Science Curriculum, We Need to Talk
The new science curriculum risks shrinking futures, especially for Māori and Pasifika students
An opinion piece by Cheryl Mitchell
Teacher, EdD
What is happening and why educators should be worried
Every teacher knows that conversation: you ask a student to stay back after class because something in their work or behaviour is not okay. You still believe they are capable, but you are not letting this slide.
That is how the new science curriculum feels.
On the surface, it presents as “knowledge-rich”, tightly sequenced, content heavy, and standardised. On paper, it looks tidy: facts first, identity later, culture optional. It performs rigour while quietly eroding the conditions under which many young people actually learn.
If a student handed this in as a draft, I would be circling the margins with: “Where are your learners?” and “Who is this for?”
We already know who pays first when a curriculum narrows: Māori, Pasifika, disabled ākonga, students in poverty, and those living with intersecting marginalisation. In STEM, that especially includes girls and gender diverse students.
In my Doctor of Education research with seven Māori wāhine in a Year 11 STEM programme, the finding was clear:
Belonging drove achievement. Relationships, recognition, and identity safety mattered more for learning than content coverage alone.
When these wāhine felt seen and safe, attendance rose, retention strengthened, and academic achievement improved alongside confidence, voice, and agency. When they did not, the learning fell away because school had not been built with them in mind.
A curriculum that prioritises content but ignores identity risks reproducing that harm at scale. Right now, the draft reads less like “raising standards” and more like “lowering who counts”.
Science is not neutral and pretending it is will harm the learners we claim to care about
The draft curriculum reduces the space where ākonga can locate themselves inside science. There is less room for mātauranga Māori, fewer explicit expectations around Te Tiriti, and less emphasis on local, relational, place-based inquiry.
For already marginalised learners, this is not a shift; it is a tightening. The message lands as: science is welcome; you are optional.
In my study, the story sharers were not pushed out of science by ability. They were pushed out by:
racism, both explicit and ambient
stereotyping and assumptions of lower capability
gendered and colonial expectations around who “belongs” in physics or engineering
the constant emotional labour of proving they deserved to be present at all
One student even described choosing a traditionally ‘masculine’ STEM field as a strategy to deflect scrutiny as a Māori woman. That is not educational empowerment; it is survival.
Meanwhile, public commentary that treats identity and culture in mathematics as some kind of mistake in previous curriculum design ignores a simple truth that teachers see every day: children learn better when what they learn is connected to who they are.
Erasing identity is not neutrality.
It is erasure.
When we hear “we are just focusing on the real science now”, what is really being said is that we are comfortable with a version of science that some children never get to fully belong in.
What is wrong with this direction?
Let us be clear about what this draft is doing and not doing.
Fact first is not the same as good science.
Understanding grows through inquiry, collaboration, and meaning making, not memorisation alone. A curriculum that treats students as storage devices rather than thinkers misunderstands both science and adolescents.
Diluting mātauranga Māori weakens science and belonging.
Knowledge is strongest when worldviews braid. A single-lens curriculum is not rigour; it is fragility dressed up as certainty.
Marginalised learners lose space to breathe.
When curriculum compresses, those carrying the most discrimination are squeezed first and hardest. If classrooms become “just the facts”, the first thing to go is often the relational work that kept some students there at all.
STEM gender bias will not fix itself.
Biology and environmental fields already carry “feminised” expectations; physics and engineering remain masculinised. A narrow curriculum cements this; it does not challenge it. Equity is not a side effect of harder tests.
Ignoring intersectionality compounds inequity.
Māori and Pasifika wāhine are already navigating racism, sexism, class, and cultural scrutiny. A curriculum that denies identity denies humanity. It tells them, in effect: “You can come in, but not as yourself.”
We cannot spreadsheets and standards our way into equity.
If we pretend identity is irrelevant to learning, we will continue to lose the very students we most need to hold. No amount of tracking data will compensate for a curriculum that quietly communicates: “You were never really the target audience.”
If a Minister or Ministry leader were a student in my class, this is the point where I would slide the draft back across the desk and say: “You are capable of better than this. Let us rethink what success looks like.”
How we move forward
If this draft curriculum narrates contraction, our response must narrate expansion. We do not have to accept “less of you, more of the periodic table” as the price of credibility.
1. Keep science braided
Western science, mātauranga Māori, and Pacific knowledges can sit together not as opposites, but as lenses. Teaching them together deepens science rather than diluting it.
Students can handle complexity; it is usually policy that cannot.
2. Teach for belonging, not just recall
Belonging was the strongest predictor of learning in my study. Science must be relational, whanaungatanga centred, and grounded in ako as shared learning, not transmission teaching.
If a student feels like an invited collaborator in science, they stay. If they feel like an outsider in a lab coat they are only borrowing, they leave.
3. Design STEM as interdisciplinary, not siloed
Project based science lets students connect knowledge, land, community, sustainability, and technology. Deep thinking comes from integration, not compartmentalisation.
We know this from classrooms where hydroponics, climate data, local waterways, coding, and whakapapa have all lived in the same unit. The learning goes further because the walls are lower.
4. Protect counterspaces
For marginalised ākonga, STEM classrooms that welcome identity, language, humour, whakapapa, and community are lifelines. We must protect the pedagogical space where they can be fully themselves.
When policy tightens, these spaces often get recast as “nice-to-have extras”. They are not extras. They are survival infrastructure.
5. Measure what actually matters
Achievement matters, but so do retention, confidence, hauora, identity growth, community connection, and willingness to speak. If we only measure what is standardisable, we will only value what is standardised.
That is how you end up with great pass rates on paper and empty seats in senior science.
A different science curriculum is still possible
We do not have to choose between “real” science and culturally grounded teaching. When Māori wāhine in my research were welcomed and recognised, they learned more science, not less. They stayed longer, spoke louder, grew prouder.
Science did not weaken.
Science became human.
So, the question is not “Can Māori and Pasifika thrive in STEM?”
They already can, and they do, when we make room.
The real question is:
Will we build a curriculum that opens doors or one that quietly closes them again?
I look forward to the webinar discussion, where many of us will be unpacking this further. My hope is that we stay intentional, stay critical, and stay child centred as we decide what science learning in Aotearoa will be, and who it will be for.
Make sure you join us for the webinar next week!
Thank you for capturing the importance of belonging and cultural connection so well. This needs to be shared with every science teacher in the country.
Kia ora Cheryl. I couldn't agree more, as someone who is arguing for mathematics as one knowledge system that can do the work of supporting mokopuna instead of measuring them.
Globally, the trend is being reflected here. No male, white supremacist wants ANY women, non-Pakeha, diversely gendered, diverse people being in professions they see as powerful and dominating, which afford people certain levels of control over others. ES and ER are like trad wives, doing the dirty leg work for the misogynistic powermongers of the world.
Am I angry? Not really. As a mother of 5 grown people, 14 grandchildren, who have different levels of behaviour I know that it's not anger, it's disappointment. Deep, bone marrow, disappointment that these versions of humans keep dominating and domineering.
They create the division deliberately to divert us ... divide and conquer. Thank you for this work. Thank you for popping your head above the parapet.