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- Professor Emeritus Tagaloatele Peggy Fairbairn-Dunlop CNZM
Professor Emeritus Tagaloatele Peggy Fairbairn-Dunlop comments on the current state of education. She shares her thoughts about reducing and bridging the gap, understanding and engaging in systems, negotiating time, and the benefits of learning the basics.
Transcript
Transcript
Talofa lava, my name is Tagaloatele Peggy Fairbairn-Dunlop. I guess I've been working in education most of my life from primary school teacher to education lecturer at teacher's college, through primary school teaching in New Zealand schools, mainly Porirua and Māori schools in New Zealand. And then in Samoa at the teacher's college, and then at the University of the South Pacific, and then sort of going a bit more globally working for UN before I came back to New Zealand, up to Victoria to be the director of Va'aomanu Pacifica, and then to AUT in Auckland. So I guess my whole life has been education, whether it's in schools or in communities or at church, or with our own children and families.
We were always told by our parents get a good education, and that's something which nobody can take away from you. The whole new generation of Pacific learners coming through New Zealand, who are not just accepting what is happening around them as the way life should be, and they are starting to question. So there are a lot of very verbal and articulate Pacific youth whose parents have been educated in New Zealand and who have a concept of it's my right, and those sorts of ... which we never had, and which the initial migrants I think, didn't have... was always, hasn't New Zealand been good to us to bring us here and we will work for the good of the country and that sort of thing. So, we have got voice and we have got visibility, but I often still wonder if it's almost a token visibility and voice in many New Zealand forums, and a lot of our well-educated leaders of the future are actually, finding it very hard to break through the assumptions and the values underpinning most of the systems in New Zealand, be this education or the way governments work. And so life is not easy for them. Me, it's quite worrying that we are doing better, right through the systems in terms of passes, but then so are the Palagis . So, if you, like, we can say, yes, we're doing better, but the gap has not reduced because they are also doing better. So that's something we sort of have to concentrate on, in our actual teaching and learning practise. But... So that's one thing we have to keep in mind, how can we reduce the gap? And that's also related to Pacific ideals of what success is, which we can touch on again later. But the worrying thing to me is that there are gender equities in Pacific achievement. When I looked at the data a few years ago, women, girls are doing much better than males. So, there's a dynamic in there that we've got to work out what is happening, why are males not doing so well?
And also, the other thing that is quite worrying is that within the Pacific community itself, there is an even greater disparity and by generation, but also of those who have made it. And those who finding it very hard even to get, you know, daily food and security, let alone support their children's education success. So there's a growing diversity within the Pacific community as well that we have to really think about, how do we bridge that gap. And some of the programmes that the ministry are doing that seems to be the gap of equity and access that is being addressed as much as possible. Whether you're in a university or a primary school or anything, first of all, number one, who are the students in front of you, where have they come from, what are their backgrounds, what do they need to know about the systems so they can engage profitably and successfully in those particular systems because if I don't know a system, how do I know when to engage? And I think that came through very carefully in the PowerUP as a programme, which isn't children going to schools by themselves, and parents at home, sort of saying, go and learn, and expecting that the teacher knows best. And the teacher and we'll all happen within those four walls, to trying to support the parents also, and the brothers and sisters in the whole family to know the system so that they know they're part of the whole.
And so I think that was one of the main... I know it was the thrust of PowerUP, which I think is over the years that it's developed, has really started to get that whole, you know, whole of system approach, parents and learners and community together. So we're all rowing the boat or rowing the vaka in the same way. And the child, yeah, that's it, and the child can bring their home knowledge into the school and into the learning at home as well. I remember going to a university graduation at Victoria, a few years ago, and this was for a graduation dinner for the parents. And I sort of felt sorry for the students because... who had graduated, for the graduates, because the parents just... A lot of them did not see the actual huge amount of learning and work that had gone into the achievement of a degree, particularly a postgraduate degree. And they kept saying, okay, we'll do the next one, we'll do the next one where they'll do the next one, but there had not been the fullest understanding, that teaching, for example, at a university wasn't going and sitting in a class like it was at primary school. You know, there's a teacher there and you sit and learn. It required a lot of, you know, additional reading and additional work.
The next bit about that is when parents really understand and come to know a process better, then they can make decisions around the process, like giving time, you know, negotiating, do you have to go to church five nights a week to do things there, or are you going to have... are we going to... you know, just negotiate the use of time because that's what students also need, an understanding of the workload and a time to do it and not be running around, doing all other jobs to support the family, which is important but which may not directly contribute, and may indeed hamper significantly their educational progress and achievement, you know, doing their homework. Something which is coming out a lot recently in the literature, which I support very much, is that every child is different. And I strongly have believed that there are certain basics that children must know if they're going to build their own knowledge basis. And some of them you would possibly have to learn by rote you know, like your times table, you can't spend all day trying to work out, you know what four sixes is, because you really want to get onto the next bit of any problem you're going to solve. I strongly believe that kids need to know their tables so that they can go onto that harder stuff. They need to know phonics and how to sound out a word. Not every child is going to find the meaning of a word from reading a sentence and, you know, thinking what goes in there, well, what makes sense, which was the new method that came in probably about the 1980s in New Zealand, you know, making sense as you read. Well if I do not have that experience that as in that text, which is a Palagi text usually, how am I going to find the word, but nor is there a strategy to address our known words and find the meaning. So I guess half of me, when I look at the, in fact a lot of me, when I look at the, what we know about diverse learners, whose language may not be English competent, nor are their concepts exactly the same as other people, that, you know, if you haven't got those tools, then you have no strategy to work on. Pacific success is achieving educationally, I'm talking about a school context, achieving educationally, but also taking the others with you as you go through. So it's not competitive. I am better than you or it's really, yes, it's a quiet achievement, but also supporting others to go through with you. Otherwise... I once wrote an article which was about male-female, Pasifika achievement, and I called it, "He's won, but he's lost it." And it was these boys at Rongotai College that we had interviewed that one of them actually went... his parents had put him in an after school... I forget the name of the programme, for maths and that, but he would never let anyone know he was at that programme. And if after school, when he went to this... what are those... there's a homework centre, which is quite well-known in New Zealand. It was Kip McGrath, yeah. He would not let it... he did not tell anyone that he was going to that. And if he went there after school, he had to make sure that no one saw him going there because there was a sense of... and even when he got good marks and others got good marks in the class, they tended to downplay their good marks. And you know, so you're winning, but you've lost. And the theme of what I was looking at was what is the bit that they lose. And it was this, to me, it was this feeling of group identity, security, you know, oneness with the bros, if you like.
And for many people I think, and I'm not sure why, and there'd be lots of reasons was that to achieve academically was almost like you were a nerd and you were outside us. And well, that's the bit we've got to break down is that... it's commonplace for Pacific people to succeed academically. It's not just, you know, out of the ordinary and we can do both. You try and teach your children and support them. And that's why the parents' role is so important. The parents and the community to, you know, to go for gold, to really use every talent that you have. And so that does require discipline to task, not discipline to body, you know, discipline to task and completion of tasks. It's just, I guess, to try and teach them good study skills and support their study skills, but also giving them the time to do it. I guess I learned it from my older brothers and sisters that, you know, that they sort of did well at school and I'm the youngest of seven. And by the time I got there, it was just an expectation. So it was, it wasn't just an expectation of the, the parents that were sort of, you know... and that was... I don't know, it seems to be a bit lost, doesn't it? And when, of course success encourages success, doesn't it?