There is an urgent need to improve support and teaching initiatives for tauira Māori studying sciences at university, and it is valuable to learn from the success stories of tauira who are persevering despite adversity. Underpinned by kaupapa Māori principles, we developed a culturally rich storytelling approach incorporating the Life Story Board (a visual qualitative research tool) led to explore the experiences of tauira Māori studying sciences, This approach was piloted by two Māori student researchers in peer-led storyboarding sessions. We conducted follow-up interviews (n = 4) with participants to explore the impacts of the LSB method. We found that the storyboarding approach fostered trust between peer-interviewers and participants, and enabled mutual sharing of lived experiences from a strengths-based standpoint that uplifted the mana of all parties. This novel, culturally-immersive storyboarding approach shows exciting promise for future studies aimed at understanding experiences of tauira Māori and other historically marginalised groups.
This article experiments with form to offer readers a sense of girls’ experiences of physical education in Aotearoa New Zealand. Inspired by Rebecca Solnit’s (2014) Cyclopedia of an Arctic Expedition, and theoretical ideas from new materialisms and postqualitative inquiry, we assemble an alphabetised cyclopedia of participant comments that evoke varied scenes and sensations. Rather than arranging girls’ comments into stable themes that develop a cohesive argument, the cyclopedia functions more as an invitation to an encounter where meaning emerges relationally in the act of reading. Reading is conceptualised as an ‘event’ that is open-ended, where impressions always become anew. The cyclopedia begins with a preface to set the scene, and concludes with an afterword that provides further methodological context for the reader.
The relationships with mathematics construct provides a framework for understanding the complex ways students engage with, learn, and participate in mathematics. This paper examines the construct, drawing on a longitudinal study of 31 secondary students in New Zealand. The study identified five interrelated elements that comprise students’ relationships with mathematics: beliefs about mathematics, mathematical knowledge, macro-feelings, perceptions of mathematical capabilities, and habits of engagement. Findings show that these elements were highly interconnected and evolved over time as students participated in mathematics classrooms and interpreted their experiences. Students’ relationships with mathematics shaped their engagement with mathematical tasks, their affective responses to challenge and success, and their ongoing participation in the subject. The construct highlights the dynamic interplay between cognitive, affective, identity-related, and social dimensions of mathematical learning and helps explain why students respond differently to similar mathematical experiences. The paper argues that the relationships with mathematics construct provides a useful lens for research, teaching, and curriculum design. By drawing attention to dimensions of learning beyond achievement alone, the construct broadens understandings of mathematical participation and learning. Ultimately, relationships with mathematics matter because they influence not only what students learn, but also how they engage with that learning and whether they continue to participate in mathematics.
This commentary shares our experiences as three secondary science teachers from the Bay of Plenty region in Aotearoa New Zealand, who collaboratively designed and trialled localised units of learning in a biodiversity context for students in Years 9–10. We reflect upon and describe how our own science identities have shaped our personal beliefs about our role as science teachers, and influenced our pedagogical approach. We share this journey during a period of rapid curriculum reform to highlight the enjoyment and value of teaching in context, both as kaiako (teachers) and for our students, with the hope that our reflections might resonate with other science teachers and teacher educators in shaping “lifeworthy” (Perkins, 2014, p.7–25) learning pathways for rangatahi (young people).
This reflective commentary examines my experience and observations of the use of theories and practices in social work education in Aotearoa New Zealand (NZ) over the last 14 years. The reflection uses the lens of a Vietnamese migrant student and later a social work educator. It demonstrates that teaching and learning are interactive, with contributions from education providers, the profession, teachers, learners and the larger environment. The classroom dynamics reflect the tensions among learners and educators from diverse social, economic and cultural backgrounds. All of these affect the way theories and practices are taught, learned and applied. The commentary calls for attention to these tensions and their impacts on social work education. It also offers insights into how they could be navigated to engage and ensure positive experiences and outcomes. These insights are useful for social work educators, learners and other stakeholders, and for education communities in a multicultural society like NZ.
In this article, we challenge the dominant understanding in New Zealand education of the term pāngarau as curriculum mathematics translated into te reo Māori, (the Māori language). This is commonly expressed using the conjoined term mathematics/pāngarau implying that the two terms are equivalent and interchangeable. We outline a number of critiques of this situation from epistemological, language/power and ethnomathematical perspectives. We also discuss how the term mathematics/pāngarau generates struggle through various toxic effects in kura Māori (Māori schools) in terms of legitimation and the focus of education using research data. We conclude by proposing that pāngarau is already showing signs of emerging as a distinct entity in its own right and that this emergence should be accelerated so we begin to talk about mathematics and pāngarau rather than mathematics/pāngarau.
As Aotearoa New Zealand’s early childhood education (ECE) sector becomes increasingly shaped by transnational mobility, migrant teachers are required to negotiate culturally embedded understandings of childhood, learning, and risk within locally situated pedagogical and regulatory frameworks. This paper explores how beginner ECE teachers from migrant backgrounds understand and negotiate children’s engagement with risk, and what these negotiations reveal about professional identity formation and transnational pedagogical adaptation. Drawing on qualitative narrative inquiry with twelve recently graduated migrant teachers working in Aotearoa New Zealand, the study applies the concept of edgework to examine how teachers balance safety, accountability, and pedagogical responsibility. Findings indicate that participants’ early approaches to risk were strongly influenced by prior educational experiences that positioned children as vulnerable and in need of protection. Over time, engagement with sociocultural pedagogies that position children as competent and capable prompted changes in participants’ professional beliefs and practices. These changes required teachers to navigate tensions between regulation and autonomy, cultural expectations and local curriculum approaches, and relationship-building with children, families, and colleagues. By centring migrant teacher perspectives, the study highlights the importance of culturally responsive teacher education and inclusive ECE environments within Aotearoa New Zealand’s superdiverse context.
This article reports on a small research project which explored the role that STEM education can play in the process of migrant students endeavouring to find a place in New Zealand society. An innovative methodology was used, drawing on data collected from stimulated-recall focus groups after students engaged with learning activities, which were situated within their current learning context. In total, 16 migrant students from Year 11, 12, and 13 years took part in this study. Data were analysed thematically, and this process showed that STEM educational experiences are relatively unimportant for these migrant students who were more concerned with a pragmatic approach that sought to find the most lucrative or appropriate career choice to have a prosperous life in New Zealand. Important issues were raised about the interplay between stereotypical views of STEM and New Zealand, and the contextualised, sophisticated understandings students also carried from their own lived experiences. The study also raised important questions about how schools might acknowledge and learn from the rich, linguistic, cultural knowledge and life experiences of migrant students which may be being obscured by a focus on their competencies in English and perceived need to integrate into New Zealand society. Lastly, the study showed that the methodology was partially successful but relies on teachers and schools having the capacity to carefully collaborate and plan with researchers. Indeed, time pressures on teachers is a very significant challenge to possibilities for empirical research in schools in general.
Education in resettlement contexts offers a pathway to employment, civic integration and a sense of normalcy for former refugees. In Aotearoa New Zealand (NZ), resettlement policy prioritises education as a pathway to participation and belonging, but educational support for resettled refugees is limited. For students from refugee backgrounds, educational access and outcomes are often dependent on the will and expertise of teachers and school leaders, as well as students’ own self-sufficiency. In this paper, we outline the findings of an “appreciative inquiry” with primary and secondary teachers and school leaders who were identified as effective and inclusive by young people, families, and educational support staff from migrant and refugee backgrounds. We sought to identify the everyday ways in which teachers and schools fostered learning and belonging for students from refugee backgrounds. We found that effective teachers and school leaders had an affirming mindset and engaged in everyday practices that can be grouped in relation to five pillars or pou: focusing on relationships, fostering connections with home, building a sense of community, making learning happen, and promoting a sense of future. We also found that, in some schools, resources were utilised strategically to strengthen these pou. Drawing on “world-travelling” to theorise what it means to be an effective and inclusive teacher, we highlight implications for educational policy and practice in NZ, and in other resettlement contexts.
Change is a constant factor in education. Curricula are refreshed to reflect the educational outcomes required in a rapidly changing society and pedagogies evolve in response to new insights into how children learn. In this constantly changing environment, teachers embark upon a career-long cycle of professional learning and development. Most primary school teachers in New Zealand are generalist teachers and therefore face the task of remaining up to date with the latest changes across a range of subjects. Some of these changes come with the support of ‘off-the-peg’ resources, such as programmes that can be purchased by schools to implement structured literacy in schools. However, in this paper we focus on the potential of learning progressions (LPs) to support non-science specialist teachers when planning, teaching and assessing children’s understanding of scientific concepts. We detail the development of an LP for the understanding of a science concept pertinent to New Zealand’s endemic species. This LP is presented in a novel format that explicitly encompasses children’s misconceptions and has the potential to be utilised effectively by time-poor teachers as part of their ongoing professional learning and development.
The development of a strong professional teacher identity plays an important role in supporting early career teacher development and teacher career longevity. The ways in which tensions between personal and professional identities are experienced and managed by preservice teachers (PSTs) can influence the development of teacher identity. This study explores how PSTs manage tensions they encounter in the development of their professional teacher identity. The study data are eight focus group discussions with a total of 24 PSTs who were near the end of their first year of a three-year, undergraduate, university-based initial teacher education (ITE) programme in New Zealand. Using Bronfenbrenner’s bioecological model of development, with particular attention to the interactions among proximal processes embedded within the model, the study finds that the features of self, development outcomes, context, and time are key elements of managing tensions in identity development. The PSTs also experienced these tensions across layers of the bioecological model and worked at the interface of these layers to manage the tensions. By understanding teacher identity development as being shaped through proximal processes, this study suggests ITE programmes can be purposefully designed with explicit support to assist PSTs in managing the complexities of becoming professional teachers.
Secondary school teachers in Aotearoa New Zealand are accountable to the 2026 Standards for the Teaching Profession, which centre on Te Tiriti o Waitangi partnership. In its current form, the standards seem to expect a form of cultural competency from teachers that ignores the colonial foundations of schooling. This paper explores how Pākehā teachers, rather than attempting cultural competency, can strengthen our anticolonial literacy by attending to positionality. Pākehā positionality—in and beyond education contexts—has been widely discussed, but few texts have explicitly considered the philosophical assumptions inherent in positionality and how teachers’ self-awareness of these assumptions can bolster a commitment to Te Tiriti. Drawing from Indigenous and decolonial theories, I offer a conceptual analysis of settler ontological and epistemological assumptions and their relationship to schooling. Inspired by the metaphors of itulagi (Vaai Casimira, 2017) and the triangulation of meaning (Meyer, 2008), I offer two sets of reflexive questions for Pākehā teachers to gauge how our enacted philosophical assumptions perpetuate or disrupt coloniality in the classroom. I argue that, when we understand the philosophical dimensions of our positionality, we can be more effective Tiriti partners, inviting our students and colleagues to challenge the deeper colonial frameworks of schooling to make space for multiple ways of knowing and being.
Teaching, learning and wider educational systems entail complex activities. Claiming that a set of detailed prescriptions based on selective principles from educational sciences is all that is required to be effective, is simplism, it misunderstands the nature of that complexity. However, policies and practices can be, and are being enacted which require greater prescription and more structured universal programmes than we have had in Aotearoa New Zealand. Under some conditions, these may provide needed resources, but they carry significant risks for meeting our excellence and equity goals. This paper discusses the nature of the complexity and what educational sciences indicate about principles underlying effective teaching, learning and system change. It outlines the risks in simplifying and prescribing, and what enables innovation and flexibility with that complexity. Our phenomena are not like ‘rocket science’ and certainly not simpler, although some policies and practices can make what we do a limited form of technical expertise.
This article contributes to the emerging scholarship on Te Tiriti o Waitangi-led education by theorising the early formation of Te Tiriti consciousness - a contextually specific form of critical consciousness grounded in tino rangatiratanga (Māori authority and self-determination) in Aotearoa New Zealand. Drawing on reflexive thematic analysis of 106 written reflections from first-year public health students, the study explores how learners engage with Te Tiriti content and its implications for professional identity. Three interrelated themes trace students’ transformative learning trajectories: confronting structured ignorance, navigating identity disruption, and reorienting professional purpose. Students described the shock of discovering hidden histories, the emotional labour of reckoning with complicity, and an emerging sense of responsibility to uphold Te Tiriti in practice. We argue that Te Tiriti consciousness extends Freirean conscientisation by grounding critical consciousness in tino rangatiratanga and by being emotionally and relationally mediated through whanaungatanga (relational accountability). These findings help advance current understandings of decolonising pedagogy by positioning Te Tiriti o Waitangi as both a constitutional and educational foundation. The study identifies pedagogical priorities for cultivating Te Tiriti-led learning that fosters transformation in knowledge, identity, and practice across tertiary education.
Transnational higher education is increasing around the globe as well as in Aotearoa New Zealand. Despite this, TNHE remains largely overlooked by the New Zealand government, leaving institutions to develop their own approaches. At the same time, existing TNHE research overwhelmingly focuses on the management and administration of TNHE, at the expense of understanding the reality on the ground. For this reason, this research aims to understand the lived experiences and perspectives of TNHE educators teaching on behalf of New Zealand higher education institutions. Through unstructured in-depth interviews grounded in a phenomenological approach with 11 interviewees across five institutions, this research enabled educators to discuss what they thought was most salient about their experiences and perspectives. Interviews were thematically analysed to find common themes and meanings across their experiences. The findings demonstrate that educators largely feel uncertain about and unprepared for their TNHE teaching, and have to navigate the challenges of teaching across multiple countries and academic systems through a process of trial-and-error. Though all educators recognised the need to adapt their courses to the local overseas context, there are a variety of different approaches and opinions about what content is most appropriate and how to incorporate it.
When New Zealand’s government proposed replacing the National Certificate of Educational Achievement (NCEA) in August 2025 after a six-week consultation, what did this urgency reveal about contemporary educational governance? This article asks what remains unexamined in the rush to reform: whose evidence counts as legitimate, whose voices matter in educational decision-making, and what remains of ‘equity’ when government acknowledges that its proposed reforms will cause harm to already disadvantaged groups of students? This article does not argue for or against the replacement of NCEA. Rather, drawing on the concept of moral panic, together with Ball’s critical policy discourse analysis and scholarship on neoliberal educational reform, we set out to formulate and discuss three main questions about the proposal. Our analyses uncover trends indicating that the reforms are motivated and shaped by ideological loyalty to standardisation, managerial oversight, and market responsiveness, rather than by careful consideration of all available educational evidence. Rather than offer definite answers, we invite readers to consider these questions, which have been foreclosed by the speed and process of the proposal, but which are essential for democratic educational governance in Aotearoa New Zealand.
This study examined the perspectives and experiences of teachers and students in constructing dioramas. It was conducted in a small rural secondary school in Aotearoa, New Zealand. The three-dimensional models acted as tools for helping students visualise and represent ideas, supporting the development of environmental and sustainability concepts. The study involved four teachers collaboratively teaching a combined Year 9 and 10 class within an integrated STEAM (Science, Technology, Environment, Arts, Mathematics) programme, where students were challenged to design and construct imaginary habitats of future homes and local environments as dioramas, merging scientific knowledge with creative expression. The purpose of using dioramas extended beyond artistic representation; they provided a tangible way for students to engage with climate science by modelling ecosystems, illustrating interdependencies, and simulating the impact of human actions on environments. Through this process, students explored cause-and-effect relationships, considered adaptation and mitigation strategies, and envisioned sustainable futures. Dioramas acted as cognitive bridges, supporting learners to develop understanding of abstract climate science concepts into concrete, visual narratives that encouraged role play and dialogue. Themes emerging from the study included how the students identified and expressed their understandings of possible futures through diorama models, how they incorporated climate-change actions and solutions into their designs, and how the construction process prompted reasoning and discussion. The strengths of diorama construction lie in its ability to tell a story, make a claim, activate dialogue, and, importantly, help young people imagine and articulate sustainable futures.
Sustainable Development Goal 4 (SDG 4)—one of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals adopted by the United Nations to address major global challenges by 2030—aims to ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all. Evidence‑based practice (EBP) is closely aligned with this goal because it enhances the capacity of education systems to provide inclusive, equitable, and effective learning for all children and young people. Given this connection, there is a global focus on promoting EBP as countries work towards achieving SDG 4. Despite the emphasis on the importance of EBP in education, there is limited research examining educators’ implementation of EBP in their daily practice. Responding to this gap in the research, the present study applies the Theory of Planned Behaviour (TPB) to explore Specialist Resource Teachers’ (SRTs) intentions to implement EBP and the factors that influence their implementation of EBP. Quantitative and qualitative data were gathered from 84 SRTs in Aotearoa New Zealand via an online questionnaire. SRTs held strong intentions to implement EBP, with their attitudes and perceived behavioural control emerging as significant predictors of intentions. Findings highlight the importance of collaborative relationships, professional knowledge, skills, and values in enhancing SRTs’ ability to implement EBP. Opportunities to strengthen these enablers through an online community of practice are identified.
