Stubbings, head of arts at Flaxmere College. “The teacher not being the font of all knowledge at the top … All teachers need to plan and over-plan. But having that relaxedness in a classroom where students are saying no, we want to do it this way, and giving them a student voice, actually listening.

“We all say, ‘Let’s listen to our students.’ ‘Let’s see what they want.’ But that’s really hard to do.”

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Cultural relationships that respect each other’s culture, language and identity underpin the training leading to a teaching approach that’s responsive to student needs.

A good relationship between teachers and students, said Meynell, is honest. “It’s open. It doesn’t mean you’re their best mate all the time. Mutually respectful. You know their likes, their dislikes, their whanau, their cousins. You can make links to all sorts of things — you know them as a person rather than just a number. And the same thing, for the kids. You’ve got to share of yourself. Because if the kids don’t know you as a person then it diminishes the respect that they have for you.”

Sanders said she began to look at her school with fresh eyes.

“When you walk around our school, you would not realize how many children at school are Maori,” said Sanders, “Because it doesn’t look it.

“We’ve found with our Maori children,” shhe added, “they like their art. So we thought, right. We need to start looking at that.”

One of her group discussions was “How to get our whanau (extended family members) into the school?”

Sanders said she used to feel proud for hosting the annual carnival. “But it’s once a year,” she said. So on ANZAC Day (a national day of remembrance) in April, the school had a picnic on the lawn, where parents came and shared food. “Instead of closing the school up, we opened it, where people can come and go.”

Staff are also making a point to engage families at sporting events or during drop-offs and pickups of students.

Back in 2001, when Bishop and Berryman started their research, the country already had Maori-language schools with curriculum based on Maori worldviews that showed achievement outcomes on par with all students.

But the researchers sought interventions in the English-language schools because that’s where a majority of Maori students went. Their research included voices from five secondary schools: those of 70 Maori students of Year 9 and 10; principals of those schools; 50 family members; and 80 teachers. Students start school at age 5; a Year 9 student is typically 12 or 13 years old.

Their analysis of the narratives became the basis of Te Kotahitanga. It found that three of the four groups — students, families and principals — identified the relationships between teachers and students as the most influential to achievement.

For instance, in one school, students said that relationship was a deciding factor in whether to complete homework. “Sometimes you just can’t be bothered,” one student told them. “It helps if they want to teach you. If they really want to teach you.”

In marked contrast, one group — teachers — focused on perceived dysfunctions of Maori students: their lack of motivation, poor behaviour, and their homes, socio-economic problems, inadequate nutrition, access to drugs, etc.

“In terms of agency, this is a helpless position to take,” Bishop and Berryman wrote in Culture Speaks, a book about the study, “because it means that there is very little any individual teacher can do about the achievement of the Maori students in his or her classroom.”

This pattern of narratives was repeated across time and distance in 2013, when Berryman conducted a similar research in Saskatchewan in partnership with the University of Regina. That study was captured in a 2014 report called “Seeking Their Voices.”

Except, says Berryman, the community voices in Canada were more desperate.

One parent told the Saskatchewan researchers “many of our children that are suffering with fetal alcohol (syndrome) … some of them are not even assessed and will probably never get assessed.

“I’m not saying that we don’t have that, but over there if you happen to be First Nations or Métis then there was almost this understanding that you were suffering from fetal alcohol,” said Berryman. “That was so pervasive. And students here could see the solutions, the students over there couldn’t. They were so ground down by the negativity.

“So I think the context over there was much harder.”

In New Zealand the researchers used their own data to create an “effective teacher profile.” The tool made the connection between identity and achievement and focused showing teachers change was possible if they stopped thinking that student backgrounds made them deficient. It showed them how to build relationships with students and their families and the importance of “prior knowledge” or teaching based on building on what students already know.

They found when teachers were able to reflect on other perspectives, they were generally able to switch from frustration to a solutions-oriented approach.

“It’s not just reflection, it’s reflexivity,” said Berryman. “It’s thinking about the thinking —‘When I said that, what was I thinking? And why was I thinking so?’ ”

The program was progressively implemented in 54 secondary schools in New Zealand, with learnings from each phase incorporated into the next.

By the end of Phase 5, one statistic stood out amid a slew of favourable outcomes: the achievement of Maori students in Phase 5 schools improved at around three times the rate of Maori in comparison schools.

Both William Colenso College and Flaxmere College have seen academic achievements skyrocket once they adopted Te Kotahitanga principles.

At Flaxmere, close to 90 per cent of students completed Year 12, which is the minimum needed for post-secondary education. That compares to 2009, when only one-third did so.

Nationally the percentage of students completing Year 12 went from 65.6 per cent in 2009 to 77.4 in 2016. In the same period, the equivalent for Maori students at William Colenso went from 32.4 per cent to 73.5 per cent.

“If we engage with Maori families then we found belonging of those students increases considerably,” said Daniel Murfitt, principal of William Colenso. “And it’s not just engagement around sport and culture. It’s also engagement around learning.”

Senior leadership invested in cultural relationships are able to bring change at an institutional level. Flaxmere College introduced a “Whanau Conference” in 2014 — a celebration evening with a sit-down dinner.

“When we sent out surveys in the past we’d only get a couple back,” said principal Louise Anaru.

“We knew from our traditional teacher-parent evenings we’d just give feedback on, yes, you have a good boy, good girl, they’re behaving well or badly. And whanau voted with their feet.”

That changed, when some 400 family members showed up. There was at least one staff at each table with questions ready such as: “What are the strengths of our school?” “What are the three best experiences you’ve had?” “What are your hopes and aspirations?” “What do you want your child to be learning?”

Then they asked the same questions to students and staff.

“We’re quite strong on bringing those other voices,” said Elizabeth Eley, associate director of Poutama Pounamu, the research and professional development unit at the University of Waikato. “That’s when we start to disrupt and make change.”

In both schools, teachers use the survey responses and student performance data to reflect on their practices. The principals are also trained in facilitating “co-construction meetings” where teachers of a group of five or six students meet once a term to evaluate — not the students, but themselves. It’s a continuous internal evaluation that is embedded, and the teachers guide one another.

“The senior leadership facilitates it so teachers see it as valued,” said principal Murfitt. These meetings are another example of ditching the top-down training model.

Principal Anaru said that “because it’s so strongly immersed in evidence and research, this (program) puts us in a confident space that we know this is what we need to be doing.”

Fiona Mason, general manager of Heretaunga Kindergartens, responsible for bringing Blended Learning to teachers of the 16 kindergartens, said the course offered “a much deeper look at how we could enhance our culturally responsive pedagogy.”

“Fatigue among teachers is about teachers not connecting with whanau and children. I find the more that our teachers engage, the more that our teachers make connections, the more that they explore their own thoughts and feelings and experiences and knowledge and skills, the more open and alive and better teachers they become.”

Beth Te Kiri, a teacher at Flaxmere, said “I thought I had a good pedagogy in class until Te Kotahitanga came across my path. And then I realized that perhaps it wasn’t as good as what it could be.”

She always had good relationships with her students but she learned that teachers nurturing that self-belief in students was vital. “There is a mentality out in the world that Maori are underachievers. They can’t do any better than working in the orchard or just doing manual work.”

“One important thing that helps with high expectations, is when they know where they need to go … help them see the next steps.

“Let them know that us as teachers are advocates for them. We’re here to help them.”

Education Without Oppression — the 2018-19 Atkinson series — examines the continuing marginalization of Black and Indigenous students in Canada. It analyzes the challenges and breakthroughs nationally and in the cities of Baltimore, Md.; Lucknow, India; and Napier, New Zealand.

Shree Paradkar , a columnist covering issues around race and gender, is the 2018-2019 recipient of the Atkinson Fellowship in Public Policy. She is based in Toronto. Follow her on Twitter: @ShreeParadkar

Education Without Oppression — the 2018-19 Atkinson series — examines the continuing marginalization of Black and Indigenous students in Canada. It analyzes the challenges and breakthroughs nationally and in the cities of Baltimore, Md.; Lucknow, India; and Napier, New Zealand.

The Atkinson Fellowship in Public Policy awards a seasoned Canadian journalist the opportunity to pursue a yearlong investigation into a current policy issue. The project is funded by the Atkinson Foundation, the Honderich family and the Toronto Star.