English in Te Ao Māori, Lani Wendt Young & reading beyond the white castle

It has been an amazing year.  For us all, we adapted to a new Covid normal that was stranger than anything we had collectively experienced.  For myself, I had surgery in the middle of the year and came back to work slowly, having to adjust to a new normal for myself that I had never experienced before.  The best news is that we learned so much from lockdown, and that I am recovering and moving more and more towards full strength.

A window into Te Ao Māori

Late in 2019, our Kaiako Māori teacher approached me about joining with the English department in 2020.  Catherine had been feeling very isolated.  I said a very excited yes, and made building a languages department (not English plus Māori and Mandarin to the side) one of our goals for this year.  

Also late in 2019, one of our deputy principals approached me about teaching the Kaupapa Māori Pathway class for English.  I had done the Te Ahu o Te Reo Māori course earlier in the year, and I had space on my timetable.  Yes, I would if he felt I had enough skills.  I had loved the course, but I didn't think I had made enough progress at using Te Reo Māori in my lessons subsequently.

Sometimes the winds and the Gods align and I get to learn lots and lots and lots.  That is what has happened this year, as I've shown Catherine how to work the school system (budget - appraisal - teacher standards - timetabling - getting people to say yes!!) and she has taught me about Te Ao Māori and different ways of looking at knowledge.  I did say yes to teaching English to the Kaupapa Māori Pathway class and our rangatahi in that class have also taught me lots and lots.  Next year I am offering a course called 'English in Te Ao Māori.'  Some days I wonder how I dare even think I can do that, and then I have to remind myself that the work of learning about Te Ao Māori is all of our responsibility.

In response to a contribution to the English Online community by Jenny Nagle on the topic of New Zealand short stories, I spent part of this morning learning from Lani Wendt Young's 2019 Read NZ lecture.  

This section really spoke to me:

Why is the castle of literature so white?

Is it because the rest of us just aren’t storytellers? (Even though our ancestors used oral storytelling to pass on our history and culture to their children?)

Maybe we haven’t quite mastered the intricacies of the written language of our colonisers enough to knock out a novel? (After all, we were punished in school for speaking our indigenous languages. Never mind that many of us had parents who made sure we spoke better English than the Queen, because they knew that English was the language that would get us into university and make us successful.)

Or perhaps we don’t write books because we actually don’t like to read? That’s why there are no books by brown people in your local bookstore! We’re too busy playing rugby. Eating corned beef and KFC. Being ‘dole bludgers,’ ‘cheeky darkies’ and ‘leeches.’

Or is there another reason why the castle of literature is so white?

Lani then quotes Arundhati Roy:

 ‘There’s really no such thing as the voiceless. There are only the deliberately silenced, or the preferably unheard.’

One of the issues we have wrestled with this year is the marvellous temptations of texts from the canon which come with such a wealth of secondary literature.  It makes it easy for us to transmit knowledge with lots of notes.  It does provide a sense of security for us as teachers, but I'm not sure that this is always helpful.  Some of our year 11 students this year lacked confidence in their own interpretations of Lord of the Flies in the face of so much secondary literature available online and we then had to deal with plagiarism investigations and assigning a not achieved to two hard working, highly intelligent students of colour.  It raised a lot of questions for me.

Earlier this week, we got the school credit card and had a buying spree on the Huia website.  We are spending part of our summers working on widening our New Zealand text offerings, and particularly on widening our Māori texts beyond Grace and Ihimaera.  I will be making sure that our mahi includes excellence exemplars for exams.  

Throughout the middle part of the year, wearing my Kahui Ako within school teacher hat, I facilitated a professional learning group on the Kaupapa Māori Pathway.  We helped each other with probing questions and collaboration to support our rangatahi.  You can see some of our work here.

In Term Three we had a hui focused on Māori achieving success as Māori.  I had the privilege of listening and learning in that hui, and one of the key directions from it was PLD for staff.  As we prepared for our Term 4 Toki Staff meeting, where Angela Seyb and I worked with Nicola Minehan and Fiona Grant, and our fabulous team of Grey High teachers to revitalise Learn-Create-Share at Greymouth High School, I decided that my best workshop contribution should focus on how we can put Māori stories and achievements at the centre of our learning.  This presentation is a tiny start, and I am keen to develop this work further in 2021.  If you want to see the Socrative activity on Waitaiki referenced in the slide show, then this link should take you there. You will need a Socrative account (free) though.

Celebrating & planning

So....  THREE English scholarships!  In our very first year of running scholarship!  All the credit goes to our wonderful students and their passionate, talented and responsive teacher, Lauren Evans.

On 3oth January, I presented my MIT 2019 work to a teacher only morning of all of our Toki Pounamu primary teachers.  I got to hear about some other fabulous inquiries that morning from other colleagues in our primary schools, and especially liked Lyndall Prendergast's work.  One of the very best things to come out of Toki Pounamu, I think, is the increased collaboration across schools, and I've really enjoyed working with primary colleagues.

Our year at Grey High is up and running, and I've got wonderful classes.  I'll write more about new class projects in another post.

My biggest new project for 2020 is doing some post-graduate study of my own.  I was granted a secondary study support award for this year which gives me four hours of release time per week to study.  In late January, tucked into a family road trip to the North Island, I spent three days on a block course in research methodologies in literacy (EDPROFST 700) at the University of Auckland.  Since then, I've submitted the practice assessment (worth nothing, but a useful exercise) and next I have to do a critical synthesis of three studies published in academic journals, each based on primary research.  On the block course we whizzed through a range of research methods used in education, carefully noting that it wasn't about ranking, but about the right fit for each project.

My decision to apply for the grant and to pursue this learning was about supporting my work as literacy leader at Greymouth High School.  I've been doing this role for the last six years, and I thought it was time to bring some substantively new material and thinking into my kete.

We each get to choose what research area we want to focus on (after critical synthesis comes a literature review and then a research proposal).  I have been thinking about the challenges of maintaining effective literacy practices as new initiatives come through a school.  That's definitely a challenge we face at GHS, and I know it is a widely experienced challenge. However, it is too broad, and far too complex in scope for a research proposal from anyone.  The whole challenge is the range of variables involved in a school at any stage, let alone tracing the maintenance of one initiative (literacy) in the face of multiple new initiatives which also deserve support and attention (learn-create-share, wellbeing, growth mindset, etc).

So that is my next challenge - to narrow my focus so that I can find some great studies and make learning progress.  It will definitely be around secondary literacy, and whereas I was thinking whole school literacy before, I may now confine it to English subject literacy.  Primary-secondary transition and literacy skills transfer is also a possibility.

I've been cleaning my incredibly messy office over this weekend while I think about a study focus.  I will refrain from exploring the impact of physical mess on the effectiveness of classroom teachers...  Now there is room for other teachers to work in here with me and I can once again find things easily. 

You can see both the floor and the colour of the top of every desk!  Time for some new photos and posters now...