Through an exploration of two experimental schools, Oruaiti (1950s) and Discovery 1 (2000s), we aim to understand the socio-political contexts that create spaces for experimentation and examine their impact on mainstream schooling. Caught between competing, often contradictory, discourses such experiments struggle between the…

Whether in health, in education, or in material well-being, some children will always fall behind the average. The critical question is -- how far behind? Is there a point beyond which falling behind is not inevitable but policy susceptible, not unavoidable but unacceptable, not inequality but inequity? There are no widely agreed theoretical…

Children attending early childhood education and care centres spend a lot of time fitting in with institutional routines. This paper uses ethnographic methods and sociocultural activity theory to describe and analyse the processes whereby young children in an early childhood centre collectively created meaning and interest during potentially…

Informed by an amalgam of notions drawn from constructivist, socio-cultural, metacognitive and self-regulation theory, the discourse created to describe assessment to enhance learning has gone through a number of iterations or discursive shifts. As a result, the current discourse is both ambitious and complex with the roles and responsibilities…

This paper investigates the code-switching behaviour of two native speaker teachers teaching their mother tongue--French and Korean, respectively--to predominantly English monolingual students in New Zealand secondary schools. A close analysis of these teachers' classroom discourse and their perceptions about classroom language use reveals a range…

The article critiques the innovative policy documents constructing New Zealand early childhood pedagogies since the advent of the first curriculum "Te Whariki" (1996) and argues that the two most compelling of these reflect the consumerist experiences of childhood today. The acclaim which followed the publication of "Te…

In the early nineteenth century, governments began to develop specialized educational programs--kindergartens and infant or nursery schools--to give children a head start in life. These programs hinged on new visions of childhood that originated in England and Europe, but what happened when they were transported to the colonies? This book unwinds…

As New Zealand has become increasingly pluralistic, the teaching profession has become progressively less reflective of the wider population. This paper reviews the literature on impediments to teaching for minority students, and reports on a case study exploring factors that deter Asian New Zealanders from pursuing teaching as a career. The…

The discourses and practices of neoliberalism, including government policies for education and training, public debates regarding standards and changed funding regimes, have been at work on and in schools in capitalist societies since at least the 1980s. Yet we have been hard pressed to say what neoliberalism is, where it comes from and how it…

This paper reports on a study of disagreement strategies used by Japanese learners of English (JLEs) studying at language schools in New Zealand. The study stemmed from an observation that JLEs were unwilling to express disagreements in exchanges with high-power (+P) interlocutors, possibly due to the threat of face-loss and the consequences of…

The risk and resilience framework (Stanley, 2003) views developmental outcomes as the consequences of young people's responses to the risk and protective factors that are operating in their social settings. Students in the School of Education at The University of Waikato at Tauranga can have the opportunity to apply the framework to models and…

Uses data from a sample of New Zealand twins to test the relationship between education and volunteering, holding unobservable family effects constant. Results show that education significantly reduces the probability of volunteering and the supply of volunteer hours. Volunteering may not be an external benefit of education. (Contains 18…

Reviews values evident in early discussions about the social effects of distance education in New Zealand. Public debates and emergent literature are characterized by extreme positions indicating deep value conflicts. Most discussions were driven by ideological commitment to principles, such as egalitarianism, communitarianism, and…

Outlines a literacy program among the Maori and Aborigines in the South Pacific. Three stages are implemented and a fourth is being developed. Focus is on the social-cultural context and its relationship to literacy. (ABM)

Discusses the situations of seven teacher education centers in New Zealand. Assesses the influence of whether and how multicultural perspectives on mathematics teaching have been introduced into these programs. (Author/KHR)