Studying with Aotearoa

When I left for Aotearoa New Zealand on July 5th, I really wasn’t sure what I was going to find there. I knew I had signed up for a ten-day workshop for educators, the description of which featured terms like Indigenous pedagogy, experiential learning, and the Maori worldview. I was certain that we would be traveling around Te Tau Ihu, which is the Maori name for the top of the South Island, a part of the country I had been lucky enough to visit before. But what would be the details of my experience in this workshop? I was unclear in my mind. 

I arrived in Nelson, midday on July 7th, and the weather was unsettled, gusting, and with a bit of rain. I went for a run along the Maitai River, right through the city, noting signs everywhere of substantial flooding. The local news was full of stories of 100-year floods throughout the South Island, as an extraordinary number of extraordinary storms had hit the island in recent weeks. Climate change had been making itself felt in the Land of the Long White Cloud. The next day, bright and early, I caught a local bus back to the Nelson Airport to rally with the other 18 educators, all from the United States, who were flying in to kick off the workshop. Meeting all of us were folks from Whenua Iti Outdoors, a Kiwi outfit dedicated to getting young people out of the classroom and into the embrace of mother nature.

The lot of us rolled out bags out to the curb and loaded up in a couple of vans and headed right out to a beautiful tidal beach located only a few miles from the airport where we could pile out and begin the process of getting to know each other and this beautiful place. Following a process that was very soon to become second nature, we all gathered into a circle and began speaking one after another about who we are and why we had decided to come together in that very spot. In addition to introductions and intention setting, we also had to do something together that was also going to have to become a habit; we had to sing a song. We’d all gotten materials letting us know that at a couple of critical moments in our journey we were going to be called upon to sing. Over email, we’d settled on making Bob Marley’s “Three Little Birds” as our group’s song and so, timidly and with little gusto, we sang that song for the first time right there on the beach. We learned we had work to do, for sure, but we’d arrived, we were all together, we were beginning our introduction to our guides and that beautiful land. 

Over the next few days, as our group of guides and educators settled into a routine–cooking meals together, hunkering down for the night in shared accommodations, visiting beautiful sites around Nelson and in Golden Bay, I noticed that nowhere in our itinerary would we be visiting any “Maori classrooms,” nor would we be working with Maori classroom teachers. I had a sense of disappointment about this, I had thought I might get to trade stories and pedagogical moves with some classroom teachers like myself, but who had come to the work from a different background and perspective. But on our third day together we did two things that reoriented my understanding of the concept of Maori pedagogy and opened a window into a whole different understanding of schooling. The first was our group went out on the water in a traditional waka or Maori canoe and the second was a visit to a marae or Maori village. What made both experiences remarkable was the slow and complex intentions that each required of us. These were not just activities we could check off on an itinerary box. Been there, done that. Both experiences involved hours of preparatory conversation, ritual introductions and story telling, not to mention the ubiquitous singing. To engage in these ceremonial AND pedagogical tasks, we American independent school educators had to slow WAY down, we had to take seriously the meaningfulness of meeting people for the very first time, of being welcomed into a new world view. Our experience of time–an experience we impose on our students back home with relentless class schedules, packed days, and hours of homework–we could not hope to hold onto that and actually live in the experience our guides were offering to share with us. In the middle of this most unusual, most remarkable day, I finally realized that I was being welcomed into a radically different concept of education. Everything our Maori hosts were doing, from the way they paddled their wakas, to the way they prepared and shared food, to the way they graciously showed us around their village, was explicitly educational, and not just for us, but for them and their children. I had presumed that what I would be learning about Maori education would look something like what I do everyday as an educator, but I had been completely wrong about that. Maori education was not primarily a classroom enterprise, it was about community, ancestry, and a deeply respectful relationship with home, the land and all the living things that share it. 

The rest of the journey in Aotearoa was an extended meditation for me on what I might call the metaphysics of education, on what the word really ought to mean. After ten days of conversation, study, adventure, and learning, our group returned to the exact beach we’d visited on our first day, and we circled up as friends and colleagues to share with one another what this experience had meant. When my turn came, I got a bit choked up (hardly for the first time) as I reflected on what I believed had been gifted to us, by our loving hosts and by the equally loving land. In Aotearoa and with the help of our guides, both Maori and Pakeha or New Zealanders with ancestors from other parts of the world, I had been given the chance to see what believe is the future of education: a holistic experience for all citizens, and not just formal teachers and students, that draws respectfully from the indigenous traditions rooted deep in every corner of our beautiful country and world, and integrated with what we have long come to call traditional schooling in the United States. We There’s no call to jettison our mathematics and scientific inquiry, our critical reading and thinking skills, our language acquisition goals, but we will ultimately need to marry those to the deeper, place-based, experiential, ceremonial, and patient, patient, patient practices that were developed over thousands and tens of thousands of years by the indigenous occupants of each and every place. The wisdom to save, to restore, to enliven, and to thrive is braided into the land, but we all need education to see it.