supporting tiriti-based curriculum delivery in mainstream early ...

The issues for these teachers, which were expressed mainly through their journals,
were similar to those expressed by other teachers in this research and in the
literature: learning te reo Māori, fear, lack of confidence, and the place of
multiculturalism. These will be discussed in chapters 5 and 6.
As I had become concerned about the value of action research and what I
perceived as slow progress in implementing Tiriti-based curriculum, I felt that
repositioning my methodological approach from action research to appreciative
inquiry could enhance the implementation of Tiriti-based pedagogy. Taking an
affirmative, appreciative stand to build on what participants were already doing
seemed to be the way forward. The appreciative inquiry model has four stages,
which are described in the next section.
Stages of Appreciative Inquiry
The four broad stages of appreciative inquiry are discovery, dream,
design, and destiny. Each stage has provocative questions for participants to
consider, share and decide to action. There are typical questions, statements and
actions that encapsulate each stage (Cooperrider, 2003; English et al., 2003;
Hammond, 1998; Reed et al., 2002; Yoder, 2005), as illustrated in Table 3.1.
Table 3.1 Stages, Questions and Action of Appreciative Inquiry.
Stages Questions Statement Actions (Whitney and
Trosten-Bloom, 2003,
p.6)
1. Discover “What gives life?” Looks at the best of what
is
2. Dream “What might be?” Investigates what is the
world calling for –
provocative propositions
3. Design “What should be the
ideal?”
4. Destiny/
Deliver
“How can we
empower, learn, and
adjust/improvise?”
Appreciate what is
Imagine what might be.
Co-constructing Determine what should
be
Empowering Create what will be
The first stage of discovery is where participants are asked to think back
through their lives/career/work to describe a high point when they felt most
effective and engaged about the topic under discussion (Yoder, 2005). In this
thesis that means Tiriti-based curriculum. Participants were asked to explore in a
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