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

they are one of the most long-standing early childhood education services operating
within Aotearoa New Zealand (Hughes, 1989). Moreover, they are a service
provided by the Government, and all teachers must be qualified and registered. For
the final centre, I was interested in exploring a corporate centre or one selected
from a large chain of centres. The justification for this was that, from experience, I
speculated that management practices affecting Tiriti-based curriculum were likely
to be hierarchical and removed from direct daily practices within centres; that is,
policies emanating from bureaucrats at head office might not align with daily
practices in the field.
Another variation that I sought to investigate was the age range of the
participating children. This was because I wondered if Tiriti-based pedagogy
might be presented differently according to the age of the children, particularly
with younger children who could be at the stage of pre and early verbalisation.
Indeed as Heta-Lensen (2010) states there is a “prevailing myth held in education
that maintenance programmes for minority languages will impede English
language development” (p. 8). I wondered if this belief would conflict with te reo
Māori being spoken in the centre.
The third factor I wanted to consider was whether or not the nature of
early childhood communities, as represented by school decile (socio-economic)
rankings, had any influence in the capacity of teachers to implement Tiriti-based
curriculum. Within Aotearoa New Zealand, a school's decile ranking indicates the
extent to which it draws its students from low-level socio-economic communities.
In general, Decile 1 schools are the 10% of schools with the highest proportion of
students from low-level socio-economic communities. By contrast, Decile 10
schools typically denote the 10% of schools with the smallest proportion of
students from low-level socio-economic backgrounds (Ministry of Education, 2008).
However, the variable of deciles of surrounding schools was shown to have little
relevance as it was so broad especially in Case Study Three.
With the exception of the inclusion of a representative centre from a
corporate group (or chain of centres) the selection criteria for determining cases
were met. Although Case Study One was part of a group of four centres, I had
been seeking a much larger chain within which to explore management issues
because it was conjectured that bureaucratic delineation would be more
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