No abstract

Transforming practices in initial teacher education and school and early childhood education contexts to support the success of Pasifika students and children can be challenging. Palagi educators, in particular, may find their practices are constrained by bureaucratic systems, processes and professional norms in ways that limit thinking about and responses to different ways of being and doing. Drawing from the experiences of a diverse group of educators during an educational journey to Samoa led by an esteemed Samoan leader, colleague and mentor, this article argues culturally based pedagogy holds the key to thinking and moving beyond some of these constraints. The article suggests that understanding Pasifika cultural values and integrating these into pedagogy is a critical first step for educators, before concluding with several practice messages. While these messages focus on Pasifika communities, students and children, they can be adapted for other ethnic groups.

In New Zealand, Pacific immigrants are among the fastest growing ethnic minorities but, as a group, they are also at most risk of not realising their literacy and educational aspirations critical for achieving their human potential and wellbeing. This may be due, in part, to a misalignment in the shared understanding of academic success between students, parents and their teachers within largely non-Pacific school environments. This study aims to report levels of agreement in child-mother, child-teacher, and mother-teacher perceptions of Pacific children's academic performance at age 6 years. Method A cohort of Pacific infants born during 2000 in Auckland, New Zealand, was followed as part of the Pacific Islands Families study. Maternal home interviews were conducted at 6-weeks and 6-years postpartum, together with separate child and teacher elicitations at 6-years. Pairwise agreement of academic performance responses was assessed using Cohen's weighted κ statistic, along with symmetry and marginal homogeneity tests. Results At 6-years, information was available for 1,001 children and their mothers, and teachers' evaluations for 549 children. Negligible to slight agreements and significant asymmetry were found between the child-mother (κ = 0.03, 95% CI:-0.03, 0.09), child-teacher (κ = 0.04, 95% CI: 0.01, 0.08), and mother-teacher (κ = 0.07, 95% CI: 0.03, 0.11) pairwise assessments-with children and mothers more likely to rate Pacific children's academic performance higher than their teachers. Significantly higher concordances with teacher assessments were found among mothers with post-secondary education, proficiency in English, and stronger alignment with New Zealand culture and for children who performed strongly on a standardised measure of performance relative to their peers.

Aim: Pacific children fare poorly on health and educational outcomes, including literacy. Early interventions are considered critical in reducing educational disparities. A prediction model was constructed to analyse the factors associated with Pacific children's English receptive vocabulary, an important component of English language development. Methods: A birth cohort study of Pacific children was used to construct a classification tree model and predict the proportions of Pacific children who performed strongly in a standardised test of English receptive vocabulary at 6 years of age (n = 1019). Classification trees were constructed using 10-fold cross-validation (CV) and pruned using the one-standard-error rule. Prediction errors were directly estimated using leaveone-out CV. Results: Analyses of misclassification errors from the pruned model gave false negative and positive rates of 19 and 19% from re-substitution and 54 and 21% from leave-one-out CV estimation, respectively. Of the predictors, maternal acculturation, small birthweight and performance in early developmental screening test at 4 years of age were found to have the highest goodness of split. Conclusions: The cultural environment to which Pacific children were exposed in early childhood, indicated by the maternal acculturation, was more crucial in distinguishing children with strong English-receptive vocabulary skills than socio-economic or prenatal conditions. This highlights the importance of integrating the cultural environment into designing measures for facilitating Pacific children's language development.What is already known on this topic 1 Educational and health outcomes are bi-directional and positively associated. 2 There are persistent disparities in children's educational and health outcomes in most developed countries, and Pacific children are among those worst affected in New Zealand. 3 Pacific children's early language and literacy skills, assessed using conventional literacy school measures, were found to be lower on average than the overall student population, highlighting the need for early interventions. What this paper adds1 Cultural environment was incorporated into a prediction model for Pacific children's English-receptive vocabulary at 6 years of age, and the results emphasise the importance of maternal cultural orientation in distinguishing children with strong Englishreceptive vocabulary skills from those who scored below the age-appropriate range. 2 This suggests the need for cultural considerations when attempting to study Pacific children's language outcomes and when designing and implementing strategies for reducing disparities. 3 Classification trees were constructed, and their performances were analysed, indicating their potential utility and limitations in predicting educational outcomes.Educational and health outcomes are considered inextricably linked and bi-directional. 1 In fact, enhancing equity in educational attainment is seen as one of the most important ways to tackle disparities in health outcomes. 2 Mo...