Describing Māori educators’ embedded literacy practices at Waikato Institute of Technology (Wintec) (2014-2015)

This report describes the embedded literacy practices of ten Māori educators at Waikato Institute of Technology (Wintec). There were several reasons for tracking these practices, including our gathering evidence that Wintec met the Tertiary Education Commission (TEC) funding requirement that level-1 and level-2 educators integrated deliberate acts of literacy teaching into their practices (TEC, 2009a). The most important reason was that we responded to three boundary texts (Thomas, Hardy and Sargent, 2007): Wintec’s Maori Capability Framework (MCF) (Wintec, 2013), the Tertiary Education Strategy (2014-2019) (MoE, 2014), and a TEC publication on how to do better for Māori (Chauvel and Rean, 2012). These texts highlight the strategic priority of lifting outcomes for Māori learners and enhancing Māori and non-Māori educators’ capability in enacting values (tikanga) from a Māori world-view. The LN-embedding team used classroom observations to raise educators’ awareness of the diversity of deliberate acts of literacy and numeracy (as well as general pedagogical competence) they used to enhance learning or circumvent barriers in learning conversations with and among learners. The report shows the range, depth and complexity of these educators’ practices. An important related goal was that observations were viewed as neither definitive nor objective: observed educators were asked to validate or reject the observations, and their comments were recorded. The authors then performed independent analyses, coding these dialogically accomplished narrative-based observations. Our analyses yielded 90 constructs categorized into 8 superordinate categories. We found that the three peaks in the frequency table related to deliberate acts of literacy and numeracy teaching, learner-centred mediation in learning conversations and deliberately sequenced pedagogical steps. We concluded that for TEC-targeted courses (units at level 1 and 2 in level-1 to level-3 programmes), educators consistently used deliberate LN-embedding strategies which were consistent with both Māori pedagogy and general LN-embedding practices. We recommend that educators (a) pursue, develop and make explicit the meanings they attach to the principles and practices of Māori or any other pedagogy informing their instructional decisions (Borg, 2003; Freeman, 2002; and Woods, 1996); (b) relevant research methodologies – such as repertory grids (Greyling and Waitai, 2016) - be used to elicit, describe and critique these explicit accounts of Māori pedagogy as a resource for assessing and promoting culturally appropriate pedagogical practices; and (c) outcomes for courses delivered in Māori and non-Māori modes of delivery be tracked