Excellent, Rosemary. I especially like the reference to humility which, I think, is an essential ingredient in critical thinking, not to mention collaboration etc. What a shame this curriculum lacks any sense of it.
The draft senior English curriculum has similar issues to those Rosemary identifies in Science - it’s essentially the canon (the draft uses the word ‘seminal’) as we were taught it back in the 1980s, through a lens of old-fashioned New Criticism - irrelevant to students today, unless they’re planning a career teaching English literature. If we do end up with this draft mandated, I think including some explicit teaching about knowledge systems and their relationship to power - however we fit it in - will be really important.
That’s fascinating Vanessa. I wonder if we could convene a small working party to tease out how paradigm shifts have played out across the disciplines, looking for commonalities and teasing out curriculum implications?
How can you be critical if more important to you is being humble? This is the dilemma NZ faces. It's a cop out - just saying nothing very much of consequence or import by being humble. People ignore humble. No great leaders were humble. Even the ones you think were humble were far more forthright than you would like to believe! Some were downright aggressive and violent! Martin Luther King was no saint as made out. He was a woman abuser and serial womaniser. Mandela was a terrorist. Do your research.
Spot on Rosemary. In short you have identified the way in which "knowledge-rich" sloganism degenerates into curriculum impoverishment. Lovely to see Robert McFarlane there in your set of covers. The ontology he represents, and which is fundamental to te ao Māori, is being careflly excised across the board. It's the sort of ontology that would make it difficult for one to enter the US at the moment.
Indeed Terry. It’s the ontological differences that make indigenous knowledge systems so challenging for those of us raised in a totally Eurocentric world. All the books I included - and many more - live the differences so well.
I like your expression....live the differences. Many of us are on a journey "live" the implications of what Anne Salmond describes as an ontological shift in the social sciences. Rata's flawed epistemological theory around conceptual universals marginalised all of this and, among other things, is the ideological foundation of her racism.
These knowledgeable and considered points should be the starting point for thinking critically and responding to the draft curriculum - for all learning areas/subjects. As always you have offered wise analysis and highly valuable suggestions for action. Mahi tika ana.
Thank you for articulating so clearly the concerns I share. I would like to see the science curriculum maintain more Nature of Science elements, and I am deeply concerned how Eurocentric the curriculum is, with complete disregard for other knowledge systems - despite window dressing at the front that pretends otherwise.
Brilliant piece, thank you Rosemary. What it highlights for me is that mana ōrite is essential to our curriculum because it reflects who we are as a Te Tiriti-founded nation.
Your discussion of knowledge systems reminds me that a truly knowledge-rich curriculum requires intellectual humility about what counts as knowledge, how knowledge is generated, and whose knowledge is valued. As Te Tiriti partners, we have a responsibility to respect and protect te ao Māori, not as an optional addition to learning, but as an integral part of our shared national identity.
Together, we need to think critically about what it means to be Te Tiriti partners and how that partnership is expressed in our curriculum, our schools, and our everyday actions. For me, mana ōrite is an important part of that ongoing commitment.
Dr Hipkins, I enjoy your complex systems perspectives (e.g., your previous book on the topic). My late wife Dr Mira Peter (who I understand you knew through NZCER), would have welcomed how your views have evolved towards complexity awareness. Like me, she worked at MOE until she passed in 2021 (see https://ibb.co/Y8Qsqdb). We both did PhDs in ecological psychology at U. Connecticut, a non-representational, non-cognitivist, complexity-based and affordances-based approach that takes seriously the fact that organisms and their environments are mutually connected, defined, and evolved through information, and therefore, all perception and awareness is direct awareness of and within environments. Mira's research on reading processes and direct speech perception via gestural phonology with the leaders at Haskins Labs and U. Connecticut has filtered through, finally, to those advising (e.g., James Chapman) and redesigning the new literacy curriculum. We would both agree that matauranga Maori is of great importance for broadening our world view, as is Australian aborigine epistemology and ontology of dreamtime, as is the thinking of many other indigenous, non-Western cultures. However, unless a country's students are taught first in the predominant and well-developed, functional, pragmatic knowledge system of their nation (e.g., it's Western science in NZ) then it is simply not possible to have any actual "critical analysis" of it, or how it compares to other systems that, necessarily, will be studied and experienced in a more shallow sense. Pupils can not be taught to or learn to become experts at everything as they will end up experts at nothing. I believe this is one of the problems with NCEA - no focus. Without specialised focus there is just hand-waving, and no development of depth. So the Western scientific tradition - which Mira was a champion of having been trained in Yugoslavia's top psychology institutes, and with parents devoted to language (her father was a philologist who also studied Hopi language) - is essential to understand before any "critical thinking" can occur beyond mediocre platitudes and hand-waving comparisons and, as you point out, watered-down weak eclecticism and anything-goes rocks-for-brains relativism.
Today would have been our 30th wedding anniversary and I think she would approve of this messsage.
If you are interested in how affordance thinking and ecological psychology can help teaching and learning, please see my website, or for contact:
I recently applied to a job at an NZ Ministry. I thought it was important to emphasise Mātauranga and Te Ao Māori. But it didn't help! Actually the opposite. No appreciation for my efforts in post-interview feedback! Someone else had "more years experience in Ministries" than me! What? Doing what?!?! So time doing nothing much as long as in Gov in NZ is what counts?? International expert counts for nothing I guess. So what to do in NZ? I give up!! Contact me if you think otherwise. I am available.
Rosemary, I welcome your comments re. types of knowledge systems. Thank-you.
Your call for epistemic humility and vigilance might be directly applied to the limitations of/and lack of epistemic awareness as shown in the draft's Years 12-13 Social Sciences: Civics, Politics and Philosophy (CPP). This new subject has been stamped with the developers unilateral 'knowledge-rich' discourse. Hence, CPP rejects integrated disciplinary approaches, Inquiry-methods, perspectives, modes of representation and critical affiliation that embody the nature of social sciences.
Bevan reminds us in his excellent ERASE piece re. the English drafting processes, that any teaching focus on students' personal response is minimal and turned toward analysis and logic.
I could say the same about the CPP. The developers of the social sciences have also rejected personal and subjective sociocultural dimensions of learning - including culturally responsive pedagogies for learners. Does this reflect a degree of academic contempt? It certainly shows contempt for teachers and learners.
Excellent, Rosemary. I especially like the reference to humility which, I think, is an essential ingredient in critical thinking, not to mention collaboration etc. What a shame this curriculum lacks any sense of it.
The draft senior English curriculum has similar issues to those Rosemary identifies in Science - it’s essentially the canon (the draft uses the word ‘seminal’) as we were taught it back in the 1980s, through a lens of old-fashioned New Criticism - irrelevant to students today, unless they’re planning a career teaching English literature. If we do end up with this draft mandated, I think including some explicit teaching about knowledge systems and their relationship to power - however we fit it in - will be really important.
That’s fascinating Vanessa. I wonder if we could convene a small working party to tease out how paradigm shifts have played out across the disciplines, looking for commonalities and teasing out curriculum implications?
That would be really interesting, and useful I think.
Count me in!
Thanks Bevan. It is such a powerful concept and we’re not seeing much of it in current policy-making.
How can you be critical if more important to you is being humble? This is the dilemma NZ faces. It's a cop out - just saying nothing very much of consequence or import by being humble. People ignore humble. No great leaders were humble. Even the ones you think were humble were far more forthright than you would like to believe! Some were downright aggressive and violent! Martin Luther King was no saint as made out. He was a woman abuser and serial womaniser. Mandela was a terrorist. Do your research.
Deeply thoughtful and appropriate comment on the importance and value of knowledge systems. Should be central to this ongoing discussion.
Spot on Rosemary. In short you have identified the way in which "knowledge-rich" sloganism degenerates into curriculum impoverishment. Lovely to see Robert McFarlane there in your set of covers. The ontology he represents, and which is fundamental to te ao Māori, is being careflly excised across the board. It's the sort of ontology that would make it difficult for one to enter the US at the moment.
Indeed Terry. It’s the ontological differences that make indigenous knowledge systems so challenging for those of us raised in a totally Eurocentric world. All the books I included - and many more - live the differences so well.
I like your expression....live the differences. Many of us are on a journey "live" the implications of what Anne Salmond describes as an ontological shift in the social sciences. Rata's flawed epistemological theory around conceptual universals marginalised all of this and, among other things, is the ideological foundation of her racism.
These knowledgeable and considered points should be the starting point for thinking critically and responding to the draft curriculum - for all learning areas/subjects. As always you have offered wise analysis and highly valuable suggestions for action. Mahi tika ana.
Thank you for articulating so clearly the concerns I share. I would like to see the science curriculum maintain more Nature of Science elements, and I am deeply concerned how Eurocentric the curriculum is, with complete disregard for other knowledge systems - despite window dressing at the front that pretends otherwise.
Brilliant piece, thank you Rosemary. What it highlights for me is that mana ōrite is essential to our curriculum because it reflects who we are as a Te Tiriti-founded nation.
Your discussion of knowledge systems reminds me that a truly knowledge-rich curriculum requires intellectual humility about what counts as knowledge, how knowledge is generated, and whose knowledge is valued. As Te Tiriti partners, we have a responsibility to respect and protect te ao Māori, not as an optional addition to learning, but as an integral part of our shared national identity.
Together, we need to think critically about what it means to be Te Tiriti partners and how that partnership is expressed in our curriculum, our schools, and our everyday actions. For me, mana ōrite is an important part of that ongoing commitment.
Tautoko Bex
Thank you
Dr Hipkins, I enjoy your complex systems perspectives (e.g., your previous book on the topic). My late wife Dr Mira Peter (who I understand you knew through NZCER), would have welcomed how your views have evolved towards complexity awareness. Like me, she worked at MOE until she passed in 2021 (see https://ibb.co/Y8Qsqdb). We both did PhDs in ecological psychology at U. Connecticut, a non-representational, non-cognitivist, complexity-based and affordances-based approach that takes seriously the fact that organisms and their environments are mutually connected, defined, and evolved through information, and therefore, all perception and awareness is direct awareness of and within environments. Mira's research on reading processes and direct speech perception via gestural phonology with the leaders at Haskins Labs and U. Connecticut has filtered through, finally, to those advising (e.g., James Chapman) and redesigning the new literacy curriculum. We would both agree that matauranga Maori is of great importance for broadening our world view, as is Australian aborigine epistemology and ontology of dreamtime, as is the thinking of many other indigenous, non-Western cultures. However, unless a country's students are taught first in the predominant and well-developed, functional, pragmatic knowledge system of their nation (e.g., it's Western science in NZ) then it is simply not possible to have any actual "critical analysis" of it, or how it compares to other systems that, necessarily, will be studied and experienced in a more shallow sense. Pupils can not be taught to or learn to become experts at everything as they will end up experts at nothing. I believe this is one of the problems with NCEA - no focus. Without specialised focus there is just hand-waving, and no development of depth. So the Western scientific tradition - which Mira was a champion of having been trained in Yugoslavia's top psychology institutes, and with parents devoted to language (her father was a philologist who also studied Hopi language) - is essential to understand before any "critical thinking" can occur beyond mediocre platitudes and hand-waving comparisons and, as you point out, watered-down weak eclecticism and anything-goes rocks-for-brains relativism.
Today would have been our 30th wedding anniversary and I think she would approve of this messsage.
If you are interested in how affordance thinking and ecological psychology can help teaching and learning, please see my website, or for contact:
https://metaffordance.com/
I recently applied to a job at an NZ Ministry. I thought it was important to emphasise Mātauranga and Te Ao Māori. But it didn't help! Actually the opposite. No appreciation for my efforts in post-interview feedback! Someone else had "more years experience in Ministries" than me! What? Doing what?!?! So time doing nothing much as long as in Gov in NZ is what counts?? International expert counts for nothing I guess. So what to do in NZ? I give up!! Contact me if you think otherwise. I am available.
https://metaffordance.com/visualisation
Rosemary, I welcome your comments re. types of knowledge systems. Thank-you.
Your call for epistemic humility and vigilance might be directly applied to the limitations of/and lack of epistemic awareness as shown in the draft's Years 12-13 Social Sciences: Civics, Politics and Philosophy (CPP). This new subject has been stamped with the developers unilateral 'knowledge-rich' discourse. Hence, CPP rejects integrated disciplinary approaches, Inquiry-methods, perspectives, modes of representation and critical affiliation that embody the nature of social sciences.
Bevan reminds us in his excellent ERASE piece re. the English drafting processes, that any teaching focus on students' personal response is minimal and turned toward analysis and logic.
I could say the same about the CPP. The developers of the social sciences have also rejected personal and subjective sociocultural dimensions of learning - including culturally responsive pedagogies for learners. Does this reflect a degree of academic contempt? It certainly shows contempt for teachers and learners.