Marautanga learning community conversations

Ko Hikurangi te maunga
Ko Waiapu te awa
Ko Ngāti Porou te iwi

Mā te reo Māori ka eke ai mātau ki te tiketiketanga o te matauranga
Ngāti Porou Māori medium kura on the East Coast of the North Island work collaboratively to develop their marau ā-kura

Ngāa Wawata mo te Reo

Kim Coleman: The new documents are really refreshing and it is quite refreshing to know that we are the only place in the world that have our document, Te Marautanga o Aotearoa for the reo and then you’ve got the NZC for the mainstream component which is wonderful.

Kim: We felt that there needed to be a total immersion cluster for the mere fact that our document is not a direct translation, that our document is a stand alone document in te reo that we could develop for us.

Lisa Ohlsen Brown: Having a look at the Marau and working with the Marau has been pretty enlightening for me. The pedagogy and the philosophy in the Marau, I can see how, as Yolanda said, it is more student focused and through, even though there are the same curriculum areas, the Pūtaio and Hangarau, there’s always, in the Marau there always seem to be that underlying teaching of values and koira te painga ki au

Kim: I think that the purpose of our cluster is for like minds sharing. Because a lot of us have come from sole charge schools or very small schools and going through the document and sorting our Marau-ā-Kura by ourselves is a huge task. When we come here, we work together and then we go back into our schools and work on it on our own as well. So it is a supportive collegial atmosphere to help us work through the task at hand.

Kui Whatuira: I think it just helps us not having to work in isolation to get all those big ideas that we all do have and collectively all our big ideas come together and we find the common theme amongst ourselves.

Kim: If we didn’t have the support from the group and Aunty Karin in looking at the font of the Te Marautanga o Aotearoa, as you say, the graduate profile and all the front pieces that helped us to support us in our understanding to start our Marautanga-ā-kura at our own schools. And just when you first asked the question, I straight away thought of an incident where I thought, ‘Oh gosh we’re doing Hauora this week when we come to the meeting with Aunty Karin, we don’t do that much Hauora’ and then when we went through the document I went back to my school really happy because everything that we do at our school is actually what Hauora is, you know following Te Aho Matua, all that values stuff that is in Te Aho Matua, that’s right on the button for the Hauora. And I felt really refreshed and happy to know that we are actually meeting all the requirements set out in that document. And on another occasion, maybe for the Pāngarau and Pūtaiao, We came to the meeting and I thought ‘Oh yeah, I’m doing all right in the Pūtaiao’ and when we looked at it deeper I found, oh, we need to set our bar higher, we need to be challenging our level three four kids to attain the language required to follow on to be an archaeologist or a biologist for our children so they have the understanding and language base to go onto those careers in the future. So each meeting we go back to school, it’s like, it’s reflection too as well. And looking at our kura and saying ‘hmm okay, we’re here for this and we need to be here, Okay, we’re here, cool , we’re there’. And a lot of reflection takes place on the progress of how our kura are going.

Marion Wharehinga: For each curriculum area there is language, for science, language for social studies, maths language, it is hard work.

Lisa: So it is teaching the language as well as the concepts. Pretty much every time you look through a different section or a different page of the Marau there are kupu that are tauhou to you so you have to go and see what it is. So personally I’m up-skilling myself all the time and so hopefully that is transferred onto the tamariki I am teaching as well. And I think it is really good working in such a supportive environment as well.

Te Paea Patterson: It’s hard knowing that you are Ngāti Porou and you are learning other words. We have resources, a specific resource that has come out and it is only to do with Ngāti Porou reo and when it comes to teaching te reo you have to always try and revert to Ngāti Porou first and then the rest. And so, to me, because there are some words in Ngāti Porou that have been brought in from other places, just like whaea and kōkā, just those words, I’m not talking about these big ones in here because I don’t know if they ever existed before these came out. The reo in here is quite high ‘faluting’. It is good that we have new words because that is how our language develops, however it is also good to keep Ngāti Porou words first, and then pick.

Kim: And so those are the added difficulties that we, over and above learning a new document, those are the added things that surround having new documents.