A view from the back, times between spaces : equality of educational opportunity and Pacific students at a university

Abstract

In the tertiary sector, the continued negative education experiences for Pacific students in New Zealand have led to sustained efforts by the State and institutions to implement intervention strategies aimed at supporting their participation, retention and achievement. This study examined State and institutional understandings of the notion of Equality of Educational Opportunity at a New Zealand university and the ways these understandings have informed the implementation of intervention strategies aimed at improving educational outcomes for Pacific students. It also examines Pacific students' experiences of the intervention strategies. This qualitative research study is presented as two sections. The first section draws on historical literature and policy documents to establish a context from which understandings of Equality of Educational Opportunity have been developed. The research identified that policy discourses have coalesced strongly in the understanding that, given the same opportunities, individuals could compete for society's rewards by virtue of their own merits. This reflected a very strong investment in the idea of educational meritocratic principles, and also legitimated a conscious or unconscious denial of non-merit factors in the distribution of those rewards. The thesis examines the impact of this relationship between educational equality and merit in defining attitudes and experiences that impact for the Pacific students. The second section of the thesis presents narratives of Pacific students who participated in Equality of Educational Opportunity programmes at the University of Auckland. The narratives profiled in this section have been developed from focus groups and one-to-one interviews, with some follow-up conversations, using a Pacific approach to dialogue called talanoa. The narratives are read through a new general time and space theory of reality, based on Pacific concepts and practices ta-va, translated into English as time and space. They show the complexities of cultural, economic, social and institutional factors and relationships that impact on the intellectual spaces that the students come to occupy.