Radical Collegiality through Student Voice by Roseanna Bourke & Judith Loveridge

Author:Roseanna Bourke & Judith Loveridge
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9789811318580
Publisher: Springer Singapore

2.For this purpose, the child shall in particular be provided the opportunity to be heard in any judicial and administrative proceedings affecting the child, the views of the child being given due weight in accordance with the age and maturity of the child.

Our own New Zealand legislation also requires this. The Vulnerable Children’s Act, 2014 Part 1 No. 6 states that we need to be “increasing their [children and young people’s] participation in decision making about them, and their contribution to society.” The New Zealand government therefore has an obligation to listen to the voices of our young people and to act on these.

Across the New Zealand Education system, Māori students (New Zealand’s indigenous population) continue to be underserved. Māori students are over-represented in all negative education statistics. As a nation, we must address this ongoing disparity in order to improve the outcomes for Māori students, all students and our society as a whole.

This chapter is presented in three parts. First, as told by young Māori people themselves, we present over 20 years of research into their educational experiences. Within this research, their experiences, perceptions and proposed solutions have been meticulously gathered, analysed and reported on. The information provided here presents the thematic analysis of this research, supported by some of their own statements. In Part 2, we outline the educational policy contexts that have been applied and implemented over the same period of time. In considering these contexts, we find little evidence of wide-scale change at a system level that responds to the issues raised and the solutions proposed, in particular by Māori youth and students. While there have been some positive impacts from the challenges presented by these young people, particularly by individual teachers and school leaders, the need for widespread school reform that grows out of the lived and told experiences of our young people continues. In Part 3, we propose some ways in which the system could, or even must, respond to the voices of these young people.

As with all authors in this book, we continue to pose the question: what does it take to ensure the voices of Māori youth truly count in education system decision-making and in informing the change that is needed? Gathering and reporting their voices is not enough—if we continue to ask students for their experiences and their opinions, but do not carefully attend to what they say, do not respect and value their thoughts, and fail to act on the solutions provided, we continue to do our young people a disservice. We owe this generation of young people an accelerated reform based on the concept of “nothing about us, without us, everything about us is with us.”

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