Pasifika peoples have long been tellers of tales. It is one of the ways our knowledge and wisdom is passed down from generation to generation. When it comes to the education of Pasifika students in Aotearoa, our tale is often defined by a tail of another sort – ‘the long brown tail’ of underachievement. The ‘tail’ is a reference to how Pacific Islands’ students are over-represented in the bottom of educational statistics in Aotearoa. My masters research completed in 2015 gave voice to the lived experiences of students from above the tail, and in particular gave voice to what they perceived as effective teacher actions and dispositions. Effective teachers nurtured students’ academic and cultural identities and as such were considered culturally responsive. Of particular significance was the manner in which culturally responsive teachers increased their influence on student engagement and achievement. These teachers operated from a strong sense of agency and on a foundational belief that their students also had agency in teaching and learning. Participants did encounter culturally responsive teachers, but it was the exception and not the rule. This article is a reflection on the findings of the ‘tales from above the tail’ and leading our school journey towards a culturally responsive curriculum and pedagogy. There have been significant culture shifts in the organisation to position our school and teaching staff to deliver a curriculum that is responsive to the identities of our local community. The work towards making cultural responsiveness the rule is definitely a journey. The challenge is to continually question our own deeply seated colonised thinking to give freedom to indigenising what and how we teach.
Pacific greetingsWelcome to the special issue of The Ethnographic Edge, titled, Shifting the system: Battling uncertainties and activating agentic school leadership practices. We, the editors of this special issue, hail from a range of islands in Te Moana-nui-ā-Kiwa (the Pacific). We are children of the Moana (Oceania) and, as such, we include our ancestral ties to the Moana in our affiliations at the beginning of this editorial and the articles within the special issue. Tongan scholar Tevita O Kaʻili (2017) articulates in his book, Marking Indigeneity: The Tongan Art of Sociospatial Relations, the sharing of ancestral kin ties allows us to bring to the forefront the various kinship branches or relations we carry. This is important as it allows us to reflect on who we are, our position, and the ancestral stories we carry with us. It also provides a means of connecting with one another and with you, the reader, through our critical and creative educational articulations. As we walk with our ancestors daily, we welcome you to this special issue and its opening editorial.
Education systems in western nations are often built on a long history of centralising the western canon of knowledge and colonial norms. These norms are perpetuated and reinforced via western research which amplifies the voices of the dominant, while working to silence the values, practices, and knowledges of minority groups. As a colonial nation, Aotearoa New Zealand continues to be impacted by its colonial histories, where colonial (read white) ways of being, knowing, and understanding dominate initial teacher education, schools, tertiary institutions, research, and our everyday lives. However, within education and research more generally, Indigenous and Pacific researchers and practitioners have been working hard to carve out space in institutions to challenge colonial hierarchies of knowledge and make space for Indigenous ways of being, knowing, seeing, doing, and feeling. This article contributes to the work being done by Indigenous and Pacific scholars in Aotearoa New Zealand by detailing our collective, relational approach to convening the special issue of Shifting the System for the Ethnographic Edge journal. Convening a special issue is not unique and groups of academics do it regularly across a range of academic journals and fields. However, our experiences of convening this special issue were quite different. Here we share the journey and reflect on how our focus on privileging the often-marginalised voices of Pacific school leaders was underpinned by an Indigenous, collective approach embedded in the pedagogical practice of Indigenous Storywork. Employing collaborative critical autoethnography, we articulate the ways in which our engagement with each other and the authors within this special issue disrupted western power relations often present in interactions between ‘researchers’ within the university and ‘practitioners’ at the coalface. Furthermore, we demonstrate how engaging in relational practices builds a space that encourages the principles of respect, responsibility, reverence, reciprocity, holism, interrelatedness, and synergy.
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