The Pacific Regional Education Framework (PacREF) 2018-2030 proposes an ambitious agenda for a transformative and sustainable educational intervention across 15 countries. This paper discusses an approach to inclusive education in the countries of the Pacific islands as they begin to engage with this educational framework. We argue that inclusive education has been heavily influenced by ideas from outside the Pacific. Pacific cultural understandings of community relationships and responsibilities in particular are often overshadowed by imported ideas from outside the region. The influence of 'outsider' perspectives and practices reflect continuing colonial domination, weakening local capacity-building within teacher education institutions in the region. The Pacific Island countries (PICs) are highly dependent on donor partners and this dependency is frequently informed by deficit views. The idea of inclusive education begs the question of 'Inclusion into what?' The dominance of Western ideas may ignore the relational context of Pacific cultures, reinforcing ideas of cultural deficit. This paper reviews inclusive education in the Pacific within the context of policy borrowing and cultural tensions between Pacific and Western frameworks. It also considers the experience of teacher educators working within an institutional context that itself is heavily influenced by imported structures and ideas.
The authors facilitated three inter-professional mentorship workshops in Fiji and Tonga, which were part of a series of such events that they recently conducted across the Pacific region. These workshops, in turn, formed part of a larger, ongoing leadership initiative co-sponsored by several local, regional, and international organizations. The purpose of each workshop was to facilitate each multi-disciplinary cohort of leaders in attendance to begin to create an adaptable mentorship model that would fit their unique Pacific contexts. One task within these model-development sessions was for each cohort to create metaphors that they believed best encapsulated the essence of their specific mentorship approach. In this article, the authors summarize aspects of that creative process, present several metaphors that the three cohorts generated, and raise implications regarding future mentoring initiatives.
Through the ideas of and within Oceania that we outline, and within which we locate architecture and institutions for CIE regionally, we illustrate the identified turning points through analysis of dynamic and intersecting trajectories of the Oceania Comparative and International Education Society (OCIES), formerly the Australia and New Zealand Comparative and International Education Society (ANZCIES), and the Vaka Pasifiki, formerly the Rethinking Pacific Education Initiative for and by Pacific Peoples (RPEIPP) project. We offer initial responses to an over-arching theme in posing the question: how, and through what processes, have these groups influenced understandings of 'regionalism' for CIE within Oceania? This involves examining the conferences, financing, membership, the Society journal/publications and aspects of CIE education of the two bodies.
It is a rare event when senior scholars and actors in a field come together; more so when that takes place in the company of new and emerging scholars. Even rarer are such occasions in the Oceania region, where distance can mediate against key players coming together in time and space. When the stars align, the opportunity must be seized. This article portrays aspects of an event when, due to otherwise unfortunate circumstances, three senior Pacific educators, scholars, and leaders offered glimpses of their experiential learning and leadership by presenting a storied discussion of leadership. The account given here discusses ideas derived from that storying. It is an examination of the form used to enact the educators’ pedagogical purpose; keynote-as-storied-discussion. This innovative way of delivering a keynote leverages the intersectional value of the tone-setting intent of a keynote, the emotional and experiential layering of storying, the pedagogical potential of woven narrative strands, and the discursive exchange of ideas.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.
hi@scite.ai
10624 S. Eastern Ave., Ste. A-614
Henderson, NV 89052, USA
Copyright © 2024 scite LLC. All rights reserved.
Made with 💙 for researchers
Part of the Research Solutions Family.