Reimagining teacher subjectivity in Pacific early childhood education in New Zealand

Abstract

This article presents a transnational Moana talanoa 1 between two Pacific early childhood education scholars. Calling on both Samoan and Tongan indigenous understandings that breathe life into a Moana subjectivity is inclusive of ways of knowing, relating and becoming. We turn our attention to the importance of talanoa (stories/storying) in reconstituting olaga 2 and tangata kakato 3 in the act of decolonising Pacific 4 personhood in New Zealand early childhood education. Moana, the waters that bind Pacific peoples through genealogy, relationality and cosmogony, generate intersubjectivity; a folding of past-present-futures. It is in the spirit of Moana that we bring attention to the interconnectedness of subjects in the context of early childhood education in New Zealand. By way of movement in and with Moana, the currents, depth and flows, we problematise politics of early childhood education and professional teacher identity. Such tensions require navigation and as Hawaiian scholar Meyer said: ‘How one knows, indeed, what one prioritises with regards to this knowing, ends up being the stuffing of identity, the truth that links us to our distant cosmologies, and the essence of who we are as Oceanic peoples’ (p. 125). In thinking-Moana-intersubjectivity, we call into question how the agency and subjectivity of teacher identity can be reimagined. We share our narratives through poetry and story as a mode of expression in analysing and decolonising personhood.