School of Education - Te Kura Mātauranga

Permanent link for this collectionhttps://hdl.handle.net/10292/3300

Research within the School of Education - Te Kura Mātauranga is driven by students working towards postgraduate qualifications, staff pursuing their own research interests, and contracts for funding agencies such as the Ministry of Education and other partners. Research interests in the School of Education include; Learning and teaching, theory and practice, Curriculum and development, Teacher education, Early childhood education, Adult and tertiary education and development, Schools, E-learning, Educational administration, and Professional inquiry and practice.

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Unconventional Spaces of Learning
(Education Outdoors New Zealand (EONZ), 2026-05-29) Bruce, Judy; Earle, Katie
Unconventional Spaces of Learning are spaces of hope for tamariki with diverse learning needs.
Weaving Selves: Students’ Insights Into Identity, Learning and Storytelling in Digital Spaces
(Emerald, 2026-04-28) Meiklejohn-Whiu, Selena; Jesson, Rebecca Ngaire
Purpose – This study aims to explore how digital learning design can create relational spaces for Moana students to share knowledge and express identity through (counter) storytelling. The authors report on how a Moana-centred website was used to support students’ digital composition of multimodal stories. Design/methodology/approach – Using a design-based research approach, qualitative data were gathered across three phases. Students’ insights informed the design and functionality of the website. Their engagement with the site and reflections inform our understanding of their developing educational identities. Findings – Findings highlighted how culturally responsive digital environments with embedded relational principles support identity exploration and meaningful engagement for Moana students. Practical implications – This research contributes to the understanding of how digital learning spaces can be designed to support the educational identity development of students. Originality/value – It demonstrates the application of culturally relevant digital spaces to foster meaningful educational experiences and offer practical insights for educators and designers aiming to create inclusive learning opportunities.
Children’s Visual Worlds: Participatory Photography as a Lens for Understanding Young Children’s Visual Arts Experiences
(Walter de Gruyter GmbH, 2026-06-02) Probine, Sarah
This article explores how participatory photography can offer new ways of understanding children’s visual lives, interests, and meaning-making in early childhood education. It draws from a doctoral study that investigated children’s experiences of visual arts learning in three early childhood settings in Aotearoa New Zealand. While the broader project used a range of participatory and qualitative methods with teachers, children, and families, this article focuses specifically on the methods used with young children. Six participants and their families across the three ECE settings were invited to document their visual experiences at home using digital cameras, offering insights into what held significance in their visual and material worlds. The article shares the narratives of three children, four-year-old twins Ellie and Sydney, and four-year-old Finn, to illustrate how child-led visual storytelling can challenge adult-centric research norms and foreground children’s agency, creativity, and rights. Framed by an interpretivist, narrative orientation, it concludes by considering the ethical and methodological implications of positioning children as co-researchers and argues that participatory visual methods can meaningfully value children’s voices, identities, and lived experiences, contributing to debates on children’s rights (UNCROC Articles 12 and 31), visual literacy, and methodological justice in early childhood research.
Extending Māori Concepts in Secondary School Geography
(Wiley, 2026-05-25) Finn, Karen; Turner‐Adams, Hana; Webber, Melinda
Secondary school geography brings together tāngata (people) and whenua (land), the central concepts of te ao Māori (the Māori world). Therefore, geography is ideally placed to respond to calls for mātauranga Māori (Māori knowledge) to gain “equal status” with Western knowledge. This article reports how 47 teachers integrated Māori concepts into secondary school geography. Data were collected using an online questionnaire and analysed through content analysis and reflexive thematic analysis. The research identified a range of geography‐related Māori concepts. The findings suggest that including more conceptual mātauranga Māori, especially in physical geography, would help achieve “equal status for mātauranga Māori”.
Public Virtue, Private Ambition—Women Owners of Private Hospitals in Early Twentieth-Century New Zealand
(Wiley, 2026-04-29) Quinn, Ann-Marie
New Zealand's early-twentieth-century health service was a two-tier system of state hospitals supported by an expanding network of over 300 private hospitals, almost exclusively owned by nurses and midwives. This article will show that this environment was created by a legislative framework introduced between 1901 and 1906, requiring nurses, midwives, and their private hospitals to be registered, licensed, and monitored. Stringent regulation could have stifled the industry. Instead, it provided fertile ground on which many women flourished as enterprising businesswomen who made significant contributions to their communities, breaking with traditional notions of nurses solely as carers and handmaidens to doctors.
Wayfinding Under the Stars
(SAGE Publications, 2025-12-04) Iosefo, Fetaui; Iosefo, Joshua
This voyage follows a mother–son practice of vā wayfinding—an Indigenous method of relational navigation and critical autoethnography. Through poetic fragments, intergenerational talanoa (relational dialogue), and moments of spiritual encounter, the narrative traces how Sāmoan diasporic identities are held, fractured, and rewoven across shifting relational currents. Grounded in vā tapuia (sacred relational space) as both ontology and method, this work shows how knowledge arises through collective witnessing, ethical refusal, and genealogical responsibility. Here, story becomes ceremony, silence becomes epistemology, and memory becomes a navigational star. Aligned with Presence Tense, this voyage reveals histories shaped through relational accountability and ancestral presence. Vā wayfinding emerges not as metaphor but as lived epistemology—formed through ’āiga, spirituality, and the ongoing work of becoming—inviting readers toward futures guided by story, presence, and Indigenous relational ethics.
‘Outside the Tent’: Early Childhood Teachers’ Summoning Authoritative Discourses in Social Networks
(SAGE Publications, 2026-01-27) Westbrook, Fiona; Hunkin, Elise; White, E Jayne
Early childhood education (ECE) teachers increasingly use social networks to advocate for their professional recognition through their political dialogues within these platforms. Yet, their strategies for gaining and being appreciated as legitimised professional signals a paradox. In deploying what Bakhtin terms authoritative discourse, language that demands acceptance as a dominant, hierarchical, profaned truth, teachers simultaneously constrain the dialogues of diverse professional voices. This paper employs a Bakhtinian dialogic methodology to examine ECE teachers’ social networking exchanges during the COVID-19 pandemic in Victoria, Australia (2020), with particular attention to how temporal and spatial contexts shape language strategies. The findings indicate that while teachers summoned authoritative discourse to advocate for their professionalism, this same discourse (un)intentionally silenced divergent perspectives, excluding certain ideas, invoking organisational impunity, and creating ‘us-them’ boundaries that limited professional agency. These insights signal how authoritative discourse operates as a double-edged sword in teachers’ political advocacy, simultaneously extending recognition while atrophying diverse exchanges necessary for robust professional and political dialogues.
Activating Sacred Vā Relationality in Higher Education
(Springer Science and Business Media LLC, 2026-01-30) Iosefo, Fetaui
This reflective commentary explores the tensions and possibilities of navigating higher education in Aotearoa as a Samoan educator grounded in Indigenous relational ethics. Written through Wayfinding and Critical Autoethnography, it draws on Samoan Indigenous Reference—Fa’aSamoa (SIR–FS)—to illuminate how globalised academic expectations intersect with the lived realities of aiga (family), vā (relational space), and tapu (sacredness). As a practitioner within a university context undergoing structural and epistemological shifts, I reflect on the ethical labour of holding space for Pasifika learners within a transnational, neoliberal, and outcomes-driven sector. Wayfinding and Critical Autoethnography enable a layered methodological approach that weaves ancestral wisdom, poetic storytelling, and personal reflection. This piece shares how I navigate the demands of institutional research and teaching while staying anchored to Indigenous principles of collective wellbeing, intergenerational continuity, and spiritual responsibility. Rather than offering a singular solution, this commentary invites readers into the vā: a sacred space between epistemologies, pedagogies, and futures. It asks how educators might honour Indigenous ethical frameworks while negotiating the border-crossing landscapes of higher education. In doing so, it contributes a grounded Pasifika voice to broader dialogues on reflexivity, inclusion, and the decolonial reimagining of education in Aotearoa.
Fine Lines: Mātauranga Māori and Science Classrooms
(Springer Science and Business Media LLC, 2026-03-04) Stewart, Georgina Tuari; Birdsall, Sally; Tedoldi, Angelo
Science teachers in Aotearoa New Zealand are under pressure to incorporate mātauranga Māori in their classrooms, yet most know little about it and there is dissent about its place in science education. If mātauranga Māori is not science, then why should science teachers teach it? What does the principle of ‘mana ōrite mō te mātauranga Māori’ mean in science teaching? In this article, three science educators of varying experiences and backgrounds join forces to reflect, separately and together, on the challenges raised by the question of including mātauranga Māori in science classrooms. Using the increasingly popular method of self-study in science education research, most of the length of this article consists of three named sections from each co-author. This article is not designed for beginning readers of the debates about Māori knowledge in science education, which are longstanding and intransigent, and familiarity with the background and relevant literature will be assumed. The aim of the article is not to come up with the ‘right’ answer but to reflect on our learning journeys, inspired by the question of including mātauranga Māori in science education.
Teachers’ Experiences of Curriculum Reform in Aotearoa New Zealand
(Springer Science and Business Media LLC, 2026-04-28) Gordon, Lisa; Lourie, Megan
New Zealand teachers have faced a period of significant curriculum reform over the past four years. With the government’s recent announcement of plans to reform the national qualification, and the proposal to introduce new subjects into the curriculum, we know more change is coming. This may result in role overload for teachers. Role overload occurs when the demands of a role surpass the time and resources available to an individual. Over recent decades, as teachers’ roles have evolved and expanded, evidence suggests there has been an increase in stress and burnout rates. This article reports on a small-scale study which explored the experiences of a group of early-adopter teachers attempting to enact Te Mātaiaho: The Refreshed New Zealand Curriculum (Ministry of Education in Te Mātaiaho: the refreshed New Zealand Curriculum: draft for testing, New Zealand Government, 2022), which was the first of several curriculum rewrites. The findings of the study shed light on the significant demands that complex curriculum reform places on teachers highlighting the emotional and professional toll this can take. The research identified two urgent needs: a greater awareness of what is required of teachers when curriculum change occurs, and a re-evaluation of the way New Zealand policymakers approach educational reform. These findings are very relevant as New Zealand teachers continue to grapple with constant change and the effects of this on their wellbeing.
The Subject-English Curriculum War: A Struggle for Symbolic Control
(Springer, 2026-03-24) McPhail, Graham; Lourie, Megan
There have been significant changes to the national curriculum in Aotearoa New Zealand over the last three decades. Subject-English has been at the forefront of the three most recent changes which have occurred in quick succession and have had different priorities. We theorise that what is happening in subject-English is symptomatic of broader educational shifts and these shifts will also be reflected in the curricula of other learning areas as they are developed. In this article we employ Bernstein’s concept of ‘recontextualisation’ to trace how key ideas from various societal discourses became the recontextualising principles used to formulate and realise subject-English curriculum policy. We begin with an analysis of two key government documents that have given direction to the writers of the most recent English curricula. This is followed by an examination of the following curricula: English Years 0–6, the draft for English Years 7–13, the recently released curriculum for English Years 0–10, and The New Zealand Curriculum I Te Mātaiaho, demonstrating how the discourses identified in the government documents have made their way into these curricula.
Enacting Power Sharing in the Pasifika Early Literacy Project
(Springer Science and Business Media LLC, 2025-11-14) Siʻilata, Rae; Jacobs, Mary M; Aseta, Martha; Hansell, Kyla; Tilialo, Avikaila
The Pasifika Early Literacy Project, funded by the Ministry of Education from 2014 to 2024, provided teacher professional learning and development focused on supporting tamariki (children) and whānau (families) to revitalise Pacific heritage languages, while also acquiring English language and literacy. Teachers in early childhood education and primary schools were supported to connect duallanguage books with whānau heritage languages, experiences, and cultural identities. Power sharing with tamariki and whānau in English-medium education was encouraged to enhance engagement and learning outcomes. This article highlights how power sharing within professional learning and development and family fono (meetings) from 2021 to 2024 challenged monocultural ideologies of language and literacy.
The Romanian Traditional Shirt "Ia": Agency, Complexity and Thing-Power in an Immigrant Teacher Identity Journey
(University of Alberta Libraries, 2026-05-11) Enache, Mihaela
Through critical collaborative autoethnography with arts-based methods, I experienced the embodied making of a Romanian traditional shirt called ia, as a practical exploration of my immigrant teacher identity. Ia changed my world; she became an intrinsic part of my identity and the core of my study. She deserved attention and representation because she was a presence. I thus responded to a provocation: not only did I understand the object/subject/agent of my study differently, but I became different myself and transformed my relationships with humans and nonhumans. Ia changed from an object into a subject and a participant; she became a storyteller and my teacher. Through complexity, thing-power, and agency, ia generated an extensive theoretical framework and enabled juxtapositions of concepts from Romanian village metaphysics, new materialism, and quantum entanglements.
Queer Bodies in School Spaces: Dis/orienting Practicum in Aotearoa New Zealand
(Informa UK Limited, 2026) Cameron, Yael Thomas; Gaerlan, Eunice
This article is a focused analysis of one participant’s written reflections on what it means to be a cis-gender gay man on teaching placement in an Aotearoa New Zealand primary school. Sara Ahmed’s queering of phenomenology is a powerful activation of theory offering the possibility of critical, interpretative insight into queer experience within teacher education. We demonstrate how Ahmed’s queer phenomenology might generate depth in understanding of the spatial, affective and embodied dimensions of queer student teaching experience in practicum. We show that, in Aotearoa New Zealand, heteronormativity continues to play a significant role in the experiences of LGBTQ+ student teachers. Importantly, we find queer student teachers draw on capacities of resistance in order to enact and anticipate ‘liveability’ in school spaces.
Breaking New Ground: New Zealand Certificates of Steiner Education
(Frontiers in Education, 2024-02-13) Boland, Neil; Brice-Geard, Karen; Bell, Amanda; Cook, Christine
The New Zealand Certificates of Steiner Education (CSE) are secondary qualifications at levels 1, 2 and 3, recognized by the New Zealand Qualifications Authority. They give access to tertiary education in New Zealand and beyond. The impulse for new qualifications grew from a wish to have important aspects of the taught Steiner curriculum recognized and valorized, that these aspects be credit bearing toward tertiary study, an option not offered by existing qualifications. The certificates were developed over an 18-month period and were implemented by the (then) four New Zealand Steiner schools with high school classes. The CSE are based on a suite of learning outcomes which give teachers a substantial degree of assessment autonomy, allowing them to tailor assessment modalities to the student or class being taught. Since 2012, the qualifications have been offered overseas and are now used as a pathway to university by Steiner schools in a growing number of countries. This article draws on the experiences of one of the developers of the qualification and two teachers in schools using the certificate in the UK, and outlines some of the challenges faced when breaking new ground in the advancement of Waldorf education internationally.
Navigating an Uncertain Interregnum
(Frontiers Media, 2024-12-05) Boland, Neil
This article seeks to identify trends in Steiner Waldorf education through the lens of Clarence Beeby’s work on educational myths. Beeby calls myths a form of communication between contemporaries or between generations, ways of conceptualizing education that can be understood quickly yet are flexible enough to accommodate a range of interpretations. A myth holds for a period and then transitions into a new myth that best suits changed times and changed circumstances. I reflect on what the myths of Waldorf education might be and take up Gramsci’s well-known quotation on change, “The crisis consists precisely of the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear,” In writing this, Gramsci extended the interregnum beyond its usual papal connotation to include the socio-cultural condition as well. I use the notion to consider if Waldorf education is currently in an interregnum period and is displaying both “morbid symptoms” and promising signs of fresh development. In addition, I contemplate if these promising signs point toward a new myth that will allow Waldorf education to step beyond its century-old, colonial heritage.
Scoping Community Engagement in the Context of Tomorrow’s Schools in Aotearoa New Zealand: An Integrative Review of the Literature
(Informa UK Limited, 2026-04-21) Boyask, Ruth; Drake, Melanie; Macdonald, Maryanne
Schools in a democracy need community involvement; community engagement in schools needs structures to support it. This article scopes how community engagement is conceptualised and enacted within Aotearoa New Zealand’s self-managing Tomorrow’s Schools system between 2009–2024 through a systematic integrative review of scholarly and grey literature. Using a replicable, PRISMA-informed protocol, we identified 68 eligible sources across government, education and academic sectors, and analysed them using reflexive thematic analysis. Definitions of community engagement were rarely explicit, and reported practices clustered at the lower end of the engagement continuum, particularly communication and participation, with comparatively few examples of durable, democratic decision-making. A consistent theme arising from the review is that policy ambiguity, including an under-specified notion of ‘community’, can constrain meaningful engagement and may leave gains for historically underserved groups less secure. The review concludes with implications for policy and future research, emphasising definitional clarity, representative infrastructures and longitudinal, collaborative inquiry.
A Hiring Decision That Disrupted Whiteness: A Critical Autoethnography of Equity-focused Educational Leadership
(SAGE Publications, 2026-04-18) Drake, Melanie
This article presents a critical autoethnographic examination of an equity-driven leadership decision in a historically segregated primary school: the appointment of a highly qualified Black African English teacher in an environment where whiteness had long shaped institutional culture, professional legitimacy, and community expectations. Drawing on Critical Race Theory, culturally responsive leadership and resonant leadership, the study interrogates how this decision surfaced deeply embedded racialised assumptions about language, academic ‘standards’, and belonging. The narrative illuminates the coded and explicit forms of resistance that emerged, revealing how appeals to ‘tradition’ functioned as mechanisms for maintaining racialised institutional norms. Through analysis of reflective journals, the article explores the emotional and relational labour involved in confronting such resistance, including the spillover of tensions into family life. While foregrounding that this experience cannot be equated with the systemic racism endured by marginalised educators, the study demonstrates how whiteness disciplines white leaders who disrupt its expectations. The findings highlight the fragility of equity gains in schools where transformation lacks structural anchoring. The article argues that sustainable equity work requires institutional, not individual, commitment and contributes to broader scholarship by offering a nuanced account of race, leadership, and the ongoing struggle for justice in education.
Revealing Stories of Artistic Identity Through Fabric Bricolage
(Informa UK Limited, 2026-03-31) Probine, Sarah; Jackson, Jayne; Enache, Mihaela; Ewing, Robyn; Crosbie, Jane; Stewart, Jean
This article presents and discusses the products of a creative workshop for artist/teachers which aimed to explore artistic identity through fabric bricolage, a medium unfamiliar to the participants. The account of the workshop and the artifacts created reveala the efficacy of a process that fostered reflection, honored complexity, included relational knowing, and affirmed the power of arts-based methods to reveal, connect, reframe, and transform. The article illustrates how individual acts of making, through the tactile, symbolic, and historically rich process of quilt-making, became a collective quilt of experience. The discussion points to the potential for further application in teacher education, professional development, and community arts contexts; any space where identity, creativity, and connection are valued. In a time when the arts continue to be marginalized in formal education and public discourse, creating spaces where creativity can be reawakened and meaning co-constructed is not just enriching, it is essential.
The Criticality of Pacific Education – The Search for a Transformative Disciplinary Space
(Wiley, 2026-03-29) Ualesi, Toleafoa Yvonne; Cunningham, Emma; Matapo, Fa’alogo Jacoba; Fa’avae, David Taufui Mikato; Iosefo, Fetaui; Allen, Jean M Uasike; Fa’aea, Aiono Manu; Baice, Tim
This paper is a collective talatalanoa by early to senior career education researchers and scholars seeking to make sense of Pacific education and its trajectory as a critical and transformative sphere within the broader context of education and education research within Aotearoa New Zealand (Aotearoa NZ). The critical stance towards the education of diverse Pacific communities is well established in Aotearoa NZ and reflects ongoing settler‐colonial negotiations within postcolonial schooling contexts. Our collaborative and ongoing conversational narratives through talatalanoa captures the potentiality of a Pacific Indigenous modality or form of communicative expression and articulation. The impact of engaging a critical discipline provides visibility and disruption, enabling the deconstruction and re‐calibration of understanding centred in Indigenous Pacific concepts and frameworks enabling shifts to occur that are agentic and transformative within initial teacher education (ITE), classroom pedagogy and policymaking and implementation in Aotearoa NZ. As Moana scholars in Aotearoa NZ, we argue for Pacific education as critical transformative disciplinary work through the lens of transindigeneity and offer implications for practice, research and policy.

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