Mātauranga, science teaching and research
In this video, deputy principal and teacher-researcher Nick Bryant shares his journey into mātauranga Māori and pūtaiao, reflecting on the experiences and influences that have shaped this thinking and practice as an educator. Drawing on his interests in culturally responsive pedagogy, critical thought and mātauranga Māori, Nick discusses the importance of creating learning spaces where rangatahi can engage confidently with multiple knowledge systems.
He discusses how exploring and teaching mātauranga Māori alongside Western ontology can be achieved through a bicultural co-design participatory approach.
Supporting resources
Nick mentions examples of bicultural teaching experiences. The following resources provide additional information and support.
Whakaotirangi and her kete of kūmara is a Connected article that recounts the Tainui oral tradition of kūmara.
Māori soil science explains how Māori settlers modified soils to promote kūmara growth. It features Te Parapara Garden at the Hamilton Gardens.
Harakeke under the microscope explores muka via mātauranga Māori and Western science.
Exploring kōwhai mātauranga in the classroom curates resources produced by Chloe Stantiall as part of the TLRI-funded research project Envisioning student possible selves in science: Addressing ‘plant blindness’ through place-based education.
Meet Professor Nick Roskruge and his work with taewa (Māori potatoes).
Enduring competencies for designing science learning pathways – webinar with Rose Hipkins.
This video is part of Puna Aronui – Exploring mātauranga pūtaiao – a Science Learning Hub PLD programme designed to support educators to deepen understanding of mātauranga Māori as a meaningful and co-equal knowledge system within science.
Transcript
Greta Dromgool
Kia ora, Nick.
Nick Bryant
Yeah, nice to see you again. Mine and Greta’s paths have crossed a number of times, and every time it’s been a positive experience. So ngā mihi nunui ki a tatou he mihi mahana ki a koutou. He mihi ki te kaupapa o tēnei wā, mātauranga me te pūtaiao.
I’ll talk a little bit about who I am and where I come from and then hopefully that will give some confidence to people, and I think I’m in the vast majority of science teachers in terms of feeling a little bit uncertain in this space.
But he uri tēnei o Ngā Puhi me Ngāti Whatua ko Korokota me Ōtamatea me Maungarongo ngā mārae. Me Ngā Puhi me Ngāti Whātua ngā iwi. Ko Parawhaurā rāua ko Kororoirangi ngā hapū. Tēnei te mihi, tēnei te aroha.
My name’s Nick Bryant. That’s me in the middle, and that’s with my mum and that’s my family. So on one side is my little baby, May Aroha. She’s quite a bit older now, but that’s all right. On the other side is my grandparents with my mum when she graduated from teachers’ college. So May Hammett, who was born in Edinburgh and moved over to New Zealand on the way home from World War II with my grandad, her husband, who was born Patariki Perekara. And then on my Māori side, because this is a mātauranga Māori space, it’s important you acknowledge whakapapa. We’ve got Ihaka Perekara, Perekara, Kiri Petikara, Alfred Owen and Ngāwai. Yeah, you get the idea.
So I grew up in Northland. I whakapapa Māori. I’m just up the road a ways from two of my marae as well as Ōtamatea, which is down a little bit more. I started teaching probably speaking about three words of Māori. I’ve done a bit more since then. But when I say who I am and where I whakapapa to, and May’s whenua is buried up in this space as well, I know who I am and I know that I’m Māori, but also, and this is important, I work in Matamata College. I acknowledge the rohe o Koperu me te rohe o Wiremu Tamehana Tarapipiti. So when I talk about I’m not mana whenua, I’m not. I whakapapa up north, and I don’t really get involved in any sort of tribal politics. I can’t speak on behalf of my iwi, let alone anyone else’s. So even though you might think, oh, yeah, this guy, he’s a Māori, so he can do what he wants, then no, I’m very much on the learning journey the same as everyone else.
You could have invited me to talk about what have I been up to lately, and it’s not quite linear, but I’ll sort of talk about the he whakaaro nui ki a tātou, the ideas that we had. Because I’ve done a few things, but sort of a big part of the last 5 years is trying to work together in a bicultural space, a genuine bicultural space, to get better outcomes for kids. So not just be nice because it’s nice to be nice to Māori people, like what are we actually going to do as professionals to get something that impacts our kids? And I won’t go into the stats, but they’re all pretty bleak and depressing. So what is something that we can do about it?
I found this model quite a few years into the research that I was doing, but it sort of resonated, so I decided, oh yeah, that’s the one we’ve been following, where we take this Western ontology, the Western way of viewing the world, give the same and equal weighting to te ao Māori, the ways of finding stuff out and the ways of doing something, and you end up with bicultural co-design, participatory approach. You get an outcome like that. In my head, that’s what we’re trying to do.
If I’m going to be honest, and I like being honest, that’s what most of New Zealand looks like. We follow the Western model, and you chuck in some Māori words, and I’ve got too many examples to share with you. And usually they’re a little bit confronting with people. But the example, and I’ve been this guy, I used to use the Māori word for test tube, and that was my contribution to te ao Māori, and that’s great. You use the Māori word, but what else is there that is Māori other than that one word and the little picture you put on the wall? What is the actual mātauranga Māori? Because any knowledge system is much more than just one word or much more than just one picture. And if I was going to be honest, my experience with this sort of thing is that, at best, we sometimes pay token, sometimes we don’t even pay token, and it’s a pretty grim situation.
So I had that in my mind. Also, I wanted to do something. So where do you go from that? I was fortunate enough to be part of this team – Maurice, Rachel, Tasha, Bronwyn Cowie, me, and he’s not in this picture, but Alistair Turner, who was a cross-school leader, who was very good at getting us all together. And this was based at Waikato University when I was the head of science at Hillcrest High School.
And we worked over a few years, and in the last 2 years, we got TLRI funding. But we looked at what are some things that could make learning better for kids? And I have an unashamed kaupapa Māori focus on it. And in my head, that’s what it looked like. You get some bits from mātauranga Māori, and a genuine mātauranga Māori, you get bits from the existing world of science, and I’ve got science training. I’m reasonably comfortable in that space. You design something together, and everyone wins. That’s sort of the idea that we had, and it’s sort of like, oh yeah, that sounds good in theory, but what does it actually mean?
The other thing I’m very aware of – and this is Rosemary Hipkins, kaihautū of NZCER – I was aware that there would be steep learning for me. And as tangata whenua me ōna tangata Pākehā, like if I’m uncomfortable in the spaces, then I imagine most people will be, and you have to be open to the fact that you’re going to be out of your comfort zone, and you’re going to make mistakes, and some of them will be public, and some of them you just wince and pretend that they never happened and try really hard not to do it again. But part of the kaupapa is you have to make yourself vulnerable. And interestingly enough, never from a Māori person, but I have had my Māoridom challenged from a range of places like, why can’t we get a Māori doing this? And I’m like, I’m as Māori as anyone else. Don’t you tell me who I am. But I knew that I’d be putting myself into a space that might not be comfortable, and as I said, I’m in the middle of Kīngitanga, and Ngā Puhi and Kīngitanga don’t always get on. So if I come up and tell people what to do up these ways or down these ways, yeah, I’m on a hiding to nothing. So anyway, make yourself vulnerable is the first bit, and that’s hard for anyone, especially someone who struggles with their Māori identity at the best of times.
And then you go back to what are some big ideas that aren’t going to be too controversial? And in the readings I did around this, this idea of whakapapa came through. Now, whakapapa traditionally means your own personal whakapapa, and that’s usually quite personal to you. You wouldn’t just go and nosey into someone else’s family tree without at the very least, asking some polite and delicate questions. But – and this is something from a kaumātua up north from a long time ago – everything in the universe has whakapapa. The chair that I’m sitting on has whakapapa. It’s the story that got it to that place in time and space that usually overlaps with you. And it’s almost like a mindset. If you look at how the whakapapa of everything works together, it’s kind of like a concept map. Or if you want to be a scientist, it’s just a way of viewing it. So if you start with gently understanding the whakapapa of something, then you can develop a much deeper and richer understanding. And this was always my intention when you’re stepping into mātauranga Māori. To me, understanding mātauranga Māori makes your science understanding richer and deeper and more complex. It doesn’t take away from it. You don’t turn your scientist off when you’re being a Māori. In fact, I think it makes you a better scientist. But anyway, one of the things that we looked at was this idea of whakapapa.
Up in that, sort of that loose idea of, in the mātauranga Māori, the whakapapa idea, and what are we going to put in the science box?
OK, I like this one. What did you just see? Tell me, what did you see that was alive? Yell out something.
Participant
There were plants, some animals.
Nick Bryant
Cool. What animals do you remember seeing?
Participant
There were cows in the front.
Nick Bryant
And what plants do you remember seeing?
Participant
Grass.
Nick Bryant
Grass. Anything else?
Participant
Trees.
Nick Bryant
Grass and trees. Anything else?
Participant
Clouds and part of the atmosphere.
Nick Bryant
Cows, absolutely trees. There’s a whole bunch of other things that are happening. How specific, as in down to species name, how specific could we be about grass?
My brother, who’s a farmer, could probably name four or five different species that he can see. There’s dandelions, there’s rye, there’ll be clover in there. There’s Pinus radiata. There’ll probably be a different species of grass up there. And one of the ideas that came through in this build-up to what the science is, is this idea of plant blindness. I’ve literally used this diagram before, and I’m ashamed to say that I have, because first of all, we don’t have snakes in New Zealand or foxes or quite a few other things. But when you’re looking at – I’m a science teacher, and I teach food chains. Grass. We’ve done whatever the number is, half a dozen, a dozen different animals, and we almost without exception put plants into this one thing or two things. Grass or trees.
And when you unpack that a little bit more in the literature, the whakapapa of this idea, there is a thing called plant blindness, where you don’t see plants. They become so invisible to you that they’re not even a thing. I tried this with my nieces who live on a dairy farm, and I said, “Look out the window, what do you see?” “Cows.” “What else do you see?” “Uh, the sky.” “What else do you see?” “Oh, the cow shed.” And they went through and through and through with me trying to give them hints, and they didn’t see grass because it was just the invisible background. But any farmer will tell you, if you take grass out, then you don’t have a very good farm.
Participant
Don’t even get me started on the soil. They’ve missed that as well.
Nick Bryant
And of course, scientists understand this. This is me identifying as a scientist saying, for many years, I’ve taught grass as the food chain, and it’s a bit more complicated than that. This idea of the misguided anthropocentric ranking of plants as inferior to animals, and I’m like, “Oh, no, I love plants.” Because I do love plants. I love learning, I love all those things. I teach all sorts of things in biology, including plants.
And then I took – this is a few years ago – took my daughter to see her nieces, who’s my brother’s kids, and they emptied their toys on the floor. And what do you see in the children’s toys?
I can see a teddy bear, a giraffe. I think that’s an elephant. There’s a koala in there somewhere. Oh, no, that’s the elephant. That might be the koala. Penguin, another koala, a monkey, undistinguishable blue fluff.
Participant
I reckon the blue fluff’s a virus.
Nick Bryant
Say that again, sorry?
Participant
I’m a virologist, and I reckon the blue fluff’s a virus.
Nick Bryant
It’s my mum’s bag, which technically isn’t part of the toys, just to give some idea. The biologist in me understands that there’s five kingdoms and blah, blah, blah – I won’t bore you with that, you probably know it already – with this little group here being mammals. From my daughter’s point of view, it’s the world. It is the living world. And she knows grass. And I’m like, oh. Because I’ve taught – I’m a scientist – I’ve taught her lots of living things, but if I’m going to be honest, most of the living things we talk about are mammals.
We don’t touch on plants. In fact, there’s a lot of things that I’m reflecting on. Maybe I’m the same as everyone else, and I’m aware of it. Maybe I’m plant blind just as everyone else is. And that was a really interesting reflection for me because when you start looking at what can we structure some lessons around, plant blindness is absolutely a thing. I could get my teeth into that. But how do we help kids see plants? Not just the grass and here’s another type of grass, but plants being the keystone species in most ecosystems. But that’s what we settled on. And then mātauranga Māori, the bit of a tricky one. Where do you start with that?
So we contacted a whole bunch of Māori people I knew. So Kimai Huirama, who was at the time sort of an educational consultant for Waikato-Tainui, Adam Whauwhau, Teddy Wharawhara, Marino Hau, and we talked. And you go into these conversations with open mindsets about what do we do to help our Māori kids. And they were really rich and deep conversations.
And Kimai is trained as a science teacher, so it’s not like we’re talking to – they’re experts in their field and in multiple fields. It wasn’t specifically about this project, but I want to acknowledge the input of Rewi Ratana and Trevor Hokene, who had a big part of this, we’re talking over a good 2 or 3 years, conversations around how do you make learning accessible for everyone, including our Māori kids?
And they were very, very generous with their knowledge, but the answer came back was like, you’re the expert. You do something. Here’s some things we know. Now you go. And I’m like, oh, come on, man. But then that’s the reality of teaching in New Zealand. There aren’t science teacher experts that happen to be local mātauranga Māori experts at the same time. They don’t exist. Or if they do, they are so massively overworked and underpaid that they might be able to give you half an hour if you’re lucky.
And I look around New Zealand schools, and that’s a pretty common picture. If you have a person, you’re doing really well. Or what often happens is it all falls back on the head of Māori, and they are the expert in everything, including science. Don’t get me wrong, I love science, but not every TIC Māori is a scientist. And is it fair for me to ask them to basically design my programme when they’ve probably got enough to do already? This needs to be an us thing, not a me thing, and I’m hiding behind this fact that I’m not mana whenua, but while I am Māori and I do know some Māori things, is there something that I can do?
And so when it comes back to something that I can do, I know what I know. And this is where this idea of not just mātauranga ā-Māori, which is this all-encompassing, deep knowledge in time and space about Māori, but mātauranga ā-iwi, mātauranga ā-hapū and mātauranga ā-whānau. And there’s information that is specific for you and your family that you might be able to bring to a space. And if you can do that, then that can encourage other people to do that as well. And that starts to become a self-perpetuating thing. It’s good for Māori kids, but also is something that works for anyone. Every single person on the planet has background knowledge from their upbringing, whether that’s from their grandparents or uncles or aunties or whoever, they all hold that. So I’m thinking, OK, this is in my head – plants – and what does my family, especially my Māori side of my family, what do we know about plants?
And there’s a different way of putting it, and this is from Maurice, who does a lot more of the academic advising. In the academic literature, it’s called funds of knowledge. I call it mātauranga ā-whānau, but to me, it means the same thing. It means that you acknowledge that everyone has forms of knowledge that can be useful to learning, and your job is to try and create spaces for that to be teased out.
And I found this interesting. This was a North American study to help Mexican students, and like, there may be parallels between a Māori kid’s experience and a Mexican kid’s experience, but you get the idea.
This came from the paper that came from it. This is what mātauranga ā-whānau might mean. All sorts of backgrounds that you have in terms of what you bring into the classroom. Most teachers have been through university, that’s part of it. But in no way is that the sole source of your knowledge in teaching. There’s all this other stuff, like even if you have stuff in your garden, some of my best science teachers talked about their garden and brought stuff in from their garden that they did when they were – yeah, you get the idea. So there’s this big rich source that every single teacher has, and whether you’re Māori or not, you can do it.
So anyway, what do I know that’s Māori that could be linked to plants? And then I was like, oh, yeah, my mum’s a weaver. I suppose that’s a thing. Then I’m like, oh, yeah, true, but not everyone has that in their back pocket. And I knew how to do muka, which is when you do the harakeke, and you strip it off, and you make it for weaving. I knew how to do that from a very young age. Although I’m not very good, I still know how to do it. Could we design some sort of thing? And I deliberately brought in stories from me and my family, not just my deep time. Literally, this is my mum. Here she is, and this is what she does. And we did some strength testing of muka. It’s real strong. It’s way stronger than most other fibres. It’s really quite cool. And we got some big data sets, and we did some cool science. And yeah, I thought that was cool. I thought that was fun. And because I was head of science at this point, I got the other science teachers to do it as well, and we got big data sets. Every class did some data on strength testing of harakeke, and we got to do some lovely graphs and whatnot.
And then I encouraged staff to bring in their backgrounds as well. So one of our teachers who had a Pacific Island background talked about taro and some of the similarities between how you can modify the taro leaf versus how you modify the muka leaf. There’s a whole bunch of cool things. And not everyone bought into it. I’ll be open about that. There were early adopters and resisters within that group of 16 teachers. But yeah, we tried it, and I enjoyed my teaching, and it’s not about whether I enjoy it or not. That’s not the measure of success because I enjoy watching TV all day if that’s the choice. That doesn’t have an impact on our kids. Did we have an impact?
This was a very confronting science thinking with evidence stats we had at my school for year 10, and it’s normalised to make it comparable. So it’s all effect size, blah, blah, blah, I won’t tell you the whole thing.
For many years, our Māori kids would exit with lower scores than when they started. We were making our Māori kids worse, and I’m real embarrassed to say that, but that was the pattern. And they were, at the first opportunity, they were abandoning science, and I use that term like they were running away from science at every chance they got. Some pretty confronting stats, and this is not that long ago. The year that we tried this, this was the picture. And I’m not saying that’s perfect because I would argue that Māori should be up here somewhere, but at the very least, we’re not getting worse. To me, that was really important, and that was affirmation that what we were trying was useful.
Then we got another year, and I’ll talk about this near the end, but in terms of the kaupapa, it’s not just chucking some Māori words or chucking in Nick’s mum’s harakeke. It’s about this whole way of thinking and starting to move away from the textbook, which is very much those first four or five bits of the system, into – I’m not saying abandon the right side of the picture, but moving towards the left if you can. So that became the second part of the kaupapa of what we’re looking at.
Then we talked more to mana whenua. So Wiremu Puke is a mōhio of Ngāti Wairere. He was very generous with his time. That’s him at Hamilton Gardens, I think. Once again, Kimai, at the time, Kimai and her whānau were doing a protest about the development of kūmara pits in Ngāruawāhia, and the story that you may or may not know of, of the kūmara pits being broken open and feeding everyone that gives the name Ngāruawāhia. Not Ngāruawāhia, but Ngāruawāhia. And so I’m talking to these people saying, ‘What’s a plant that might overlap with mātauranga Māori?’ And I’m like, oh, Wiremu’s literally shown us the kūmara pits at Hamilton Gardens. Kimai’s literally protesting about the kūmara. You get the idea. You might guess where we ended up going. So we went back and looked at publicly available knowledge, because I did not want to talk about mātauranga ā-whānau that was not my whānau. And my mum’s grown kūmara, that’s about as far as I know. And my granddad did too. But in terms of the deep history of kūmara, that starts to overlap in some other bits, including some real cool DNA stories. And the DNA tells a story as well, but you can trace the name of kūmara around the world, and you can see kūmara has South American links, which was interesting and challenging for me to find out. And there’s different versions. You get the idea. There’s a deep and rich whakapapa of kūmara, which starts to overlap with plant blindness quite quickly.
Look at the formal whakapapa of kūmara in a te ao Māori sense, and you can see that kūmara is linked back to the stars. Now, as a biologist, I’m not saying that kūmara came from a star. But in terms of a concept map, I’m seeing some pretty strong ecological relationships there. The caterpillar and the kūmara are pretty much part of the same family. The kūmara being linked to stars indicates its importance. And when you look at traditional sources of carbohydrate in New Zealand, yeah, we don’t have it. Kūmara is it. And if you look at pretty much every vegetable available in your supermarket today, every, or almost every vegetable, has a non-New Zealand origin. So there’s some real interesting history of carbohydrate that overlaps strongly with New Zealand history, and then you look at how that’s held in a mātauranga Māori world, it’s pretty closely linked to the beginning of time. Kūmara’s a big deal. Kūmara’s important. Because without kūmara, and this is, you’ll see soon in Waikato-Tainui, without kūmara, you rely on hunter-gathering, which is not always reliable in a whole year. There’s a lot of science that can come into this story, a lot of really, really good science. And to understand it, you need to know about the kūmara. So let’s find out more.
Early on, we found out this story of Whakaotirangi – I’d argue one of New Zealand’s first scientists. She was the wife of Hoturoa, who was captain of the Waikato-Tainui waka. Near Aotea, she planted the first kūmara gardens and did a whole bunch of testing to see what could grow well and what couldn’t. That’s in Te Awamutu. She’s personified in carvings, and her story is around the Waikato. She’s a pretty – it’s a safe one to tell, if that makes sense. This is a Ministry of Ed resource. I’m not going to upset anyone by saying, hey, Whakaotirangi was a pretty cool, interesting scientist. And she – the fact that it’s a female scientist addresses some other biases that creep into New Zealand teaching.
Participant
And then visit the gardens as well. It’s a beautiful link, actually, to spend some time on the whakapapa of the kūmara, and it’s local as well for us.
Nick Bryant
And it kind of grows everywhere. There’s a few spots in New Zealand it doesn’t grow, but it’s pretty hardy. And then even comparing the traditional kūmara, which is about the size of your thumb, with all the varieties of kūmara. I got up to 82. Stopped counting, but I’m sure there’s more. And then the most common ones, the ones that are available today. And this is me being honest, I always thought that the Ōwairaka red was the Māori kūmara. No, no. That’s a more modern variety. And even the Beauregard, the big orange one, that’s about 20 years in New Zealand. That’s a pretty recent one. You start getting into all these plant husbandry and, I think, some really cool learning. And you can eat kūmara, which always goes down well, and you can grow kūmara. I stole this image. I didn’t take it myself. I stole it off Enviroschools, ironically. But we did a lot of that, and then we planted them in the gardens and yeah, did some cool kūmara stuff.
We did things like, I showed this picture and I said, is this guy a scientist? I used a few images, not just this one. And most kids said no. And then you tell a bit more about him, and you tell a bit more about him, and you finish on the fact that he’s professor at, I think he’s at Massey University. I don’t know where he’s at the moment. And he’s published a whole bunch of stuff on agribusiness and traditional agriculture. He’s more of a scientist than I’ll ever be. But it’s challenging these stereotypes. Once again, I used some female examples that were deliberately female, deliberately Māori, so that we could just challenge this Pākehā in white coats mentality of what a scientist is.
What did we find? So Chloe in Silverdale did the same thing, and hers was more narrative. I did graphs because I’m a scientist and I like graphs, but hers was more narrative. She found that, yeah, lots of positive narratives coming back from that. Lots of community involvement, lots of high student engagement. She was very positive of it and would do it again in a heartbeat.
This is the sorts of things that she got her students to do, the before and after. So is there a connection between you and plants? Or do I see myself connected to plants? There was a statistically significant shift from sad faces to smiley faces. They saw that plants were part of their world.
For my sins, I did a few more ones because we were thinking more of another idea that came through the science – future possible selves. So do you see yourself as a scientist? A lot of evidence, including stuff that we collected, do Māori kids see themselves as sports stars? Yes, they do, because that pathway is transparent. Look at the All Blacks right now. Find a Māori. You can do it. Look at the Silver Ferns. That’s a transparent pathway. Do you see yourself as a scientist? Well, who’s that? I don’t even know what that is, let alone do I see myself in it. And I did this with a couple of classes or, tried to get as large a data set as I could. The pretty strong message coming in when they started the survey is they, and I’m quoting and I won’t use the word, but they effing hate science. They wrote that down, and I effing hate plants. That was their entry level, and that was almost unanimous amongst our Māori kids. So I’m not sure what happened. This was year 9s that we did it with, so don’t blame me. But they were strongly turned off science before they got in there. And in terms of do they see themselves in the future as a scientist, once again, strong no. And they weren’t being rude, they just made their feelings very firmly known that they do not see science as part of them or ever will be, and don’t you poison my life with that. Which made me, I found that quite confronting, but OK, that’s the problem that we’re trying to solve.
That was the average of the classes. And afterwards, that’s where they ended up. And you’re looking at that going, oh yeah, it’s not super significant. Maybe with a bigger sample size you might find that, but not that good. When I’m looking at Māori future possible self was, with a very small sample size, was statistically significant.
If I go back a bit, when you’re dealing with stuff that is personal to you, because I like kūmara. I told all sorts of stories about growing kūmara, and my mum who grows kūmara, my granddad. When you bring yourself into the classroom, and you link to mana whenua stories that are publicly available and safe, so I don’t have to upset anyone, we found a bit of a jump up, but the biggest jump was for our Māori kids. When you’re doing a bicultural approach, you’re trying to address all kids, which we did, but in particular Māori, and which we did. And I was like, oh, that’s kind of cool. There was 5 years of work. I’m like, oh, look at that. We found something. Yeah, that’s cool.
So what were my takeaways from some of that? And I presented this particular slide at the ChemEd BioLive in November. Probably the biggest one is that top right, use your personal ecology. You know stuff. Use your mātauranga ā-whānau, because if you can do it, then it creates space for other people to do it safely. Now, they’re not going to do it if you don’t lead the way.
And the other one is, a fancy word, narrative identity. The story that gets told of you being in science in some way in the future. My firm argument is everyone is a scientist. Everyone is affected by science. Everyone should be science literate. But the very clear message I got from the kids in this study was that, eff off, don’t let me touch that thing. So it’s giving examples like Whakaotirangi. There are New Zealand scientists that are really cool and can show some really cool stuff and can use their Māoriness, if you like, as part of their strength. Not as a weakness, not as a instead of, but as something that makes their science better. Yeah, I get frustrated when it’s like you see some of the narratives in the media about how Māori this and Māori that. No, no, it’s New Zealand, and we’re making it better, and being Māori or seeing the Māori world helps you be better at what we all do together.
Anyway, the last bit, and I’ve done this with a few groups of teachers is think of your year 9 course. Now, I’m not criticising sciPAD. I quite like sciPAD, but I know that sciPAD’s a pretty common one. Where does sciPAD fit on this continuum or within these things? By definition, it’s compartmentalised and structured and linear and reductionist and written. I’m not saying don’t use sciPAD, but whatever resource you use, I’ve done this, or we did this for our review of our year 9 camp at my school, and a lot of our year 9 camp was fitting strongly in this space, in this Western space.
So the misconception is that you have to be a tohunga to do this, and you have to have this deep, localised knowledge of your particular iwi. And to give you some example, at my school, my current school, we’ve got three iwi that claim mana whenua, so part of my navigation is to try and make sure I acknowledge them all. And the person that knows all of the deep knowledge of all three iwi doesn’t exist. I’ll tell you that now. Especially not in a science sense. Those people are, if they ever existed, they’re not there now. So what can I do to do it safely, but also to bring this thing into my science classroom? I can start to look, like our year 11 level 1 NCEA teachers have set up a native nursery that will probably come to fruition in about 10, 20 years’ time. We can do that as part of our pattern-seeking behaviour. That’s really cool.
Instead of looking at – what’s an example? On Great Barrier Island, where I’ve done some work out there, you don’t have kiwis on Great Barrier Island. So why are you learning about kiwis if they’re not kiwis where you are?
There’s a whole bunch of other things that you can do, like I don’t know about Dunedin, but down the other side of the country, down in Dunedin, there will be a whole bunch of things that might not really fit a Waikato context.
Up north where I am, my mum’s got banana trees in her backyard, and there is no way that we could grow them in the Waikato. So start to think about holistic community, long timeframe, value of all life in your science teaching rather than fitting a box. I argue that that’s good teaching.
And I’m not saying chuck out the Western system. Please don’t think that I’m saying that. Most of my career’s been in this space. But can you find places to move, to dip your toe into the left and the right? And that’s where te reo me ōna tikanga fit, and that’s where you do have these genuine interactions with mana whenua. You have these conversations and find that stuff out, and it’s done in a safe and respectful space. But yeah, if we just keep on doing what we’ve always done, we’ll always get what we’ve always got. And to me, this is a much safer way of testing the water and being genuine to that bicultural mātauranga Māori. Cool.
Greta Dromgool
Beautiful. Thank you, Nick.
