He aha kei tua atu o te kohu kawata? What lies beyond the silvery mist? Epistemic agency at the intersection of mātauranga Māori and biological science knowledge worlds

Abstract

Within most urban mainstream secondary school biology classes across Aotearoa New Zealand are students who come from a range of ethnic, cultural, linguistic and socioeconomic backgrounds. They bring with them into the biology classroom knowledge from their life worlds. While for some, these knowledge resources are front and centre, for others their cultural knowledge remains hidden at the margins, in the shadows. In the face of dominant Western science discourse and practices, students often respond by keeping their cultural knowledge out of sight. The purpose of this research project was to investigate the ways in which senior biology students used mātauranga Māori and/or Pacific cultural knowledge alongside biological science knowledge to justify their position on the socio-scientific issue of the use of 1080 poison to control mammalian pests in Aotearoa New Zealand – an issue of scientific and cultural importance. This research explores the potential for mātauranga Māori knowledge to be included into a mainstream, English-medium secondary school biological science course. This research used a social constructivist ontology and qualitative-interpretivist mode of inquiry that utilised documentary analysis and semi-structured individual interviews with participants who were students in their final year high school biology course in two urban Auckland secondary schools. Three conceptual frameworks were developed for the thematic analysis of participants’ written and verbal data: 1) Biological science knowledge, 2) Mātauranga Māori knowledge, and 3) Epistemic learner agency. The findings from this research have identified how the participants used scientific and cultural knowledge when justifying their position on the 1080 issue. The application of the first two conceptual frameworks established the existence of three distinctive cultural interfaces: 1) Conflicted, 2) Parallel, and 3) Connected. Furthermore, for those students who occupied the cultural interface (Nakata, 2002), data analysis using the conceptual framework of epistemic learner agency enabled the construction of detailed representations of the theoretical space of the locale of the learner (Nakata, 2007). The findings have highlighted the significance of epistemic learner agency in enabling culturally and linguistically diverse learners to bring forth their knowledge-worlds into the biological science knowledge domain.