A story of entanglement: The 1987 Curriculum Review report and the Treaty of Waitangi

Abstract

In the mid-1980s, under the Fourth Labour Government, a committee of selected educators and officers from the Department of Education conducted a two-year long ministerial inquiry known as the Curriculum Review. To inform future policy on curriculum, the Curriculum Review Committee formulated a set of national guiding principles for a common curriculum in the compulsory years of schooling, a task not attempted before in Aotearoa-New Zealand. In its final report (Department of Education, 1987a), the Committee accorded the Treaty a central position in one of its recommended curriculum principles. Based on archival material, relevant literature and the narratives of former teachers and public servants, my research considers how the Treaty almost 150 years after its inception become entangled with the Curriculum Review report, the first official education policy-related text to include the Treaty. How did the Treaty gain traction in the thinking of Curriculum Review Committee members when at the time the Treaty was outside public discourse on education, an unknown quantity, a rumble in the background? My thesis explores the conditions of possibility that fostered a climate of hospitality towards the Treaty in the work of the Curriculum Review Committee.It anchors an understanding of this early Treaty-receptivity in the affective, political and ethical content of face-to-face Māori-Pākehā encounters during the 1970s and 1980s. When the Treaty 'arrived' in the discussions of the Curriculum Review Committee, it mapped onto prior relationships and practice, onto struggles to create a fairer education system and better learning environments for students that acknowledged Māori language, culture and histories. The Treaty was understood by the research participants as legitimising pre-existing aspirations that included a bicultural imperative and sense of Pākehā responsibility towards Māori. It was not so much the content of the Treaty itself (although this was part of the story), but who and what in the research participants' professional concerns and personal experience the Treaty connected to. Published in April 1987, the final report of the Curriculum Review Committee made the Treaty available for future policymakers working on national curriculum guidelines, albeit as a lively and productively uneasy presence capable of provoking conversations about the value of difference and supporting innovative school practices attuned to local contexts.