Understanding the Te Whariki Approach

Early years education in practice

Wendy Lee, Margaret Carr, Brenda Soutar, Linda Mitchell

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780415617123
• eBook ISBN: 9781135119720
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Early Childhood Education

Understanding the Te Wh?riki Approach is a much–needed source of information for those wishing to extend and consolidate their understanding of the Te Wh?riki approach, introducing the reader to an innovative bicultural curriculum developed for early childhood services in New Zealand. It will enable the reader to analyse the essential elements of this approach to early childhood and its relationship to quality early years practice.

Providing students and practitioners with the relevant information about a key pedagogical influence on high quality early years practice in the United Kingdom, the book explores all areas of the curriculum, emphasising:

• strong curriculum connections to families and the wider community;
• a view of teaching and learning that focuses on responsive and reciprocal relationships with people, places and things;
• a view of curriculum content as cross-disciplinary and multi-modal;
• the aspirations for children to grow up as competent and confident learners and communicators, healthy in mind, body, and spirit, secure in their sense of belonging and in the knowledge that they make a valued contribution to society;
• a bicultural framework in which indigenous voices have a central place.

Written to support the work of all those in the field of early years education and childcare, this is a vital text for students, early years and childcare practitioners, teachers, early years professionals, children's centre professionals, lecturers, advisory teachers, head teachers and setting managers.

1

Setting the Stage for Te Whāriki

From England, Margy Whalley writes:

Cultural defamiliarisation (Tobin, 2009 p.159) has been extremely important for those of us working at Pen Green, a fully integrated centre for children and their families. Several of our original team, the pioneers who set up the centre in 1983, had worked in majority world cultures, had experience of a range of pedagogical approaches and had worked in diverse settings in this country and overseas. When staff began to visit nurseries in Denmark and Italy in the 1990s we learnt to appreciate just how much of what was taken for granted in the UK as being ‘good practice’ in Early Years provision was culturally determined. It was not until we visited New Zealand 10 years later that we felt we had found a curriculum framework and pedagogical approach that really made sense to children, families and practitioners. We were lucky enough to work with powerful colleagues from New Zealand who shared unreservedly the emerging Te Whāriki framework in all its different stages. We loved the fact that the framework was an emerging document, co-constructed at every step with practitioners, written in an engaging style but with lyrical prose and focusing on the things we thought were absolutely critical: a bicultural approach, an approach that focused on the child within the family context and with a central concern for children’s dispositions to learn. We owe our New Zealand colleagues a debt of gratitude for the powerful materials that they have produced. The Te Whāriki curriculum has had a huge impact on practice in our setting and across the UK.

Introduction

Each of the books in this Routledge ‘Understanding’ series so far has described approaches to early childhood education (ECE) that link theory to pedagogy in a particular practice. This book describes an example of an early childhood national curriculum, Te Whāriki, that makes these links. It is also an official description of young learners with an explicit view about the nation in which they will become citizens. This book therefore has three tasks to enable the reader to begin the journey of understanding Te Whāriki. The first of these is to set out the contextual, cultural and historical features that underpinned and influenced the development and implementation of Te Whāriki as the national early childhood curriculum for Aotearoa New Zealand.¹ The second task is to describe the principles, pedagogies and early childhood practices that have arisen from those features. The third task is to signal the ways in which some of those principles, pedagogies and early childhood practices can be recontextualised so that they might become interesting and useful for discussions about early childhood practice elsewhere. All three tasks or agendas are interwoven through the book.

The aim of this Routledge series, as we see it, is to provoke dialogue, debate and experimentalism (Moss, 2009). In Aotearoa New Zealand we are still exploring new ways to implement Te Whāriki, and we hope in this book to provide enough material for lively discussions about the ways that this approach can inform short, medium and long-term practices and visions here and elsewhere. This chapter introduces the first of the above three tasks: setting out the contextual, cultural and historical features that underpin and influence the development and implementation of Te Whāriki. At the end of the chapter we invite readers to contemplate these features of their own curriculum.

New Zealand’s History is Important for an Understanding of Te Whāriki

Aotearoa New Zealand is a small, geographically remote island country located in the southern Pacific Ocean. It was the last country in the world to be discovered and settled. Eastern Polynesian migrants came in canoe groups probably in the thirteenth century AD, although some historians put the date earlier than this (King, 2003). Māori were the first settlers and are the indigenous people of Aotearoa New Zealand. It was not until 1769, after its rediscovery by British Royal Navy Lieutenant James Cook, that Europeans set foot on the land and soon after began settling here.

With a population of 4.5 million it is similar in size to Finland (5.5 million) and Singapore (5 million), countries whose school reforms have been of interest in the educational world (Luke, 2011; Sahlberg, 2010). Allan Luke comments on the relative success of these curriculum models (including Ontario, Canada):

The stories of Singapore, Finland, and Ontario are not about the triumph of scientific methods. They are not about the triumph of markets, or successful standardization. They are about cultural and governmental settlements, about durable historical, social, and cultural commitments to particular forms of education and, indeed, forms of life (Luke, 2011 p.374).

There are some features of these settlements and commitments in the Te Whāriki story, and the historical, social and cultural history of Aotearoa New Zealand is relevant to an understanding. This country had become a self-governing democracy in 1856 and in 1893 was the first in the world to give women the vote. It was called the social laboratory of the world for its welfare state policies following the Great Depression of the 1930s. These values are reflected in Te Whāriki’s focus on equity and respect for children’s rights (and responsibilities), together with the aim of supporting children growing up in a democracy in which they will make a contribution. The aspiration statement at the beginning of the document says that ‘The curriculum is founded on the following aspirations for children: To grow up as competent and confident learners and communicators, healthy in mind, body and spirit, secure in their sense of belonging and in the knowledge that they make a valued contribution to society’.

The curriculum looks ahead to citizens who can make responsible and informed choices, respect the ideas and beliefs of others, include diversity in their world-view and have an understanding of both major cultures and languages of the country. The treaty between Māori and the British Crown, Te Tiriti o Waitangi, signed in 1840 (see Chapter 3) was to provide the foundation for a country with three official languages, Māori, English and NZ Sign, and a vision of a bicultural society. Te Whāriki is a bilingual document in English and Māori. Valuing and promoting diversity and upholding Māori rights to tino rangatiratanga (authority over their lives and resources) can be seen both in the story of the development of Te Whāriki and the story of the growth of early childhood care and education (ECCE) provision in Aotearoa New Zealand. A theme of this book is that the Te Whāriki approach is not a series of strategies or outcomes that can be taken on elsewhere without a close look at the social and cultural infrastructure that supports and surrounds early childhood services. New Zealand has had a tradition of social welfare policies with a vision of equity and opportunity, a bicultural treaty with Māori that includes te reo as a ‘taonga’ (treasure),² a commitment to public education and a cultural belief in the power of creativity and improvisation: early settlers – Māori, Pākehā (see glossary) and migrants from Pacific island nations – adapted to a very different environment in innovative and skilful ways. Early European immigrants in the nineteenth century could shrug off some of the class constraints of ‘home’ to develop hybrid identities that included new opportunities for crafting their own life journeys.

Diversity of Services

The stories of early childhood in Aotearoa New Zealand are eloquently told by Helen May, and readers will find in her histories – The Discovery of Early Childhood (1997), Politics in the Playground (2009), and I Am Five and I Go to School (2011) – a wealth of stories and details that make the history come alive and position early childhood inside the wider lenses of education, society and culture, internationally and nationally.

A diversity of ECE provision preceded the development of Te Whāriki. ECE in Aotearoa New Zealand covers the period from birth to school starting age (usually at the age of 5 years, but compulsory at the age of 6). The various and distinctive types of early childhood services mostly developed from community and parent initiatives in response to a particular need within their social and political context. In the last two decades this strong community basis has shifted somewhat as a growing number of business owners have set up centre-based or home-based childcare services. The diversity of provision and freedom of philosophy has been staunchly upheld in Aotearoa New Zealand. Enabling multiple curricula within a common framework also became one of the aims in the curriculum development process. Recently, for policy purposes, the ECE services have been categorised broadly as teacher-led and parent/whānau-led to differentiate between how the services operate and are funded. These are briefly introduced below.

Teacher-Led Services

A teacher-led service is one where one or more qualified teachers are responsible for the overall programme in the service. They are required to have a person responsible who is a registered, ECE qualified teacher and meets the government’s teacher registration targets. All teacher-led services are working towards a policy of an 80% qualified (with the quivalent of a 3-year degree or diploma) teaching team. Education and care centres (childcare centres) cater for the largest number of children and offer full day, sessional or half day provision. These cater for children from birth to the school starting age. Chapter 4 includes a case study of Te Whāriki in an education and care centre. Kindergartens have traditionally been sessional services for 3-year-old and 4-year-old children. Many are now expanding their hours in response to community needs, including those of working women, and funding incentives; they have moved recently to school day or full day provision and often include children under 3 years of age. Chapter 5 includes a case study of Te Whāriki in a kindergarten.

Home-based services (family daycare) tend to be flexible, providing an educator to work with children in the educator’s home or the child’s home at hours to suit parents. The correspondence school is a distance service and the only one that is directly provided by the state.

Parent/Whānau-Led Services

Kōhanga reo (Māori immersion language nests) were established in 1982 and have been described as ‘the most vigorous and innovative educational movement in this country (dare I say in the world)’ (Reedy, 2003, p.65). These offer total immersion in Māori and are managed by whānau (the extended family). The kōhanga reo philosophy centres on fostering Māori language and cultural identity as well as self-determination. A core aim is ‘passing on the Māori way of life to future generations’ (Government Review Team, 1988, p.19). Most kōhanga reo operate for 30 or more hours per week. Chapter 3 tells more of this story, and Chapter 6 provides a case study of Te Whāriki in a kōhanga reo.

Playcentres are a uniquely New Zealand service and based on a belief in the family as the most important setting for the care and education of the child. Developed during the Second World War (Somerset, 1976a, 1976b) as a support for mothers, parents undertake all roles, including curriculum implementation, management and administration. Parents are provided with playcentre training, which is education designed to enhance the parents’ understanding of human development and their role as educators of their children (Hill et al., 2000). Chapter 7 includes a case study of Te Whāriki in a playcentre. Sessional playgroups are also run by parents, but they require no training, unlike in playcentres. They are usuall...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Acknowledgements and introduction
• 1. Setting the stage for Te Whāriki
• 2. The development of Te Whāriki
• 3. Cultural identity and language
• 4. Principle one: Ngā honongā/relationships
• 5. Principle two: Kotahitanga/holistic development
• 6. Principle three: Whakamana/empowerment
• 7. Principle four: Whānau tangata/family and community
• 8. Weaving: documentation, assessment and planning
• 9. Teachers as researchers
• 10. The future
• Glossary of Māori terms
• Index