ABSTRACT
My first encounters and experiences in learning the theories and methods of education research were challenging, intellectually traumatic in the sense that the world of knowledge I knew and wanted ‘to research’ was so far away from what the literature, what education experts, and what politicians and leading thinkers in New Zealand suggested I ought to be doing that I felt for a while I was swimming in a deep pool of ‘double consciousness’ (Du Bois, 1903). Initially, I began my research journey wanting to bring to the foreground the history of Māori education and the history of Māori in colonial education. But then I ran into the ‘small’ problem of the terms ‘History’ and ‘History of Education’. My scope fell outside where History, as the story of the victors, was said to begin and where the History of New Zealand education officially started with the arrival and actions of British missionaries and a colonial settler government. I loved researching the archives but spent most of my energy being excited by how bold and resistant my people were in the face of colonial policies (Simon & Smith, 2001). I then moved to the curriculum and then to pedagogies, to teachers and language revitalisation, constantly trying to engage with what we were taught was ‘the international literature’ which in fact was literature from the North. I ran into a similar ‘small’ problem trying to develop my doctoral proposal on ‘cultural literacy’ where I was totally off the page in terms of how that term was being used in the literature (Simon & Smith, 2001).
