Understanding climate change is becoming an urgent requirement for those in education. The normative values of education have long been closely aligned with the global, modernised world. The industrial model has underpinned the hidden and overt curriculum. Increasingly though, a new eco-centric orientation to economics, technology, and social organisation is beginning to shape up the post-carbon world. Unless education is up to date with the issues of climate change, the estate of education will be unable to meet its task of (...) knowledge transfer. This paper covers the basic science and ethical policy debates, and begins to outline the questions that will necessarily entangle education as we orientate ourselves to the new world that is upon us. (shrink)

In Maori thought, the possibility exists for a sort of lateral thinking that does not necessarily directly respond to another’s utterance or opinion but that considers some of the creative and arbitrary themes that arise. In this article, I employ this counter-colonial speculation, keeping in mind a Maori worldview whilst thinking in the wake of Elizabeth Rata’s “Ethnic Ideologies in New Zealand Education: What’s Wrong with Kaupapa Maori?” The speculative powers that Maori have at our disposal here have undoubtedly been (...) employed in a number of ways throughout Maori history; here, I use them in a way that does not directly respond to a prompt. Although Rata’s true aim is to critique kaupapa Maori, she inadvertently brings my attention to a particular characteristic of her writing—the suffix -ism. The fact that it saturates her writing in this article leads me to consider the broader issues associated with instrumentalist language, and the impact of the -ism on a Maori relationship with things in the world. It emerges that, although Rata may be controversial for Maori in her views, her writing is useful for some unintended reasons, as it prompts some thinking around the appropriateness of the -ism for Maori. (shrink)

The experience of researching as a Māori student within academia will often raise questions about how and whether the student’s research privileges Māori world views and articulates culturally specific epistemologies. This study offers some theorising, from the perspectives of a Maori doctoral student and her Maori supervisor, on the metaphysical nature of research for Maori. It emphasises that there is a space for speculative, creative and responsive thinking as a central method in the student’s doctoral research and describes how access (...) to free thinking has been only partly recognised in currently dominant methods of research. We describe this approach as ‘whakaaro’, and note its relationship to language itself, to the researcher and the interviewee, and in particular to the researcher’s intuitive and largely unknowable response to what an interviewee utters. In that act, the student envisages that she will expansively hint at the deep expression of the profoundly mysterious. Here, our thinking resonates with various Western and indigenous writings about research and adumbrates the potential of the whakaaro method without foreclosing against its various permutations. (shrink)