I whakaputahia tēnei atikara e RNZ.
A leading force in Māori education has been honoured for their work which has been transformative in kura.
For more than four decades, Distinguished Professor Graham Hingangaroa Smith has dedicated himself to validating and advocating for Māori education systems that better serve indigenous peoples.
His work identifying and analysing Kaupapa Māori Theory has been transformative in kura, and the world of academia both here and overseas, which is why he has been recognised with the Te Puāwaitanga Research Excellence Medal at the Royal Society Te Apārangi Awards.
Smith (Ngāti Apa/Nga Wairiki, Ngāti Kahungunu, Ngāti Porou, Te Aitanga-a-Hauiti, Kāti Mamoe) told Saturday Morning that it was always special to be recognised by his peers, so he was happy to accept the award.
But he added that he owed a lot of his success to others.
One of five children, Smith’s father was a returned serviceman of the 28th (Māori) Battalion and his mother worked in Parliament. His parents eventually separated and he was raised by his mother.
“Our early years were a bit of a struggle, obviously being a single parent in those days there was a stigma attached to it and to families like us.
“But also my schooling experience in those days was a struggle as well, from the point of view that schooling was very much about assimilation, as I look back now I’ve got the word to describe it.”
Smith said schooling in those days was often an ordeal, both for himself and his brothers and sisters, because it was culturally different from how they lived at home and the way their grandmother raised them in a Māori cultural environment.
It shaped the way he thought about education and influenced his research work later in life, he said.
Eventually Smith won a scholarship tenable at either Te Aute or St Stephens/Tipene. His mother chose to send him to Tipene because his father worked in Auckland at the time.
“That had a huge influence on my life, most of the teachers were Māori, the philosophy was very supportive of our cultural well-being, so I had a pretty successful education there and went straight on to university from St Stephens to Auckland University and I really haven’t been out of university at all for the rest of my life.”
Smith was also involved early on in the Kōhanga Reo movement, which his daughter attended.
“Eventually the children that she went to Kōhanga Reo with turned five and had to go to school somewhere and the only options at that stage were state schooling.”
After sending their children to bilingual classes they noticed very quickly that the children lost the language they had from Kōhanga Reo.
“A group of us began to develop what we called the Kaupapa Māori movement of the time. The Kaupapa Māori movement was a movement to change New Zealand schooling to provide a genuine option for these Kōhanga Reo graduates to go into.”
He helped drive political changes, including to the Education Act 1989, which significantly expanded the number of Kura Kaupapa Māori.
“But for the most part those schools began by themselves with their own communities outside of the state system and struggled for some time before they were eventually accepted.”
In the early days, many of the parents were flaunting the law because it was compulsory for kids to be in state schooling at age five, he said.
This was also part of his PhD research at the time, he said he was interested in the “key elements that triggered Māori parents to become interested in education again”.
“After the 1960s many of the Māori parents were switched off schooling, they passed on these messages to their kids and it was a very negative atmosphere around education, but here was something that triggered new opportunity.”
Nā Saturday Morning nō RNZ.
