Cultural leadership: The reciprocities of right relationship at Kia Aroha College

Abstract

The central aim of my research is to explore Māori and Pasifika students’ cultural leadership in the context of Kia Aroha College, a designated character state-school in New Zealand that pursues a culturally-centred and critical pedagogy. The inquiry focuses on the students’ understandings of their school-based, cultural leadership and how this is enacted. My qualitative, emergent research design has an instrumental case study methodology, with Kia Aroha College selected as an exemplar of a culturally responsive school. The culturally responsive inquiry framework I employ helps to explain my choice of methodology, methods and strategies. The kanohi ki te kanohi (face-to-face) focus group interviews, and the guided walks, are of especial significance as culturally appropriate and safe research spaces. I view the case of Kia Aroha College as an integrated system, but one that is linked to wider social structures. Accordingly, I employ Archer’s (1995) morphogenetic/morphostatic methodology. The students’ cultural leadership is named whānau leadership. The seven structural properties of whānau (family) leadership I identify broadly conform to the informal, flexible, relatively non-hierarchical, and shared leadership in the relevant literature. The case study students problematize their authority. I emphasize the cultural specificity of whānau leadership for the Māori and Tongan students respectively. Reciprocal causation between the social structures of the school and beyond, on the one hand, and the students as agents on the other, helps account for how and why student leadership is enacted as whānau leadership. The students’ positive experience of a figurative whānau bond fosters whānau leadership. Student leaders reproduce the structure of whānau leadership via their social practices because whānau leadership is experienced as empowerment. My research findings support those researchers who argue that youth prefer informal, nonhierarchical, spontaneous, and collaborative leadership. Māori and Pasifika youth perspectives on student leadership are aired and examined; a rare moment in the literature. The influence of school context on students is investigated, opening up the student leadership research field. The study explores the problematical nature of student authority, power, and hierarchy for the students—an under-elaborated issue in much of the scant literature on secondary-school student leadership.