Stewart, Georgina TuariBenade, LeonSmith, ValanceWells, AlastairYates, Amanda2025-02-112025-02-112024-07-09New Zealand Journal of Educational Studies, ISSN: 0028-8276 (Print); 2199-4714 (Online), Springer Science and Business Media LLC, 59(2), 447-462. doi: 10.1007/s40841-024-00328-40028-82762199-4714http://hdl.handle.net/10292/18633Māori aspirations in education have not been served by past national policies. It is hard to extinguish the influence of monoculturalism, whereby schools were used to colonise Māori by enforcing linguistic and cultural assimilation. The history of debate on Innovative Learning Environments (ILE) and Flexible Learning Spaces (FLS) demonstrates the ongoing dominance of this Eurocentric, monocultural approach. Official New Zealand education policy and practice follows international trends in school design, moving away from traditional single-cell classrooms towards more open and inter-connected spaces, despite no real evidence concerning the relative effects on learning of each classroom type. Meanwhile, school marae have been around for several decades, but largely ignored in national ILE and FLS policy and research literature. Our experiences lead us to suggest that Māori identity must be ‘built in’ not ‘added on’ to monocultural ILE frameworks, and for this reason, spatiality is crucial in Māori teaching and learning spaces. This article explores the notion of ‘Māori learning spaces.’Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permis sion directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/3901 Curriculum and Pedagogy3902 Education Policy, Sociology and Philosophy39 Education4 Quality Education13 EducationEducation39 EducationJournal ArticleOpenAccess10.1007/s40841-024-00328-4