Over the holiday break I had the wonderful experience of being able to revisit my past, when my family decided to celebrate my birthday by spending a weekend together in the place where I grew up.

All of my primary schooling was in the one-roomed Pataua School, where the greatest total roll number ever was 16.  All my secondary years were spent riding in my father's bus from Pataua North to Whangarei Girls' High School every day.  It has been 47 years since we left the community, and I hadn't been back in all that time.

I obviously expected change, and it was there, in the numbers and quality of homes and beach houses and the tar-sealed road all the way from Whangarei!  The school is long gone, replaced by an outdoor education centre, in its prime location right on the banks of the Pataua Estuary.

What I didn't expect was how much had remained the same. The footbridge my parents, and a community committee, fought so hard to establish still spans the river, joining Pataua North to Pataua South.  Before the bridge we came to school by boat, until we moved to live in our bus garage on Pataua North.  Others came on horseback or walked.  Some families crossed two rivers to get to school.  The beauty of the location, right on the coast, the mountain - the original Pa site, the names of original families preserved in road names.  Our old home is gone, but its location now has a street name and number. That's progress!

Pataua Mountain

My long-suffering whanau were treated to all these stories, and I came home reflecting on what it was about that upbringing and education, that shaped the way I have thought about learning ever since?

The only Pakeha families, other than ourselves, the teacher, and one shop owner, were farmers, well spread out along the road from Pataua to Whareora.  The strength of the community was the  long-established Maori whanau.  The seeds of my interest in Maori education were planted in the Pataua School Kapa Haka group (all 16 of us), in the number of Maori hui, celebrations, tangi, and events we were always part of, and my daily interaction in a school where Pakeha were the minority.

With hindsight, I'm sure it mattered that the sole teacher was always a white male, and that the farming community was the only source of any economic wealth.  However, even with my rose-coloured glasses off, my memories are of a community that came together in the school, of a respect for Maori culture and tikanga, of the school as the hub of all community activities - calf days, gala days, church services, kapa haka, sports events, community meetings, fundraising, weaving classes, making piupiu, carving - that all happened in the school grounds.  We even had a tennis club, on the school tennis court - which is still there!  There was one shop selling basic needs, no transport other than the bus once a day, few families had cars, or telephones, and people had to get together, face to face, in order to communicate.  The isolation of the community was both its curse (or so we thought when we were young!) and its strength.

I'm not suggesting we should go back in time, although many small, rural, schools now still have that same rich community experience, however there are lessons to be learned in our modern, large, urban, schools and frenetic daily lives, about the way we interact and engage families in their children's learning. There are lessons about the importance of the cultures that underpin every community.  There are lessons about cultural content and learning from each other.  There are lessons from the kaumatua and kuia who were constantly present in the community.  All those lessons were the ones that stuck with me when I started teaching, were strengthened when my own children went to school, and have followed me into school leadership and research.

Thanks Pataua!  I can't wait to go back for another visit!

The ocean beach

Pataua School site on left, river on right

Congratulations to the Auckland Primary Principals' Association on their recommendation that its members cease to attend any training around the implementation of the National Standards.  APPA believes that the government's National Standards policy is irreconcilably flawed, confused and unworkable.  The standards are not in fact standards and therefore cannot be moderated to provide valid, reliable and consistent achievement data.

On 2 July, 500 principals at the New Zealand Principals' Federation conference in Queenstown  added their voices, sending  a clear message to the Minister via three remits declaring they believe the National Standards will not deliver intended outcomes, they want a complete and urgent review of the system and they support regions looking to boycott National Standards training. The APPA decision adds to the stand taken against implementing the Standards  by schools in Tai Tokerau (Northland) and Invercargill. Since the APPA announcement, the Southland and Canterbury Principals' Associations have joined Auckland's decision.

On 6 July, a hui of more than 200 Maori educators in Rotorua, attending the annual hui of Te Reo Areare - the Maori Council of the education sector union NZEI Te Riu Roa, issued a strong vote of no confidence in National Standards, saying they will damage the learning of tamariki Maori.

Our Board's stance is clear.  The Board of Trustees and staff of both schools:

• supported the NZEI call for a trial before the implementation of National Standards proceeds
• were signatories to the NZEI School Communities appeal to the Prime Minister
• were signatories to the official NZEI petition to Parliament campaigning for a trial
• hosted the NZEI Bus Tour for the Otara community - other schools, our BOT and staff, and community members attended
• are against the implementation of National Standards because they:
  • do not represent a Maori or Pasifika world view and therefore disadvantage our Maori and Pasifika students
  • come from a dominant Pakeha ideology and hegemony, which will perpetuate the marginalisation and 'ghettoising' of our Maori and Pasifika students and further negate their cultural competencies and identities
  • are contrary to the goals and design of the National Curriculum, which our two schools support due to its alignment with our practice and developed learning model, and for its flexibility to be specific to our community.
  • will distort a balanced curriculum approach by requiring schools to focus on the Standards to the exclusion of other learning. This distortion will be particularly evident in low-decile, Maori and Pasifika schools such as ours
  • are untested
  • will not solve the issues of underachievement
  • will undermine students' identities as learners and label some children as failures from a very early age
  • have been driven by distorted data gathered and interpreted with flawed methodology
  • have been implemented without consultation with educators or communities
  • will result in league tables which will again disadvantage schools in low-decile, Maori and Pasifika communities nationally
  • have failed when implemented in other countries

The current BOT position is to delay any implemention of, or teacher professional development in, National Standards until these issues and our serious concerns about the effect of National Standards on our students is addressed through; thorough consultation with community and professional educators; professional development of teachers; adequate resourcing for students identified; the standards are responsive to Maori and Pasifika worldviews; and a process is determined that prevents the development of league tables using the data.

Te Whanau o Tupuranga and Clover Park Middle School will continue to discuss the issues with parents and:

• benchmark students' learning outcomes and progress against national norms through the use of resources already readily available in schools
  
• use these resources to supplement and provide comparisons with school-based assessment resources:
• report this achievement to parents in plain language which gives parents reliable information about their child's progress against national benchmarks

The Education Review Office came to Clover Park Middle School in June - and left, for once, a positive "afterglow" in their wake. This time, we felt, ERO actually "got" us.  Individual ERO reviewers in the past have been positive about the way we do things, but possibly the new 2010 review format lends itself better to schools designing and describing their own approach to learning, and being acknowledged for that work.  The review team this time suggested this was so, and our experience confirmed that.  After all, the New Zealand Curriculum now requires us to do just what we have been doing for over 15 years on this campus - design the curriculum to suit the school's specific community.

We won't "count our chickens," until we have the written report, but the verbal feedback to our Board had some heart warming moments, all too rare when you choose to work outside the education box that reduces learning to a common denominator of literacy and numeracy outcomes defined by Eurocentric norms.  ERO highlighted the fact that our Board, school leaders, teachers, students, and parents, all spoke with one voice and the school was the "heartbeat of the community." ERO told us they found  "a unique framework, an in depth understanding of social and cultural capital and unlocking self-potential so children realise what they can do and who they are - it's culturally located and about social justice and that's unlocking the pathway to a just education." YES!!

Preparation for an ERO review is a huge amount of work - as the gap since my previous blog entry testifies!  All else goes out the window as schools prepare to show both their "business as usual" and the wealth of reflection, development, research, strengths and skills that underpin that day to day reality in the classroom.

Our fabulous Clover Park students were determined this work would not go unnoticed!  Welcoming the ERO reviewers into our Tongan bilingual unit, Mele stood to speak. "We want you to ask us questions," she said.  "Please do not leave Fonuamalu with any questions unanswered."

In the art room a reviewer stopped to chat to Dania about her work.  Dania explained what she was doing, and why, and the reviewer was about to move away.  Dania was having none of that. "Excuse me," she said.  "Do you know about our Lenses"? When the reviewer asked her to tell her more, she was treated to an in depth explanation of our learning model and philosophy!

From the combined schools' powhiri, to the Samoan bilingual unit's welcoming Ava ceremony, through the meetings with staff, families, and our young people, ERO heard and saw how much culture counts, and how important this is to our community and our children's learning and future.

Thanks everyone!

It takes time to allow all the learning from an event like the AERA Conference to sink in.  It's not just the sessions you attend.  As is the case in any conference some are great, some not so relevant.  The real learning often takes place outside the sessions, in the conversations within the networks of like-minded educators who force you to think, and rethink what is happening in our tiny part of the world.

In some areas, we can pat ourselves on the back and feel we are doing well.  In other areas, particularly in terms of  raising a critical, social justice, consciousness in our education system and among our policy and decision-makers, I think we still have a long way  to go.  Liberation is much more than literacy. I'm not sure we are even beginning to talk about that in our mainstream schools.  Other countries envy the autonomy our system gives to individual schools and boards - yet for the most part we replicate the status quo, and our improvements are mostly about getting better at doing the same things.  I wonder why this is so?

Real learning also takes place in the visits outside of the conference, in the school and university visits and observations I was privileged to have access to.  I wrote of our visit to East Oakland in my last blog post.  Last Thursday evening I was lucky to attend a lecture by Professor Russell Bishop and Dr Mere Berryman from our University of Waikato, to Chapman University in Orange County, California. It was great to be there to share the excitement when University surprised Russell by naming him the recipient of their Paulo Freire Democratic Project's Award of Social Justice for his work in the Te Kotahitanga project in NZ.  These connections and collaborations are what we need to do to take our thinking beyond our individual schools and our 'one-size-fits-all' mindset.

To that end we are delighted to have been able to arrange a third visit to NZ in September by Professor Jeff Duncan-Andrade, from San Francisco State University. This time he will be accompanied by Professor David Stovall from the University of Illinois at Chicago.

These two eminent social justice educators will work with our staff and students, speak at a Symposium on our campus on 3 September, and also travel to speak in Rotorua, and at Te Whare Wananga o Awanuiarangi in Whakatane.  Dr Duncan-Andrade will also be the keynote speaker at the Maori Principals' Te Akatea Conference in Auckland.

My grateful thanks to our far-sighted board for making this travel and continuing research possible.  My huge thanks to all those who met with us, joined in the conversations and challenged our thinking in the USA - Jeff, Wayne, Cam, Gabino, Dave, Suzi - the learning will be ongoing and our young people will benefit!

I'm in Denver, Colorado, at the American Education Research Association Conference. AERA is a national research society, which strives to advance knowledge about education, to encourage academic inquiry related to education, and to promote the use of research to improve education and serve the public good.

AERA has approximately 25,000 educational researcher members in the United States and abroad, including college and university professors, leaders in school systems, federal, state and local agencies, foundations and the private sector. There is always a strong NZ contingent at the annual AERA conference. The conference usually has an attendance of over 13,000 people, and 1,800 scholarly papers, posters, and roundtables are presented. It's hard work just deciding which sessions to attend, let alone finding the venue for each one!

Grade 9 class at Mandela High School

On my way to Denver I spent some time in San Francisco visiting a good friend of our schools, Professor Jeff Duncan-Andrade, from San Francisco State University (SFSU), and other East Oakland educators.  Yesterday morning I sat in Jeff's Grade 9 class at Mandela High School in East Oakland.  Six of his students, accompanied by under-graduate teaching assistants, will present with Jeff at AERA - a daunting task for 14 year olds!  I'm looking forward to seeing the result of their work here in Denver.  I was struck, yet again, by the similarities between the African-American and Latino youth in this community and our youth in Otara.  Their resilience and their strength of character, in spite of the challenges society presents them with, is always impressive.  So too is the level of support and advocacy they receive from adults committed to social justice in education and society.  Young people rise to the very high expectations we have of them, if they trust us and we work together and I saw more evidence of that in East Oakland yesterday, as I do every day in our two schools.  I still find it hard to get used to no school uniforms though!

In the afternoon I attended Jeff's Raza Studies lecture to under-graduate students at SFSU.  We need all students who might choose to become teachers in the future to be in the classes of  educators like Jeff,  to understand the history that has shaped our current schooling practice, so they can change it.

I am in Wellington, where last night I was lucky enough to be a guest at the NZILA Awards Dinner.

Every two years the NZ Institute of Landscape Architects' Professional Awards honour the best in landscape architecture from across the country.  The NZILA Resene Pride of Place Landscape Awards 2010 were announced at the NZILA conference dinner, on Friday 16 April 2010 at the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa. I was there at the invitation of Roy Blok, the Jasmax architect responsible for Te Whanau o Tupuranga's buildings and facilities, and Joseph Muir, the Jasmax landscape architect for Tupuranga.  We were joined by Graeme Birkhead, the Northern Director of Arrow International, who managed the Tupuranga construction project.  Graeme and I were there as the cheer squad we felt, waiting with great anticipation to see if the Tupuranga entry into the lansdscape design section was going to be successful.

It certainly was!  Huge congratulations to Joseph, and to Roy, and to Julian Huggins of Arrow who all worked so hard to make sure the landscape and Tupuranga's outdoor environment matched the facilities and captured the very Maori essence of Te Whanau o Tupuranga.  It also captured the judges!  Tupuranga won a Gold Award in the Landscape design section and then was chosen for one of the overall Awards of Excellence! While we all basked in the glory momentarily,  it was Joseph's night, and we were all very proud and honoured to see him accept these well-deserved awards.

Joseph and Jasmax have offered the Awards to be permanently displayed at school so we will hold an assembly to receive these and to celebrate this success early in the new term.