Listening to the voices of indigenous Māori students over time

This chapter investigates how indigenous, Maori secondary school learners in Aotearoa, New Zealand have begun to experience and understand the central tenet of the Ministry of Education’s Maori education policy, ‘Maori students enjoying and achieving education success as Maori’. It discusses two studies, the first of which is quantitative, and took place between 2009 and 2013 in 16 secondary schools that were in their fourth year of engagement in Phase 5 of Te Kotahitanga, a government-funded, iterative research and teacher professional development project. The second study comprises a qualitative look, taken in 2015, at the experiences of senior Maori students describing what ‘achieving and enjoying education success as Maori’ means to them. In New Zealand, the prevailing egalitarian rhetoric has long proclaimed our commitment to social justice. Unfortunately, for many people, particularly members of the tribal groups that comprise the Indigenous Maori people, the reality falls far short of the rhetoric.