The importance of understanding Te Ao Māori in my practice....

I was challenged by Associate Professor Sonja Macfarlane and Melissa Derby, University of Canterbury's blog post about authentic approaches and if Kaupapa Māori values were more than just words in New Zealand educational settings, which they referred to as rākau - derived from the Te Reo Māori word peni rākau or pencil being a metaphor for ticking the Māori culturally responsive check box.  The approach that was compared was ngākau which means from the heart, where the approach was authentic and where having a deeper meaning of Te Ao Māori concepts and values drives every part of the school. 


I was drawn to read this because of the behaviour management example that was used to consider whether Te Ao Māori values were truly integrated in the learning environment's culture.  I want my approach in my role as Special Education Advisor in the Behaviour Service to come from a ngākau position where restorative approaches are used in a school's behaviour management policy, where the focus is on restoring relationships and building harmony, developing accountability for those involved. 


This approach also really resonates with the learning design of Haeata Community Campus where I was working for the last two years and the difference this can make for our ākonga and rangatahi where mana not only remains intact but is enhanced by taking a strengths-based and learning (ako) approach to behaviour management.  This approach values manaakitanga, aroha and whānaungatanga which are all vales incorporated in the Haeata Community Campus learning design: the school values of manaakitanga, alofa (aroha) and the underpinning phrase, "Relationships are at the heart of all we do" (whānaungatanga).


Macfarlane and Derby went on to explain how the ngākau approach would focus on Māori cultural content within the school's curriculum or learning design and this included the use of Te Reo Māori.  It discussed content being driven by place-based pedagogy and cultural narratives and experiences, understanding the significant and stories associated to place names and local or national areas.  If I think about this in terms of my practice and professional context, if I were to have a ngākau approach it would be to really understand individual ākonga backgrounds, their whānau, their turangawaewae and whakapapa. 


This made me think of one case I am working on currently, supporting a young boy who identifies as Māori although has been displaced from his cultural heritage for some time due to safety issues with his biological father.  The boy was transitioning from one school to another following being excluded from one school and the transition was from a primary school setting to a secondary school setting.  Both the boy and his mother were very open and keen to connect more and learn more about this so it was about listening, whānaungatanga and manaakitanga - understanding what was really important.  I have learned so much about the ngākau approach because of this young boy and it is so amazing to see when his mana is protected, how this supports him to gain confidence in his identity both as a learner and as Māori. 


References:


Haeata Community Campus (n.d.) Curriculum. Retrieved from www.haeata.school.nz


Macfarlane, S., & Derby, M. (2018). From the rākau to the ngākau: Exploring authentic approaches to leadership, policy, and pedagogy. Ipu Kererū: Blog of the New Zealand Association for Research in Education (NZARE).

Keeping my head above water

Well it has been an interesting few weeks with many challenges and I have felt like I haven't been keeping up with my study.  

I have had a busy few weeks with family visiting from Gisborne and our extended family went on a trip to Hanmer to commemorate my husband's father who passed away three years ago from cancer.  The weekend was busy and my study day was taken over by sick children and packing.  

The following week I found myself unwell, battling with a migraine that hung around for a few days and then the awful events of Friday 15th which seem so surreal.  I ended up racing down to my son's school in Linwood when my sister phoned explaining the shootings and the schools being in lockdown.  I waited there with many other parents until it was safe for children to be released.  It was really scary!  I had to drive another family home as they didn't have a vehicle and the ladies husband was in lockdown at his work also.  

From all of these events though, I have now managed to spend some time focussing and my perspective has now slightly changes with wanting to be more multicultural in terms of culturally responsive practice.  It has been impressive to watch our nation's leaders engage with the Muslim community and the way that New Zealand and many other countries have come together in love and support of this awful tragic event.

First Whānau Group

Today we had our first whānau group meeting at the new Rehua Building at University of Canterbury.   It was great to be able to meet up with everyone from the block course and find out how they were all going with their learning journeys and how they had found Domain 1 and the first assignment. 

 

Cara who is the coordinator for the Early Intervention endorsement is the contact for our whānau group and facilitated the conversation.  The part of the discussion that I found the most valuable was when we were talking about reflections.  Cara shared how important our reflections were in relation to our practice and that we need to be thinking critically about our learning and making connections to our context - bringing the learning to life.  She explained the following as a possible way of structuring / framing a reflection:  "...based on my reflection.....I noticed.....and this is what I will do to implement this within my practice...." 


We discussed other structures for framing reflections:

i.e. barriers - enablers - what next? 

Cara added that as long as the next steps were integrated into a professional practice contexts then the reflection would connect with our learning and that is the purpose of this course.

 

In terms of reflection on artefacts, we discussed:

• What did I know?
• What did I find out?
• Where to now and what next? (practical practice related ideas)

We talked about how the paper was structured to supported personalized and self-directed learning which for many of us is a new way of learning.  One of the ladies shared that she found it was a lot easier to focus when she followed these steps:

1. Complete the self-assessment.
2. Develop personal professional learning goals using the information and thinking sparked from the self-assessment.
3. Contribute to the forum posts and the glossary.
4. Read the course content that relates to the personal goals or your learning context.
5. Work on the portfolio pages for the domain.
6. Reflect on the artefacts and the whole domain.

I all comes down to, what is important to me now in my learning?  This question should help to guide the direction of the learning.


Another lady in the group shared that she had found a tutorial on YouTube that showed her how to use Zotero successfully to support her APA referencing: "Learn Zotero: Step by step tutorial"

 

One of the other questions asked was about referencing and the expectation is that artefacts including forum posts should be APA referenced to ensure other's work and ideas is acknowledged.

Reflection for Domain 1: Professional Learning and Identity

This reflection is about the progress I have made on the goals that I set two weeks ago when I began the Core Theory and Foundations of Specialist Teaching Paper at Albany University where I attended a three day block course, 13 February - 15 February.


When thinking about my year, I feel very privileged to have the time and space in my professional life to have so many learning opportunities.  I know that the learning is more about the process than the outcome and think that I have made some progress in developing my competency and skills in a range of digital literacy skills. 


Using Blogger as a way to record my reflections and learning journey is one thing that I have really enjoyed.  It has enabled me to reflect throughout the process rather than at an end point which is what I often have done in the past, only reflected out of accountability and having to for my professional management requirements.  I am learning that reflecting is an essential part of my professional learning.  I have mentioned in some of my other reflections that with my new role this year, I have extended travel time which allows me both some personal wellbeing space and some time to process my work and reflect which I am finding very helpful.


One area that I haven't made much progress in is my wellbeing goals as I have been very busy over the last few weeks.  I hope to be able to prioritise my time better to allow space in my schedule to focus on my wellbeing goals.  As my mother frequently tells me, "You can't help anyone if you don't help yourself Jess" - words of the wise that hinder my thoughts.


Another area that I would like more opportunity to develop are my academic skills.  Most of my reflections have been written informally and my posts on the forums on Moodle have been short and not written in academic writing so this is something that I would like to add to my goals - practice academic writing regularly in forum posts over the first semester.


A question I have asked myself after reading the material in the Domain One book is: Are my goals written as SMART-EST goals and I wonder if there is a tool that can help to analyse goals to ensure they are well written?


I am looking forward to the next Domain to see if I am able to use MyPortfolio with more ease and competence.  I will be asking at my whānau group whether I can turn on the 'skins' function to make my pages more aesthetically pleasing.

How are digital tools used by other educators and what for???

https://www.unleasheducation.co.nz/about/ this is a blog I came across after googling nz educators blogs.  I'm keen to learn more about this.  It was interesting the other day in a supervision session as I was sharing about how my study was going and explaining to my supervisor what I had contributed to the glossary in my endorsement that she was interested in the content.  We got a bit side-tracked but I felt genuinely valued that my supervisor who is an experienced psychologist was interested in something I had to contribute.  It felt like a true moment of natural tuakana teina.




There are so many resources and tools to use and what I find a challenge is intially getting to know how it works and then getting to know who uses it and what for.  I've tried twitter, but I haven't mastered the knack of tweeting and hash tagging and how to add much or contribute much in that arena as a professional and in my brain I have categorised that to professional connections / networking and don't put anything personal on twitter OR LinkedIn.  My personal social digital tool is Facebook.


Another literacy demand in blogging is the visual aspects as I find it quite boring just looking at a whole lot of text, but who wants to take photos of documents and notes?  What visual components do educational bloggers use to make their posts more attractive to readers?  Or is this even important?  Are blogs for a purpose, a particular audience or just a means of expressing meaning?

Navigating my way around MyPortfolio

MyPortfolio is a tool that we need to use for our papers to evidence our learning and the cool thing is that is an electronic tool that we can continue to use after our study.  It has lots of potential to be used for a range of purposes such as evidencing for appraisals, presenting information for professional projects or for things like CVs so I was excited to get the hang of how it all worked. 


I did come across some challenges right at the start.  When I signed up, I didn't put Massey down as my facility and put University of Canterbury instead which meant that skins weren't enabled so I couldn't make my pages look pretty. On reflection though I'm actually glad about this because it has meant that I haven't been too distracted wasting time, making my page look pretty. 


At the block course, I worked with a new friend, Wendy Blackmun who was quick to get the hang of how it all worked and she showed me how to copy a page so that I could set-up a template so that is the first thing I did so that after completing Domain 1, I wouldn't need to fiddle around with setting up my page for Domains 2-6.


Another challenge has been the computer that I am using.  Since starting my new role at MoE, I was allocated a tablet to use that is Windows and for the past 12 years I have been using an apple Mac which I was very comfortable with and knew many techie things to help me do my work efficiently so getting used to a new system has been frustrating and I've had to go ask friend Google a few things like how to take a screenshot and how to save a document to pdf from internet etc... I was even tempted to go out and buy a laptop but I'm trying to resist the temptation due to finances.


The next thing I have tried to do is embed my blog on my page as this is the tool that I have decided to use for my reflections and after lots of attempts, I put up a post on the general discussion forum for all and got some helpful advice so then I was able to put at least one article of my blog on the page and now I'm going to attempt to correct this so my whole blog shows.....  I will know this works when this post is showing as an article for an artefact and when my reflections part of my page shows the whole blog.

I'm still having some challenges with it as whenever I add an item to a page and save it, it takes a long time to load and I have to push remove or the X button to get rid of the box and sometimes this deletes the item I've added and sometimes it doesn't so it has taken me a lot of time to fiddle around with it....


Now for feedback from Assignment One :)

Reflecting on Wellbeing...

It always amuses me how the more we try and focus on personal wellbeing, because we know that it makes all the difference....the busier our lives become.  Lately I have been feeling quite overwhelmed trying to get used to the new routines of my new role, balancing this with the new study routines and level of commitment as well as trying to honour my responsibilities as Mum, wife and in other areas of my life, at church and with the league club.  Every time I look at my calendar, I feel the stress rising.


It's the little things that make all the difference and as I consider wellbeing goals for myself as a professional, I start with the obvious:

• Lunches - I make my kids lunches everyday but often don't pack anything for myself and then I often skip breakfast trying to get out the door and then... I buy junk because I am starving after getting to work, doing some work and before I know it, it's 2 or 3 in the afternoon.  One of my wellbeing goals is to eat breakfast daily and take a packed lunch to work.  This will also help my finances too if I don't buy food at the shops near the office.
• Sleep - As a busy working mum who is studying, I often am up at night doing the housework that I haven't had a chance to do during the day when I'm working and this impacts on me being able to go to sleep at a reasonable hour.  It is a vicious cycle....if I left the housework, then I'd be stressed out in the morning trying to find clean school uniforms for the kids and trying to pack lunches when things aren't tidy in the kitchen.  With all of this, sometimes you've gotta give yourself a break so part of my goal is not worrying about the state of my house as much as this isn't the top of my priority list, the other thing that I can do is get my family to support with these things and lighten the load.  I will sacrifice TV viewing to be able to do all my jobs and get to bed at a reasonable hour. 
• Exercise - a bit of a foreign concept for me but something that I want to be able to achieve.  This is always the first thing I find an excuse for.  I started a few weeks ago, getting up early and taking the dog for a walk but this was short-lived as things picked up and my sleep was impacted, so I will start with a goal of taking the dog of a 45 minute walk in the morning for 3 mornings a week.
• Spiritual - this area of my wellbeing is reasonably okay.  I am committed to attending my weekly women's celebration group where we reflect on life as women.  I also am involved in my church which I find very fulfilling.  One new area that I have enjoyed is being able to sing in my car as I travel to and from appointments in my new role.  This is the first time I have worked in a job where there has been a bit of travel time.  I have found this enables me time and space to process, reflect and prepare my head for what is required of me next and also means when I arrive home after a long day, I'm ready to put on my wife / mum hat and leave the worries of my work behind me until the next day.  Of course, this will take some discipline to maintain.
• Family - it's exciting this year with lots happening in my wider family and in my little family too.  I am enjoying having a bit of flexibility with hours of work and study days which have meant that I have been able to take my daughter to school visits prior to her starting school in term 2 and have been able to drop my son off to his new school and support his transition there.  One area that I would like to do better would be to make time for myself and my husband to go out for an evening, maybe once every two weeks.  He is a very supportive man but I don't want to put too much pressure on him as he is a busy man too.  He has had to change his routine a bit this year to make it work and he is still adjusting to picking up all the kids and doing the after school sports trainings, homework, dinner prep routines.

Now that I have this all processed, I think I'm ready to write my wellbeing goals.  I bet everyone is feeling a bit like me in the description above doing this course and I'm interested to see how everyone else is coping.  I have my first whānu group meeting next week so it will be good to catchup with the other Christchurch people doing this.