Māori Perspective - Student Interview 1

I have started going to visit the classrooms of all the Māori teachers at school to observe how they approach teaching. First visit link here, and I have a few more to do over this week.

To start to get a student perspective, I had a great conversation with a couple of my Year 12 Māori students today. I explained to them how teachers are expected to do an inquiry and how gearing your teaching towards Māori students was an expectation in the teaching standards.

So far they have been taught by three seperate Māori teachers and all of them have been female.
They have recently discovered they are related to one of the newer Māori members of staff. They feel this will not affect how they interact as they do not know each other and they are not taught by this teacher. So far they have compared Pepehas.

When they have these staff members, there is a general use of more Te Reo Māori in the classroom and they feel more confident about using it in general conversation.

When I asked them if the Māori staff members had different / higher / seperate expectations of them, their behaviour or their achievement and they said that they had not noticed a real difference and it was more personal to the teacher rather than the ethnicity.

I told them how as teachers we are advised to work on a good relationship with students. They totally agreed with this and told me they generally enjoyed the talk and stories that their teachers give them. They also advised teachers to "read the room" at times and not force the relationship path if it is sometimes not wanted.

These two students today are also very active out of school and are taught by Maori teachers in these activities too. They feel these teachers motivate them really well as they are really enthusiastic about what they are doing. These teachers speak Te Reo Māori a lot to the whole group they are teaching, encouraging the non Māori students to join in.

They came to Auckland about 5 years ago from a smaller town in New Zealand and have noticed a definite difference in the expectations from the teachers.
More information was given to me about this part of our talk and I was shocked.

What do they want more of?
They want teachers and students to support Māori activities more, like the Kapa Haka.
They want the Māori students to acknowledge their culture more as they feel like some students hide from it.

I loved my talk with these two students today. They were really open and helpful with all of my questions and appreciated when I told them what I was doing and why.

I absolutely have plans to talk to more of my Māori students to get their insights too.