values in the new zealand curriculum - Ministry of Education

S ECTION 3: N EW Z EALAND L ITERATURE - V ALUES IN NZ S OCIETY
VALUES IN THE CURRICULUM: AN AOTEAROA NEW ZEALAND FRAME.
Values in the curriculum implicitly and directly affect all members of Aotearoa New
Zealand schooling communities. As was outlined earlier, education in Aotearoa remains,
for the most part, bonded to key Western values. However, what values in the curriculum
mean for the diverse groups of peoples within Māori, Pākehā, Pacific, Asian and other
schooling communities in Aotearoa is also important if the often expressed educational
values of equity and equality of opportunity, and bicultural and multicultural attentiveness
are to be given substance.
The complexity of values in relation to culture and ethnicity in Aotearoa New Zealand is
well illustrated by Webster (2001). Work on the values of people in the Aotearoa New
Zealand population over a number of years has been recorded and examined by the New
Zealand Values Study operating under the auspices of the World Values Study and
summarised by Webster in his book Spiral of Values. Webster’s analysis of the New
Zealand data suggests that there are seven distinct values groupings in New Zealand. He
describes these as: Māori-Māori; Māori-New Zealander; Pākehā; New Zealander;
European; Pacific Islander and Asian.
This review examines literature on values in four of the most significant ethnic and cultural
contexts of the New Zealand population. It begins by considering the Pākehā, or New
Zealand European, context and in three further sub-sections reviews Māori, Pacific and
Asian values perspectives and contexts. The second to fourth subsections raise questions
about the Western values that tend to saturate curricula in Aotearoa and probes the extent
to which the values perspectives of non-Western communities in Aotearoa New Zealand
might be addressed in a mainstream school curriculum.
We need to qualify what follows by pointing out that this is a vast and complex field and
the time and resources available to our team limit the scope of what we have been able to
cover. Further, while two of the authors of this report are of Pākehā/European ethnicity
and one of Māori ethnicity, none of the authors are of Pacific, Asian or other ethnicities
discussed in the report. What follows, then, is a summary of the literature on values that is
already written down by Aotearoa New Zealand writers of Pākehā, Māori, Pacific and
Asian descent we were able to access. We have attempted to identify key points
Values in the New Zealand Curriculum: A Literature Review 9