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

were spoken by some families in the centre. One of the observations I made was
that bilingual children appeared to adapt easily to both languages – unlike my own
struggles at 11 years old to learn French at school.
By the mid to late 1980s members of the Auckland Playcentre Association
were attending Project Waitangi workshops and bringing back ideas for discussion
on such matters as Te Tiriti o Waitangi and resource sharing. A consequence of
this for me was a shift from wanting to incorporate multiculturalism to realising
that bicultural development was crucial in Aotearoa New Zealand. Consistent with
this realisation, ways to implement Te Tiriti o Waitangi in Playcentre settings were
being sought by members of the organisation, including myself.
I had resumed part-time university studies in 1985, initially in social
anthropology and later in archaeology, history, and education. Within these
disciplines, where a choice was possible, I focused on gender and Aotearoa New
Zealand. I was introduced to ideas of Māori migration, settlement, and
development that were very different to those ideas to which I had been exposed in
school during the 1950s and 1960s; an era that was besotted with the myth of
attaining egalitarianism for all.
I was now confronted by ideas of colonisation and racism. Through
educational studies I was able to make more sense of my own teaching and
learning as I now had some theoretical frameworks upon which to interpret,
understand, and apply my experiences. I explored the ideas of Bourdieu (1973)
and notions of cultural capital which I now recognised was one of the key
differences between myself and the children I taught at Kawakawa. The banking
model of education (Freire, 1972), which has the teacher as an expert charged with
banking knowledge into receptive children. However, even though Friere critiqued
this model, it helped me to make sense of my own time at school, for which I had
previously developed (and retain to this day) an intense dislike.
My first introduction to social anthropology emphasised participant
observation, where the researcher becomes involved with the subjects being
studied. The excitement I felt as I was exposed to research based on this method
never disappeared: what grabbed me in particular was the way in which
participants spoke for themselves. They were so alive.
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