Our first school goal is around raising Maori achievement. This goal has been a focus for our school for a long time and in discussions with my department we felt it was important to invite our teacher in charge of Maori Whaea Ruiha to share her insights into how to address raising Maori achievement. One of the ways was unpacking what we taught and whether it was relevant.
The new Aotearoa Histories curriculum is one that schools are planning for and one of the key big ideas is the need for communities to know the history of their place. We needed meaningful discussions to start immediately as the plan originally was to have a year 9 curriculum in place by 2022. Scott our teacher in charge of History, suggested we start by bringing in knowledgable local speakers such as Russell Stone who has a wealth of knowledge on the European history of our local area.
Whaea Ruiha suggested we visit Waitingi and possibly go across to the west coast and visit a new museum Manea the footprints of Kupe which explores the journey of the Great Kupe who was the first Maori explorer.
Other ideas were:
- Drawing in common history of Maori and Pacific.
- Maori settled in N.Z but stopped in at many places on the way.
- Researching the Historic Trauma of our area.
- Creating a whanau/aiga culture in the class
- Look for a day to plan for our Aotearoa Histories.
- Looking at local wars and international wars.
We will look at ways to put our ideas into actions and I felt the meeting was a good way to start the conversations that needed to be had and hopefully will be actioned.
