There is concern in Aotearoa New Zealand that Pacific students, families, and communities are underserved by schooling. Of note is the inability of education to encourage and equitably enable Pacific students to follow a successful journey into science. To shed light on this situation, this article presents the stories of two young Pacific…

This strengths-based paper draws on the qualitative and quantitative survey results from whanau (family members) of "tamariki" (children) attending 12 schools in an urban area in New Zealand with a high proportion of Maori people. The paper describes the positive impact of effective family engagement on tamariki, from the perspectives of…

This paper provides an autoethnographic view of the influences that have changed my perceptions and helped me to make better sense of the world that I live in, and my place in it. It is a story of personal, ongoing critical reflection. A story of unlearning and conscientisation that changed how I came to understand myself, my teaching practice and…

Over the years, dances from African cultures have been viewed in the Western world as caricatures of exotic bodies and representations of experiences that are abundant in the natural order of things. Valentino Y. Mudimbe (1988) has defined this otherization and objectification as the invention of Africa. With the continuous mobility of people and…

Intercultural capability, or the ability to relate comfortably with people from diverse linguistic and cultural backgrounds, is increasingly recognised as a key twenty-first century competency. The importance of its development in the context of learning a language has long been acknowledged in the literature. However, practitioners worldwide…

In 1957, Ans Westra immigrated, as a young adult, from her native Holland to Aotearoa-New Zealand, where she eventually became one of the nation's foremost photographers, and perhaps the pre-eminent photographer of Maori people and events. Early in her career, before she became a famous photographer, Westra worked on contract developing classroom…