Tapasā: An Invitation to Decolonize Literacy Teacher Education in Aotearoa New Zealand

Abstract

The New Zealand Teaching Council recently published Tapasā, a touchstone document to support non-Pasifika teachers in considering how their practices might be more culturally sustaining for Pasifika students, signaling continued national recognition of the need for teachers to inquire into their teaching practices as culturally informed and situated. In this chapter, we see this call as an invitation to look critically at the content of our initial teacher education literacy classes, and also to look critically at the methods of instruction and assessment. In our framing and analysis, we draw on several aspects of Tierney's (2018) framework for global meaning making, including “interrupting existing frames.” Despite Aotearoa New Zealand's official foundation in biculturalism, Indigenous ways of knowing have been historically marginalized in official schooling spaces, so there is a continuing need for rigorous interrogation of curriculum and practices that continue to privilege settler colonial perspectives and values. Using diffractive text analysis and talanoa vā, we explore the processes and first wave of insights to arise through a collaborative effort to decolonize some aspects of literacy teacher education curriculum.

Citation

Rubin, J.C. and Fa'avae, D.T.M. (2022), "Tapasā: An Invitation to Decolonize Literacy Teacher Education in Aotearoa New Zealand", Assaf, L.C., Sowa, P. and Zammit, K. (Ed.) Global Meaning Making (Advances in Research on Teaching, Vol. 39), Emerald Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 41-56. https://doi.org/10.1108/S1479-368720220000039004