Abstract:
The authors’ research interests revolve around our scholarship in the field of Indigenous and Migrant Education (IME) and, in particular, how this work contributes to an education for all colonised peoples around the world. Educational perspectives inform our work with an emphasis on principles and innovations embedded in Pedagogy, the Politics of knowledge, Cultural Diversity, Collectivity, and ‘Tonganess’. In the chapter, the writers discuss critically notions of individualism underpinning technocratic approaches to education that marginalise indigenous peoples’ ways of knowing in tertiary education. The authors ask if education, as education is being communicated in Aotearoa, New Zealand leaves indigenous Māori and indigenous migrant Tongan people vulnerable and marginalized in the prevailing New Zealand European/Pākehā society (Smith, 1999; Kēpa 2008). We ask ourselves if education refers to capacity building and strengthening the potential of marginalised students’ language and culture; or, only sustaining English language ascendancy and technical virtuosity. Situated within the School of Education/Te Kura Mātauranga, Auckland University of Technology (AUT University) in the city of Auckland, we will convey how the prevailing pedagogy grounded on assumptions of individual success and competition marginalise peoples’ languages and cultures that are grounded on principles and innovations of collectivity and interrelatedness or connectivity. Specifically, the focus of the chapter is the marginalisation of Tongan people’s language and culture in the National Diploma in Teaching (Early Childhood Education, Pasifika). For the most part, the teachers of the National Diploma seem to draw on the prevailing pedagogical approaches to enhance aspects of English language and technical virtuosity and in so doing, consciously or unconsciously, marginalize the language and culture of the Tongan city dwelling, low income students. For the most part the students are migrants, mature, and women. The Tongan students, we argue are vulnerable when their language and culture are devalued, damaged and destroyed (Doer, 2009; Kēpa, 2008a; Kēpa & Manu’atu, 2008a, Kēpa & Manu’atu, 2008b, Mila, 2005; Tuafuti, & McCaffery, 2005: Manu’atu, 2000; Beaglehole 1941). Therefore, the chapter will endeavour to understand how the nitty–gritty details of Tongan language and culture might be conceptualized, taught and learned in a divergent tertiary context thereby contributing to ideas on how marginalized and vulnerable groups of people interrelate our teaching and learning with the dominant language and approaches to teaching practice. In doing so, a Tongan ‘voice’ would add value to communication for development in Early Childhood Education in the University. The bulk of the discussion is grounded on one of the writer’s experience as the Tongan Senior Lecturer of the National Diploma and as a member of the Pasifika Educators Network (PEN): as well as, the other author’s experience as the Chair and the Tangata Whenua/indigenous Māori representative on the Pasifika Consultative Group (PCG). Both of the authors engage in active critical reflection of the assumptions and practices that marginalize the teaching of other languages and cultures in the Diploma. The chapter is organized as follows: Section 1 is devoted to setting the scene and the Treaty of Waitangi; the founding document of New Zealand in order to convey the relationship between the Tangata Whenua and the Crown (representing all other peoples living in New Zealand) (Doerr, 2009:25-26). The next section will present a partial but crucial theoretical background by which to understand collectivity and connectivity (See also Doerr, 2009:182) called in Tongan language, Fonua. Section 3 is devoted to discussing ways in which critical pedagogy in the Diploma might resonate both individualilty and collectivity. The final section returns to question the more general realm of pedagogic and research practices being impacted by the assumptions, in the University.