Identity, Knowledge, and Curriculum: A Sociological Study of Ethnicity in New Zealand Education

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to examine and explain the way in which New Zealand education policy requires that student identity is acknowledged and affirmed. The research focusses on two areas. The first focus is within the area of policy specifically the New Zealand national curriculum, which sets out directives, principles, values, and goals for all students and also school level policy, which targets the educational achievement of two selected ethnic minority groups – Ka Hikitia for Maori students and The Pasifika Education Plan for students with Pacific Island heritages. The study establishes a difference between the type of identity encoded at the policy level and that which is decoded at the level of practice. Bernstein’s (2000) concept of recontexualisation is used to theorise this difference as it occurs in the space created when the discourse of identity is moved from its site of origin in national policy to school policy and then to the pedagogical site of school practice. An analysis of teachers’ discourse of how they enact the curriculum ‘identity directive’ indicates that their practice is largely based on a culturalist ideology. In contrast, an analysis of policy shows a coupling of neoliberal and culturalist ideologies in order to accommodate the educational goals of achievement and identity affirmation. I argue that this accommodation has implications for the type of knowledge taught at school. That is, the knowledge students have access to is largely determined by how they are ethnically identified. In other words, what they learn is determined by who they are perceived to be. A more abstracted level of theorisation is possible by locating the study within the sociology of education. At this level, the study is about the relationship between the individual and the social group. The ideologies of neoliberalism and culturalism have influenced the type of relationship promoted at school. The former seeks to distance the individual from the social group, the latter to attach the individual to the social group. However, these ideologies are not the only ontological directions available to education today. I conclude with a call for a return to a liberal humanist education; one that requires both the individualising and socialising functions of modern education described by Durkheim (1971).