Teaching and learning New Zealand's difficult history of colonisation in secondary school contexts

<p>In recent years, awareness of New Zealand’s history of colonial injustice has grown in national consciousness. This awareness has led to much questioning of history education, particularly New Zealand’s high autonomy curriculum and its capacity to ensure that all young people encounter these ‘difficult’ aspects of the past. Yet little is known about the experiences of secondary school teachers and students during lessons on New Zealand’s history of colonisation. This study aimed to explore how teachers and students engaged with the history of colonisation, including how a sample of effective teachers and their students confronted the challenges and complexities of these pedagogical encounters. The importance of understanding this became even more significant when in 2019, the government surprised many by announcing that New Zealand history will become a compulsory feature of the curriculum at all levels of school from 2022. This thesis contributes to the new challenge of implementing compulsory curriculum content by developing a deeper understanding of the complexities currently experienced by teachers and students during lessons on colonisation. History education that focuses on historical forms of violence and its representation in curriculum is commonly referred to as the study of ‘difficult history’ (Epstein & Peck, 2018). In New Zealand, the early European colonists acquired land from the Indigenous Māori people resulting in inter-generational forms of suffering, trauma and oppression. In such a ‘settler society’ the history of one’s own nation and its instances of colonial injustice present challenges because the descendants of the early colonists remain, owning the majority of land and controlling to a large extent political systems and institutions, including schools. This thesis extends the research on difficult history by focusing on the challenges of teaching and learning the history of colonisation in New Zealand, particularly as it relates to the power dynamics of a settler society. It plays close attention to the pedagogical complexities of place and emotion and is situated within a broad framework of critical theory which seeks to explicitly acknowledge the significance of Indigenous systems of knowledge. Using a mixed method approach, this study presents findings drawn from a survey of teachers (n=298) and students (n=1889) and a multiple-site case study using qualitative approaches at four schools. In addition to classrooom based research, the study also investigated students’ experiences during field trips to places of colonial violence. Data gathering methods included interviews, semi-structured focus groups, classroom and field trip observations and a student-led photography task. Analysis of the data showed that history and social studies teachers overwhelmingly expressed critical views about the nature of colonisation and recognised that, for example, colonisation reverberates in the present and that its consequences were destructive, primarily for Māori. Teachers also comprehensively endorsed inquiry-led and discussion-based pedagogical approaches that were attentive to the conventions of the discipline of history. Some dominant conceptions, however, revealed barriers that prevented teachers’ collective ability to engage more deeply with this history, especially Māori perspectives. Students also expressed critical views about colonisation, but many still understood this process as a discrete ‘event’ found only in the past, reducing their ability to consider the implications of the past for today. Furthermore, while the majority of students were receptive to learning the history of colonisation, a significant proportion were not. The ethnographic component of the study revealed a number of complexities that hindered deeper engagement with the past. This included dealing with discomfort and resistance to histories of colonisation and the challenges teachers faced in forming relationships with iwi and hapū. The ethnographic component also showed that school field trips to sites of colonial violence held potential to operate as place-based ‘counter narratives’ that could transform students’ prior conceptions and deepen their engagement with difficult histories of place. The study concludes that two key ‘patterns of engagement’ shaped teachers’ and students’ encounters with New Zealand’s history of colonisation. In the first, many teachers struggled to engage pedagogically with Māori perspectives and approaches to the past, which made the curriculum goal of acknowledging and validating Indigenous systems of knowledge less likely. In the second, students’ emotional discomfort functioned as a complex and ever-present dynamic that potentially deepened but at times reduced their engagement with difficult histories of colonisation. Collectively these findings have implications for classroom practice and policy reform that take on a renewed urgency with New Zealand’s move toward compulsory teaching of New Zealand history.</p>

Teaching and learning New Zealand's difficult history of colonisation in secondary school contexts

<p>In recent years, awareness of New Zealand’s history of colonial injustice has grown in national consciousness. This awareness has led to much questioning of history education, particularly New Zealand’s high autonomy curriculum and its capacity to ensure that all young people encounter these ‘difficult’ aspects of the past. Yet little is known about the experiences of secondary school teachers and students during lessons on New Zealand’s history of colonisation. This study aimed to explore how teachers and students engaged with the history of colonisation, including how a sample of effective teachers and their students confronted the challenges and complexities of these pedagogical encounters. The importance of understanding this became even more significant when in 2019, the government surprised many by announcing that New Zealand history will become a compulsory feature of the curriculum at all levels of school from 2022. This thesis contributes to the new challenge of implementing compulsory curriculum content by developing a deeper understanding of the complexities currently experienced by teachers and students during lessons on colonisation. History education that focuses on historical forms of violence and its representation in curriculum is commonly referred to as the study of ‘difficult history’ (Epstein & Peck, 2018). In New Zealand, the early European colonists acquired land from the Indigenous Māori people resulting in inter-generational forms of suffering, trauma and oppression. In such a ‘settler society’ the history of one’s own nation and its instances of colonial injustice present challenges because the descendants of the early colonists remain, owning the majority of land and controlling to a large extent political systems and institutions, including schools. This thesis extends the research on difficult history by focusing on the challenges of teaching and learning the history of colonisation in New Zealand, particularly as it relates to the power dynamics of a settler society. It plays close attention to the pedagogical complexities of place and emotion and is situated within a broad framework of critical theory which seeks to explicitly acknowledge the significance of Indigenous systems of knowledge. Using a mixed method approach, this study presents findings drawn from a survey of teachers (n=298) and students (n=1889) and a multiple-site case study using qualitative approaches at four schools. In addition to classrooom based research, the study also investigated students’ experiences during field trips to places of colonial violence. Data gathering methods included interviews, semi-structured focus groups, classroom and field trip observations and a student-led photography task. Analysis of the data showed that history and social studies teachers overwhelmingly expressed critical views about the nature of colonisation and recognised that, for example, colonisation reverberates in the present and that its consequences were destructive, primarily for Māori. Teachers also comprehensively endorsed inquiry-led and discussion-based pedagogical approaches that were attentive to the conventions of the discipline of history. Some dominant conceptions, however, revealed barriers that prevented teachers’ collective ability to engage more deeply with this history, especially Māori perspectives. Students also expressed critical views about colonisation, but many still understood this process as a discrete ‘event’ found only in the past, reducing their ability to consider the implications of the past for today. Furthermore, while the majority of students were receptive to learning the history of colonisation, a significant proportion were not. The ethnographic component of the study revealed a number of complexities that hindered deeper engagement with the past. This included dealing with discomfort and resistance to histories of colonisation and the challenges teachers faced in forming relationships with iwi and hapū. The ethnographic component also showed that school field trips to sites of colonial violence held potential to operate as place-based ‘counter narratives’ that could transform students’ prior conceptions and deepen their engagement with difficult histories of place. The study concludes that two key ‘patterns of engagement’ shaped teachers’ and students’ encounters with New Zealand’s history of colonisation. In the first, many teachers struggled to engage pedagogically with Māori perspectives and approaches to the past, which made the curriculum goal of acknowledging and validating Indigenous systems of knowledge less likely. In the second, students’ emotional discomfort functioned as a complex and ever-present dynamic that potentially deepened but at times reduced their engagement with difficult histories of colonisation. Collectively these findings have implications for classroom practice and policy reform that take on a renewed urgency with New Zealand’s move toward compulsory teaching of New Zealand history.</p>

Reading Our ‘Destiny in the World We Have Made’: Inscriptions and Incantations of Race in the Wake of the Christchurch Massacres

In the wake of colonial violence, how do we come to terms with its event while refusing the power exercised by these very terms? If race is an organising grammar upon which we must draw in articulating the very realities to which it consigns us, then what recourse does it leave us in disarticulating and remaking these realities? This article is a meditation on these questions in the context of the massacres at two Christchurch mosques, and the raced discourses which they occasioned. In exploring these discourses as raced, the emphasis here is on their temporal qualities: on race as the coding of the time and the place (or non-place) in history where its subjects belong. Against the legibility and transparency with which race interpellates its subjects, is there a magic in the opacity and poetics of speech through which we can rewrite our ‘destinies’ and reinvent ourselves?

Bitcoin and Stone Money: Anglophone Use of Yapese Economic Cultures 1910-2020

Recently parallels have been drawn between Bitcoin and Yapese stone money. The analogy between Bitcoin and Yapese stone money is based on proposed commonalities that are inaccurate, ill-defined, and/or trivial. However, this does not signal a need to refine the comparison, but rather a need to reconsider the rationale for attempting it in the first place. Recent attempts to redescribe Yapese stone money using the vocabulary and concepts from the field of cryptocurrency participate in a longer textual history, whereby Anglophone writers have misrepresented Yap for pedagogic or polemic convenience. This history features frequent colonialist troping of Yap and the erasure of histories of colonial violence and power. This paper uses desk research to provide an overview of this textual history. It celebrates broad scholarly exploration of more-than-capitalist practices, but recommends greater caution in the study and pedagogic representation of Yapese economies.

Dis/connection: Violence, Religion, and Geographic Imaginings in Aceh and Colonial Indonesia, 1890s–1920s

This article draws attention to the case of Aceh to analyse the mechanisms through which ideologically driven geographic imaginings obscured the role of place and class in colonial and anti-colonial violence in Indonesia. Its main perspective is the region's West Coast. In the course of the long and brutal Dutch-Acehnese war (1873–1942), the West Coast of Sumatra was transformed from a dynamic centre of trade, commerce, and religious renewal into a colonial frontier. Violent resistance persisted in this area as the Dutch involved themselves in and exacerbated local contestations for authority and resources. Colonial discourse worked to conceal these complexities, foregrounding an image of the West Coast as a remote, backwards, and inherently dangerous place, prone to a violent Muslim millenarianism.