Māori Student Agency: If you’re not at the table you are on the menu . . . Helen Kinsey-Wightman We have scored 200 hours of PLD time! Judging by my Principal’s jubilant and faintly incredulous response this is nothing short of a miracle – despite being a woman who is not afraid of a challenge and usually very positive – when I asked for her support to apply she had felt the need to prepare me for the potential failure of the endeavour before I began, such is the fearful reputation of the application process! Throughout the initial form completion I cursed the name of the designer who forgot to allow the creation of a new paragraph through the simple use of the enter key . . . But now, having wrestled at length with the application form – temptingly and slightly romantically titled a PLD journal – I am invested in the process. As compensation for the time I will never get back, I now tell myself that the reason the Ministry created a form in Excel was to deliberately weed out those lightweights who had only a casual interest in a bit of extra funding, from those of us who have a genuine zeal for student achievement. My jubilation at being successful was somewhat shortlived when I realised the price of success was the opportunity to wrestle again with the PLD journal in the form of a more lengthy delivery plan. Having anticipated my misery and perhaps proving that they had trialled the process themselves, the Ministry helpfully provide up to 3 hours of an external expert’s time to assist me in completing the monstrous form they created – of course the 3 hours I invested required no compensation since they would have otherwise been spent enjoying some needless down time in the term break . . . I have had emails this week from 3 different organisations offering to support schools to fill in their PLD journal and delivery plan. So, yes, I do wonder at the necessity and economy of creating a process for the allocation of funding, from one government organisation to another, which is so prescriptive in its purpose that applications must be expressed in a certain way in order to be successful and which require funding to be dedicated to assist school leaders – who just might have a modicum of common sense and expertise – just to fill in the application form. Having completed the delivery plan I have come to understand the purpose – at least from the Ministry’s perspective – in the use of Excel, in that the form calculates the number of provider hours accounted for and deducts these from the total allocated – does this make it worth the clumsiness from a user perspective? I imagine a feedback form might deliver a fairly resounding no! All that said, I am genuinely thrilled to have been allocated the funding to work on our school goal: To recognise and value Māori as Tangata Whenua. The opportunity of 200 hours with Hine Waitere to work with staff around culturally responsive and relational pedagogies will be invaluable. One of Hine’s strong messages around Māori success is that, “If you are not at the tabe you are on the menu.”
With this in mind, at the same time as I was applying for funding towards our school goal I was also thinking about how we could engage students in support of it. Last term I attended the Secondary AP/DP Conference held in New Plymouth. The Conference had some great keynotes but – as is often the case – the most memorable session I attended was one of the breakouts. It was led by Kirsty Dowding a recently appointed DP at Kaipara College. She described the development of a student group – Te Roopu Rangatira – which was set up with the goal of developing Māori student agency within the student body. A group of Māori students, deliberately chosen as a mix of students already engaged and successful in their learning and those who at that stage were not, were selected to represent their peers. Staff explained the concept of deficit thinking and asked students to share examples of deficit thinking in their own educational experience which they went on to demonstrate to teachers through a drama presentation. With staff support, the roopu ran a teacher only day session to share their experiences, to challenge teachers with a range of activities in a Māori context which mirrored the types of learning experiences NCEA demanded of them. Staff learned to read and pronounce a range of Māori place names, to collaboratively complete a kowhaiwhai pattern puzzle, to practise and share an action song. The school leadership then shared the school’s Māori Achievement Action Plan with the students and asked for their feedback and also their ideas for ways to engage their whānau with the plan. The students organised a hui and called every parent in the community to invite them. At the meeting – which was very well attended – the students presented the school’s achievement plan and asked the parents to think about how they could support it. Now that Kaipara College have engaged in a CoL these students have been able to speak to other schools about the work they are doing and the effects on their school environment and their success. Speaking of success, between 2015 and 2016 NCEA Level 1 results for Māori students at Kaipara rose from 62 per cent to 77 per cent and in 2016 100 per cent of Māori boys achieved Level 2. As is so often the case with those ‘just in time’ messages, I left Kirsty’s session feeling energised and optimistic that I had a blueprint I could take back to my school to continue the work we are beginning. We will hold our first student hui for the 245 students who identify as Māori in our school next week – I feel hopeful that by including them at the table our whole community will benefit.