Elaborating socio-cultural narratives for educational change: Five case studies from tertiary vocational education

The Te Arawhiti Māori Crown Relations Capability Framework (MCRCF) identifies six focal areas in which agencies and individuals have to develop capability: understanding racial equity and institutional racism; New Zealand history and the Treaty of Waitangi; worldview knowledge; tikanga/kawa; te reo Māori; and engagement with Māori. As a subsidiary of the newly formed Te Pūkenga, Waikato Institute of Technology (Wintec) has initiated the Tōia Mai Excellence Framework (TMEF, 2020) in response. Our focus in this report is on educator capability development in level-1 to level-3 programmes at the institute, and how training on the New Zealand Certificate in Adult Literacy and Numeracy Education (Vocational) (NZCALNE-Voc) creates a firm launch-pad for elaborating socio-cultural narratives that are consistent with Ministry of Education, Te Arawhiti and Te Pūkenga expectations. We argue that NZCALNE(Voc) training provides a stepping-stone from the unfamiliar to the comfortable on the Te Arawhiti scale (MCRCF, 2018). In five case studies from the training programme, we illustrate how 18 Te Reo Māori terms, integrated into lesson planning and implementation, were activated as meaning-making lenses to raise kaimahi awareness of te ao Māori and the significance of this world view for their pedagogical practices. Our aim was to show how Māori terms could be deliberately enacted in educator (kaiako) teaching practices. Using collaborative lesson-planning, lesson observations and one-on-one interviews with four kaimahi, we attempted to place these elements of socio-cultural narratives, consistent with the Te Arawhiti and Tōia Mai frameworks, front of mind. Applying qualitative research methods, we found that when these terms were clustered, they could be used to capture complex, mutually supportive socio-cultural meanings. We triangulated our analysis of the lesson observations with data obtained from kaimahi in structured one-on-one interviews premised on the assumption that their personally held meanings were a worthy starting point for elaborating their pedagogical belief systems. We showed that laddering up and laddering down pedagogical constructs could be used to develop practice-based descriptors of meaning-making lenses in action whether personally held or otherwise. We concluded that externalised narrative accounts of personally held (and known) pedagogical lenses were valuable points of departure in embracing the meaning-making potential of the Māori concepts and socio-cultural frameworks in question. Kaimahi, we sensed, had to develop the flexibility and capacity to don any relevant constructs in exploring their implications for their teaching practices