Looking at learner success through a cultural lens: Iwi and whānau 'speak'

Melanie Riwai-Couch opened the Te Toi Tupu hui by talking a little bit about the work she is doing with iwi. A lot of the things she is looking it is around iwi and whānau 'voice'.

Melanie is from a bicultural marriage at a time when it was unusual, and when her parents split, her father brought her up. Growing up with strong Māori roots gave her an interesting perspective on life. She lives and works in Ngāi Tahu, but does not claim Ngāa Tahu in her ancestry. There is a whole other world when it comes to iwi.

Melanie also teaches at the kura, and she discovered all of these things that didn't work for me. The students tried really hard, but there were a lot of things that kept tripping them up. For example, the letter 'i' - is it always a capital letter? So why doesn't me, he, and she have a capital letter too. It was a way to peel back the cultural layers of the spelling traditions, and the cultural shaping that underpins them. She went to the community partners to see if she could find student teachers who would come into the kura and to sit with the children while they read.

The initiative resulted in several hundred hours of extra reading for the students - and this, Melanie feels, has helped students create a love of reading. There was a sustained shift of at least 1 to 1.5 stanine (PAT), and up to 4 to 5 stanines. This led to Melanie to ask the question, "In what ways are iwi and schools working together to improve Māori student achievement". Students also grow in confidence ("I'll probably succeed in a lot of stuff like getting a degree at University" - Māia, Year 8), and are happy to speak to pretty much anyone.

Parents also say "success for them is to be standing strong and confident and humble in anything and everything they chose to do and to be able to make mistakes and learn from them". And an Iwi education representative said that "it's that whole person" that is key, and another that "Maori student success is when student are grounded in who they are and where they come from whilst achieving success in whatever field they choose no matter where in the world they are" (Iwi Education Representative). Potential is not something that is based in the future, but it is something that students are 'being' and realising.

Three case studies (Ngā Puna Korero) have informed her thinking to date. The sort of thing that is emerging are the importance of sustaining high trust relationships, and this means that, in part, it's working with iwi in the way that iwi want to be worked with. In part this means working within communities of practice that tend to be more responsive to the needs of the participants. One of the students said "people with two languages like us are gifted, bi-lingual and bi-literate. We are talented and clever" (Ruamano, Year 10). Not all iwi receive money from the ministry for education. The purpose of Iwi Education Project funding is "to build iwi capability to engage in and contribute to the education system and the education of their whānau and hapu. This appropriation is primarily used to produce iwi education strategies, reo strategies and implementation plans; and to deliver iwi education project" (Ministry of Education, 2013, p. 1). However, there are tensions between expectations and responsibility - i.e. whose responsibility is it to implement some aspects of an initiative. The 5 iwi with the main schools include Ngai Tahu (579), Ngati Whatua (397), and Ngati Maniapoto (144). The amount of funding, compared with the geographical area or the schools they work with, however, was not scaled to the funding received...ranging from $40,000 per school to $193 per school that they work with. Resourcing is therefore an issue.

The best way to influence the impact schools is, Melanie proposes, through working with organisations such as Te Toi Tupu. Ideally, it is a case of contacting and working with all stakeholders...something that isn't possible if resourcing isn't sufficient. At the end of the day, however, a student has succeeded when students have the confidence and skills to come back to work with iwi. It's about young children building a sense of where they are from, who they are 'from', what they are doing now (as a whole, culturally shaped person), and also where they are heading next.

 Images

• 'hapu'u' http://www.flickr.com/photos/37718675756@N01/6180648 Found on flickrcc.net
•  'Creation and Consumption'  http://www.flickr.com/photos/49053756@N03/8120316401 Found on flickrcc.net

Related articles

• Education investment priority for Ngai Tahu (radionz.co.nz)
• Ngai Tahu assures Ngati Kahungunu over Ruataniwha dam (radionz.co.nz)

What impact is participating in a Virtual Professional Learning and Development programme having for students? Check out this video

This video provides some teacher's reflections and insights as to how participating within the Virtual Professional Learning and Development programme programme has helped their students and impacted their practice.


VPLD Hui 2012 - Reflections from CORE Education Digital Media on Vimeo.

We would like to acknowledge and thank all of the participants who shared their reflections in the video. The camera and editing work for this video was done by Michael Lintott.
With thanks also to the Ministry of Education and Te Toi Tupu for their ongoing support.

Looking for ideas for working with gifted and talented learners?

Image via WikipediaGifted and talented learners are sometimes seen as the students who already have a head start. However, the challenge is to work with a range of students who are on a continuum - to have sufficient differentiation to maintain motivation and extend learning. A tough ask! However, there are some really useful resources available.

The first set of resources is from the UK and comprise:

• Videos that illustrate ideas and approaches for primary
• Videos that illustrate ideas and approaches for secondary

For some super examples of projects that are underway you might like to visit the Edgecumbe College space (designed and set up by Anne Sturgess), and the Learn Now projects (designed and coordinated by Jo Gibson)

If you are based in NZ (or even if you're not), you may find the Ministry of Education, TKI resource useful, as there is information and resources available for parents / whanau, students, and teachers. You might also consider joining The New Zealand Association for Gifted Children.

If anyone has any other ideas resources, or great sites - or would like to share their experiences, please pop comments below :-)

Related articles

• Room at the Top: A New Direction for Gifted Education? (Part One) (giftedphoenix.wordpress.com)
• Gifted Education in the 21st Century (acfeinc.wordpress.com)
• The Composition of England's Gifted and Talented Population in Schools (giftedphoenix.wordpress.com)

Greetings from Your Foreign Correspondent: A report about support for Christchurch's Schools (by Douglas Harre)

Douglas Harre

Douglas Harre and CORE Education have very kindly given me permission to share the following report with you, which gives a vivid insight into some of the challenges the students and schools are facing, and the amazing ways in which they are rising to those challenges. The Ministry of Education and Core have been spearheading support that is being offered to schools in Christchurch, alongside a wide range of other committed personnel - many of them voluntary.

Douglas Harre wrote (13th March 2011):

Parts of Christchurch do feel somewhat otherworldly at present, so I thought I would take a moment to report on one part of Core’s support for schools in that still somewhat beleaguered city.

I am back working with the MoE over the next couple of weeks to assist with getting the ICT systems of damaged schools up and running , although it is likely that the schools will need a large amount of ongoing assistance for a couple of months.

As you will be aware there are many more schools badly affected by the Feb 22 quake (up to 30?) compared with the Sept 4th event (only 2 local schools closed after that event).

The Ministry of Ed and local schools/BoTs have been working hard to find space for schools that have been given the dreaded red sticker and are therefore out of action in the short to medium-term.

The result is that many schools will be sharing space in the interim – it looks as though primaries and intermediates will share space at the same time and high schools will split their day 50/50 (-ish).

About 100 students from St Mary's Primary are therefore moving into the hall of another unaffected school nearby - the hall will be divided into 5 partitioned zones that teachers and children will work in until the fate of their own school becomes clear. The school needs to have broadband, power, data, and a wireless network put into the hall….. “And oh” said the St Mary's principal (with a hopeful smile on his face) “if you can get us 10 desktop PCs that would be greatly appreciated”.

Heaton Intermediate (500 students) was the next school to visit…. their 3 year old, stylish, angular, steel and glass admin block/staff room doesn’t look too bad from the drive, but once inside you can see how walls have come away from floors, things have a generally Pisa Tower-ish look to them and the staff room has an unappealing layer of detritus that came up through the floor boards and oozed everywhere within 10 minutes of the quake. Broken glass is still strewn across the floor from when the dishwasher door flew open and disgorged its contents at the peak of the shaking.

Heaton’s Yr 7s are off to Casebrook Intermediate and their Yr 8s to Breen’s Intermediate – so each of those host schools are working hard to find space (old rooms, garages, spare prefabs, large cardboard boxes) and facilities for 250 students and their teachers who are about to turn up later this week.

Fortunately Heaton managed to get their servers out, plus they had a backup (yay!) and a[n]...offsite backup also (double yay!!) so they are looking good…..now we just need to get the infrastructure and associated hardware going to use it in the host schools. As the Heaton teachers have been using eTap (a hosted SMS) and KnowledgeNet (hosted LMS) they will be able to continue to use those products in their new location. Cloud computing is looking increasingly attractive to those schools with email servers buried under a steel beam or in a location with no power....

As an example on the secondary front Avonside Girls High School is moving to the Burnside High School site – the high schools are going to run consecutively rather than simultaneously – so it looks at though BHS will operate 8am to 1pm, then AGHS moves in from 1.30 to 5pm…..AGHS has managed to get a lot of their PCs out of their outlying buildings but about 30 TELA laptops remain trapped and alone in the badly damaged admin block (generally with a multitude of teacher resources on each one). As you can imagine this is one more stressor for teachers who may also have power or water off at home, or be dealing with injured family members.Image via Wikipedia

Your correspondent was able to acquire laptops for those teachers direct from Equico, so they are being couriered down to BHS over the weekend, re-imaged Monday/Tuesday by IT staff to make them ready for the AGHS teachers. What we CAN’T do is replace the resources on the laptops (if they aren’t backed up) so we will see how that unfolds over the next week or so.

(Note to self and ourselves: ensure personal backup plan is in place, functioning and tested).

Last example is Unlimited/Discovery1….the two schools in the heart of the CBD, 650 staff and students in a modern, vertical, concrete and glass structure….state of the art ICT facilities/fast fibre connection and with the city as their learning environment. It is in the Red Zone so is off limits – all teacher laptops, school computers and servers (and backups) inside….a sub-optimal scenario to say the least.

Those two schools are being relocated for the next month or two to a rural, horizontal, one story school on the outskirts of the city…..an interesting cultural change for students who may not have seen a cow for sometime, felt grass between their toes or who may now have to travel 3 kms for a double trim latte.....but as many have said “needs must”….and (hopefully) a fantastic learning opportunity for all concerned.

Image by wheany via Flickr

There’s a big team of MoE people there also, but spare a particular thought for Bernie Scannell (the Queen of School Transport), who has been living out of a suitcase in Chch while trying to organise the dozens of buses that will be required to pick up 6-7000 school kids twice a day and deliver them to and from their new schools, across a pretty broken transport network.

In the midst of all that is happening in the wider Chch context I would really like to note the rallying of teachers and schools together to support one another – in all my conversations with principals and teachers last week there was a very supportive atmosphere….this has been aided and abetted by the sterling work of numerous Core people around the country who are contributing in a variety of ways – the rapid development of last week’s wiki being an excellent example. People in the schools are VERY appreciative (and aware of) the work occurring nationwide to assist them.

As you are all aware Core staff in Chch have an additional range of personal and professional challenges to deal with, so it has been gratifying to watch the support flowing in for them in particular.

Hopefully this has provided one small set of examples re the challenges schools are facing in the city. Morale is generally pretty high, but people are very realistic about the challenges ahead. How it will all play out in the longer term regarding the provision of education in the city as a whole, is an as yet unanswered question.