Kaupapa Māori Assessment: Reclaiming, Reframing and Realising Māori Ways of Knowing and Being Within Early Childhood Education Assessment Theory and Practice

Abstract

The history of schooling for Māori has been one of cultural dislocation, deprivation and subjugation. Māori children were viewed as outside the norms of development suffering from “intellectual retardation” which was attributed to disabilities related to acculturation. Traditional western assessment served to further these Eurocentric power ideologies that marginalise non-European peoples and cultures, such as Māori, as backward, inferior and deviant. Kaupapa (philosophical) Māori assessment can be viewed as an assessment approach that is derived from the Māori world, from a Māori epistemological perspective that assumes the normalcy of Māori values, understandings and behaviours. The validity and legitimacy of Māori language, cultural capital, values and knowledge are a given. Kaupapa Māori assessment works to challenge, critique and transform dominant educational perceptions of the Māori child, the nature of learning, pedagogy, and culturally valued learning. This article explores ways that kaupapa Māori assessment builds upon Māori philosophical and epistemological understandings to express Māori understandings of knowledge, knowers and knowings, in order to reclaim, reframe and realise Māori ways of knowing and being within early childhood and assessment theory and practice.

“Climbing the Same Mountain”

“…Rameka (2021: 5) notes a number of "cultural tools, practices, and artefacts, traditionally utilized by Māori to hand down knowledges, worldviews, values, histories, teachings, beliefs, genealogies, and arts to successive generations". These "transmission techniques" include whakataukī which are a means of transmitting wisdom and knowledge (Riley, 1990(Riley, , 2020Patterson, 1992;Hemara, 2000;Rameka, 2013Rameka, , 2016, and, as with proverbs in other cultures (see e.g., Lalengkimi, 2018;Ademowo and Balogun, 2014), they highlight valued characteristics, personal virtues, ways of behaving, life lessons, and appropriate courses of action (Rameka, 2016(Rameka, , 2021Mieder and Dundes, 1981;Elder, 2020). In this context, as a contribution to a special issue on proverbs across cultures, Lomotey and Csajbok-Twerefou (2021) provide a valuable theoretical discussion, focussing on issues surrounding the pragmatics encapsulated in these proverbs.…”

Building Indigenous knowledge: Exploring the Pedagogy of Māori knowledge in the Digital Computing Information Technology Tertiary Sector of New Zealand

“…http://ejournals.library.ualberta.ca/index.php/JCIE 100 those from the non-culture, with assessment outcomes favouring the former (p. 1). Kaupapa Māori Assessment as described by Rameka (2021) is intrinsic to te ao Māori, incumbering all epistemological and ontological Māori philosophies. As a result, kaupapa Māori assessments will be tricky to create in the IT sector because of the interconnected Māori philosophies, and Māori IT academics are in short supply (see Table 4).…”

Ethical relationality, TribalCrit, and autobiographical narrative inquiry: Imagining coming alongside Indigenous children

“…We build this process into our syllabi, and we give examples from our practices as teacher educators and from when we taught in grade school and our everyday lives. As the term unfolds, we engage in term-long reflective thinking as we co-inquire into assessment as an aspect of teaching, how assessment is related to identity making, and how assessment, as a result of colonial narratives that still dominate in schools and universities, privileges certain ways of knowing, being, and doing while silencing or attempting to change or exterminate other ways (Bouvier and Karlenzig, 2006;Rameka, 2007Rameka, , 2021Claypool and Preston, 2011;Huber et al, 2011Huber et al, , 2022Young et al, 2012;Peltier, 2017Peltier, , 2021Ball, 2021;Preston and Claypool, 2021;Shultz and Englert, 2021;Stavrou, 2021;Brown, 2022;Steinhauer, 2022;Tulloch et al, 2022;White, 2022). Our process of reflection begins as we explore curriculum making (Clandinin and Connelly, 1992), and interrogate how curriculum making, assessment making, and identity making are connected (Murphy, 2010;Huber et al, 2011;Swanson, 2013Swanson, , 2014Swanson, , 2019Houle, 2015;Lessard, 2015).…”