Abstract:
This is a small-scale study that investigates strategies to engage Pasifika students in ways that will generate equitable academic outcomes. This is premised in the notion that it is the obligation of secondary schools to create academic outcomes for Pasifika learners that are on a par with the academic outcomes schools create for Pakeha/European students. The absolute imperative that this inequality of outcomes changes and changes quickly, is what informed this study, the scope of which involved interviewing seven participants from several secondary educational contexts, and compiling a range of strategies currently being implemented to better engage Pasifika students. Patterns emerged from their perspectives and experiences that permitted several broad approaches for engaging Pasifika students in secondary schools to be explored and debated. The seven participants of this study, while from a range of roles, all work in or with, Auckland secondary schools with high Pasifika populations that are committed to innovating change for Pasifika students. Informed by critical theory, a qualitative investigative approach is employed, with evidence collected through semi-structured interviews in which each participant shared their challenges and learning from new ideologies, strategies and structures implemented to improve the engagement, and academic outcomes, of Pasifika students. The varied participant positions of principal/director, teacher and social worker/counsellor, along with a participant from a government agency, allowed for a wide range of experiences and perceptions to be shared, and from a variety of perspectives. This study suggests that creating sustainable change necessitates the adoption by teachers and schools, of a new pedagogical paradigm; a culturally responsive paradigm. Such a culturally responsive paradigm is based in the re-thinking by teachers and schools of the assumptions currently held about Pasifika learners, and the ‘one-size-fits-all” approach to teaching presently practised. Overlaying shifts in teacher positioning is an array of strategies for improved learning and teaching of Pasifika learners to be implemented in the classroom, across the school and with the wider Pasifika community. It is the inter-connectedness of these strategies that creates the paradigm, by providing the depth and sustainability of pedagogical practice required to facilitate more than superficial change in schools. Such interconnected culturally responsive strategies are based in collaborative relationships between teachers, Pasifika students, Pasifika parents, and Pasifika community groups. Decisions by schools to create equitable change, or to maintain the status quo, are decisions of power, and therefore addressing present Pasifika educational inequalities rests with teachers and schools. The new Registered Teachers Criteria now require that schools make those decisions. The extent to which schools are respectful and responsive to what Pasifika students bring to their schooling, defines that school’s capacity to respond in the culturally appropriate ways that the new Registered Teachers Criteria require of all teachers.