Talanoa moe vā: Pacific knowledge-sharing and changing sociocultural spaces during COVID-19

This paper is a consideration of how the method/methodology of talanoa and vā, can be used online by Pacific researchers to respond to the current pandemic’s effect on the traditional face-to-face physical spaces used for knowledge-sharing. The following discussion examines and explores the two concepts: talanoa and vā. It is important to understand how these research approaches work in a multi-sited research context, particularly when travel regulations and social distancing rules require Pacific researchers and their informants to keep physically apart. Virtual sociocultural spaces have become increasingly important to Pacific knowledge-sharing. As a Pacific researcher, I share my thoughts on talanoa and vā and how these concepts have been transferred online in previous research (2015–2019) and more recently, during COVID-19.

Grounding Spirit

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Practising Pacific pedagogies during New Zealand's level four lockdown: Pacific early career academics and COVID-19

During New Zealand’s unprecedented level-four lockdown, opportunities to practise Pacific pedagogies in New Zealand universities required creative and innovative solutions from Pacific academics. This paper brings together the experiences of teaching during this lockdown from a cross-section of Pacific Early Career Academics (PECA) across a wide range of disciplines and schools at New Zealand’s largest university. This paper argues that despite the challenges, PECA found ways to adapt Pacific pedagogical concepts through online delivery methods; however, their ability to effectively do this was severely influenced by existing socio-economic inequities that disproportionately impacted Pacific students. PECA continued to nurture the vā/wā with students in innovative ways, but they still encountered major challenges that will require more careful consideration of equity issues by New Zealand universities moving forward.

The virtual faikava: Maintaining vā and creating online learning spaces during COVID-19

Covid-19 has had a major impact on collectivist cultures and their means of social interaction and maintaining contact with those in their wider community. This has particularly been the case for Pacific peoples living in diaspora, with Covid-19 preventing travel home and social distancing and forced lockdowns restricting the ability to gather. This has also impacted vā, the Pacific concept of ‘relational space’ critical to connectivity and maintaining relationships. This paper explains the creation of virtual faikava; online meeting environments in which Pacific kava users meet, maintain vā, connect with those at home and in the wider diasporic community and learn, while consuming their traditional beverage kava.

COVID-19 and online learning experiences of Solomon Islands students at the University of the South Pacific

This study aims to investigate the experiences of Solomon Islands students during the shift to online, remote teaching during the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic. It utilises the tokstori to collect data from 16 Solomon Islands students of the University of the South Pacific’s (USP) Suva and Honiara campuses. It is framed and analysed data using Khan’s eight dimensions of gauging successful e-learning experiences. Prior to COVID-19, many of the courses at the USP were offered in blended mode, which encompasses both online and face-to-face delivery. However, with a sudden move to fully online offerings, and the associated fears resulting from the unknowns of COVID-19, this was disruptive and traumatic for many students. However, analysis identified several key factors aiding student success including many Solomon Islands students being able to eventually cope with the disruption and displayed independence and resilience. It is also found that Solomon Island students got to experience new applications and tools such as, for example, having to be in Zoom or having to sit an online exam. This study has potential to inform higher education institutes (HEIs) in the Pacific Islands and beyond, and the need to carefully navigate the practical realities of the islands in the interaction between digital technologies, instructors and students to facilitate online learning post-pandemic.

Fakalukuluku: Conceptualising a Tongan learning approach in tertiary education

Given the current impact of COVID-19, the learning experiences of Pasifika students within tertiary education has implicated their social and emotional wellbeing. Engaging in a Tongan learning approach, such as fakalukuluku, can present a viable learning practice for tertiary students’ learning experiences. This paper presents the perspectives of four Tongan-born and raised researchers and educators who completed their tertiary education in Aotearoa New Zealand. Based on our experiences and reflections, we propose the Tongan concept of fakalukuluku as an approach to help elevate students’ academic achievement in tertiary education. Our paper conceptualises and unfolds perspectives of fakalukuluku, as a cultural practice that is appropriate, collaborative, and accorded learning stability because of its spiritual dimensions as being paramount to students’ success. We propose that a strong family and community support, the utilising of university learning support and the students’ spiritual beliefs can help Tongan students in tertiary education succeed.

Weaving CLES-FS and talanoa to capture Fijian student's science learnings: Exploring possibilities

This study seeks to explain how a modified Constructivist Learning Environment Survey (CLES) was implemented together with talanoa to explore Fijian students' perceptions of a constructivist learning environment in the science classroom in New Zealand secondary schools. The modified CLES, called CLES-FS, was developed explicitly for Fijian students in the New Zealand secondary schooling context. The adapted CLES-FS instrument included five components of constructivist learning: relationship and identity, familiar context, talanoa, critical voice and shared control. The inclusion of talanoa within the CLES-survey tool has not been done before to collect data from iTaukei (Indigenous) and Fijian-Indian students. The implication of using talanoa alongside CLES-FS has provided the unfolding of possibilities when weaving together qualitative as well as quantitative data. As an emerging Pacific researcher, the exploration exercise is essential learning that helps make sense of what it means to engage in research, particularly within the post-Covid context.

Re-imagining the dialogic spaces of talanoa through Samoan onto-epistemology

This article proposes a Samoan indigenous philosophical position to reconceptualise the dialogic spaces of talanoa; particularly how talanoa is applied methodologically to research practice. Talanoa within New Zealand Pacific research scholarship is problematised, raising particular tensions of the universal and humanistic ideologies that are entrenched within institutional ethics and research protocols. The dialogic relational space which is embedded throughout talanoa methodology is called into question, evoking alternative ways of knowing and being within the talanoa research assemblage[1] (including the material-world). Samoan epistemology reveals that nature is constituted within personhood (Vaai & Nabobo-Baba, 2017) and that nature is co-agentic with human in an ecology of knowing. We call for a shift in thinking material-ethics that opens talanoa to a materialist process ontology, where knowledge generation emerges through human and non-human encounters. [1] The concept of assemblage developed by Deleuze and Guattari (1987) refers to a process of temporary arrangements or constellations of objects, expressions, bodies, qualities and territories that create new ways of functioning. The assemblage is a multiplicity shaped by a wide range of flows and emerges from the arranging process of heterogenous elements (Livesey, 2010).