Supporting the development of leadership in New Zealand schools these days requires a high degree of cultural capability.  Equity and excellence for learners of all cultures have long been held as goals in our education system, but these have remained elusive for a number of students, particularly Māori and Pasifika.  There is a persistent sense that the education system, as we have known it, alienates rather than supports the aspirations of non-European families. The appropriate and now required response is inclusion. The Aotearoa New Zealand histories curriculum, the broader curriculum refresh, NCEA review and calls for the development of localised curriculum, are all designed to ensure the lived experiences and understandings of non-European cultures are included in both what and how we teach. However, learning to truly embrace cultures that are not one’s own is a highly developed skill.  We need models and assistance to pursue this new level of cultural competence. 

Auto ethnographers such as Spry (2018) and Minh-ha (1998) explain that the process of learning to engage cross-culturally is at least a three-step process.  Firstly, we need to become unsettled by our own assumptions about the ‘other’ culture. Then, we need to press through our own sense of discomfort to learn more about those who are not of our own culture.  In this way of learning to understand other cultures, we will learn to know ourselves better, preparing ourselves for the final stage: developing a sense of ‘we’ with ‘others’.  

A model to help apply these ideas can be formed using metaphors developed by the New Zealand poets Allen Curnow (1979) and Glen Colquhoun (1999) (Metge, 1994).  Curnow (1979) likened monocultural New Zealand society to a moa standing in a museum on one leg.  He laments this state of affairs.  Colquhoun (1999) later replies, asserting the need to find the second foot to stand on, and then to learn to walk with both feet.  I use these images to suggest that in recognising our one footedness, pressing through discomfort to make space for the second foot and ultimately learning to walk confidently on both feet, we will develop cultural competency (Dow, 2019). 

Standing on one foot

Allen Curnow stared at a moa in a Canterbury museum in about 1943.  He saw that the moa was unable to stand as it only had one leg.  It required scaffolding.  The egg beside it was cracked, devoid of the potential for new life.  Curnow was astute in his perception of New Zealand society at the time.  He wrote:

At that time, European culture dominated the New Zealand education system.  Assimilation was actively pursued through the banning of Te Reo Māori in schools and the provision of low level education which was aimed at preparing Māori for lives of poorly qualified service (Barrington, 2008; Barrington, & Beaglehole, 1974; Simon & Smith, 2001).  Later, in the post war years, egalitarian beliefs held that learners everywhere received the same quality of teaching and learning and therefore could be expected to attain the same outcomes (Beeby,1992).  Any lack of achievement was attributed to be the fault of the students and their homes (Bishop & Glynn 1999, 2003).  This is deficit theorising, against which we have been warned for decades now (Ministry of Education, 2008, 2013).  It is perhaps challenging for those of us who were educated in the egalitarian era to apprehend the damage that has been done.  Maybe this is the point of becoming unsettled, when we realise that education that appears to be equitable for all, is in fact not.  We must change.

Curnow’s image is poignant when we apply it not only to the education system, but to students themselves.  The moa, the students, have been forced to stand on a monocultural leg for generations.  They require significant support to enable them to stand.  Labouring under the expectation that we would produce equitable outcomes for all, educators have worked hard to provide that scaffolding, and some efforts have been successful.  We have been committed to holistic care, to developing relationships and employing all manner of pedagogical processes to ensure all students are given the support they need.  However, as the image portrays, for many the ‘egg’ of their potential remains broken and lifeless.  We need now to consider that perhaps the answer does not lie in helping students become better at standing on one foot. The answer, as proposed by Colquhoun and promoted by educational policy makers in recent times, is to make visible and viable the second foot, their own means of support. 

Making room for the second foot

In reply to Curnow’s lament, Colquhoun wrote:

In the 1980s, at the behest of Māori academics and parents of children who were persistently failing in both knowing themselves as Māori and obtaining satisfactory results from mainstream schooling, Kohanga Reo and Kura Kaupapa Māori were born.  Educating children in a Māori-centred context makes finding and establishing dependence on the second foot easier. But the majority of Māori students are educated in mainstream educational contexts.  A series of hui designed to examine the state of education for Māori students held in the early 2000s led to Dr Sir Mason Durie stating that whether Māori students were educated in Māori-centred, Māori added or collaborative pathways, the expectation remains the same:  students need to be taught in such a way that they will succeed as Māori, as global citizens of the world, and in experiencing holistically healthy lives (Durie, 2001a).  The second foot needs to be found and established in every place that Māori students learn. 

Māori have critiqued the three pathways.  Māori centred contexts have been found to be hugely beneficial.  Māori added pathways include contexts where specific Māori programmes, such as Taha Māori, have been added to a Euro-centred curriculum and have been found severely wanting (Holmes, Bishop & Glynn, 1992).  The collaborative pathway therefore seems most likely to be the best choice in schools other than Māori-centred.  Collaboration with Māori has long been expected, but not well understood.  Collaboration is required of boards of trustees (MOE 2000, 2013b).  Partnership with parents is required of all educators in New Zealand.  Māori tell us that these initiatives are not working (Johnston, 1992). Māori added and collaborative pathways are most often used by folk still determinedly or perhaps unwittingly standing on one foot themselves (Dow, 2006).  So how do we enact collaboration that really does enable the second foot to be secure and bear weight?

Learning to make space for the second foot in our lives as educators involves a deliberate act of choosing to place ourselves in the position of being a learner (Dow, 2006).  This is perhaps an unaccustomed position for us, uncomfortable even. But, it involves acknowledging that when it comes to learning another’s culture, we are not the expert.  Adopting a position of learner ensures that we suspend thought long enough to listen and hopefully really hear the ‘other’.  Our tendency to simplify matters into easily digested small pieces of knowledge, a long-honed skill developed by most educators, needs to give way to curiosity and willingness to explore beyond the immediate and the obvious.  We need to sit awhile and check the lens we are using, as well as learn to adopt new ways of looking at things.  Colquhoun’s poem “Learning to stand upright here’ consists of couplets in which everyday items are described from both Euro-centred and Māori centred perspectives.  The Māori centred lines evoke smells, sights, sounds and tastes that connect to generations of understandings that go beyond any European experience in New Zealand.  Te Reo Māori words connect to deep understandings of the world that are often lost in translation (Barlow,1991).  Being open to learning the essence of words and images from the world of Māori results in us discovering the existence of the second foot, a new place to stand.  However, the journey to cultural competence is not essentially for us, it is for our students. 

As we return to applying Curnow’s image to our students, we remember that it is they who have been made to stand on one foot for so long, and they who we must help discover there is another foot to be found.  Māori academics have shown us the way to do this.  They warn against non-Māori approaching tasks such as this with the thought that we will position ourselves in a manner that means we take from Māori or act to, at or for Māori (Smith, 2001).  We should rather seek to work with Māori.  ‘Working with’ acknowledges the inherent, intrinsic and extremely valuable knowledge and understanding even the most reluctant of Māori learners have about being Māori.  We are not seeking to reach out and find answers for our students, we are equipping them to find answers for themselves.  Our students are our windows into our Māori community.  While years of finding collaboration challenging in the one footed mode we have worked within may find us timid, helping our students find their second foot is different.  Indeed, we are not unaccustomed to this stance.  Freiere (1972) taught us to resist considering our students as empty slates on which we write.  We have long known to use the concept of ako (Pere,1994) in our classrooms.  Educators and students are both teachers and learners.  As we grow in these essential aspects of being educators in Aotearoa New Zealand we will find enrichment beyond measure, and our confidence and competence will grow.  We will find ourselves ready to walk a newfound talk.   

Creating the way for two-footed walking

Glen Colquhoun completed his reply to Curnow’s lament with the words:

The auto ethnographers Spry (2018)  and Minh-ha (1998) write of the need to establish a sense of ‘we’ with those we might once have considered ‘other’, those who are of a different culture to ours.  Creating a sense of ‘we’ involves learning to walk with both feet, to see issues from more than our own personal point of view.  We can share history and locality without needing to hold the same views.  We can allow for different perspectives and different styles of knowledge.  Dr Sir Mason Durie (2003a, 2003b) writes of the enrichment that is possible through the embracing of these differences.  His Whare Tapa Wha (Durie, (2001b) model of holistic health is a fine example. It has enhanced the quality of medical care in New Zealand through bringing a holistic description of health provision rather than the pathological approach that existed formerly.

Walking with both feet involves learning to judge what we need to hold on to, and what we need to let go.  Our education system is working on that as we speak. The curriculum refresh is broad and general, aspirational in scope.  But it also requires us to engage with our local communities and to develop our own understandings within the large framework provided. Walking on both feet involves intimate connection and engagement with the immediate terrain.  Developing local curriculum and seeking to understand local history is not a fly by effort.  Within the broad narratives spoken of nationally, globally even, there are immensely different understandings to be found by being specific, locally.  Some of the learning we will encounter within the intimate knowledge of the local context will run counter to the broad, which must then be let go. At other times, broad, general perspectives will provide the lens through which we make sense of the intimate.  Sometimes we will need to let our old perception of the specific go in the light of the critique a broad view has provided.  Walking with both feet, gaining the hope and confidence to develop a sense of ‘we’ with ‘others’ will help us to grow in cultural competence.

Conclusion

Growing in cultural capability is an ongoing process.  Culture is not like the moa standing in a museum.  It is like a group of moa foraging in a swamp, negotiating the dangerous spots, finding new ways.  It is dynamic and ongoing.  To grow in it we must enter into it, recognising that as we do so we will make space for greater inclusion of those who matter: our students and their families and the communities they will become.  

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