College of Arts, Society and Education

This article reports on a study of Pacific primary school teachersÕ and university lecturersÕ reflections on their involvement in the in-service Bachelor of Education degree programme offered at the regional University of the South Pacific (USP) in Fiji. Two rich sets of data have emerged from this study. Firstly, there are a number of critical reflections by ourselves as teacher educators concerning levels of equitable student access and participation in our degree as it is reconceptualised for distance and flexible delivery to increase levels of teacher professionalism across the Pacific region. Secondly, there has emerged a set of statements from teachers themselves about: teaching and learning; professional development opportunities; and what it means to be a professional educator in the Pacific region. This later data suggests an alternative set of voices in what has largely been a ''conversation between us about them'' conducted by Ministries of Education, Curriculum Development Units, USP, other educational bodies and the media in the Pacific, but particularly Fiji, about teachers and teachersÕ work. Critical reflection upon our own practice as teacher educators and the voices of experienced teachers are particularly pertinent not only as we seek to reshape a degree programme to suit the needs of the regionÕs primary school teachers but also as ''rethinking'' debates about the purposes of education in the Pacific region are on-going yet exclusive.

This article examines research by postgraduate students in education at the University of the South Pacific (USP) between 1968 and 2009. These experienced educators, who later return to their original education sector to influence policy and practice in some way, are producing new knowledge intimately connected to Pacific education systems. The article identifies broad trends in supervision, growth in completed degrees, research area, and national focus, and makes some comparisons with similar research in New Zealand. The article also focuses on how students position their research theoretically, using Lather's research paradigm typology. The analysis indicates that many of these projects are positioned within an interpretivist paradigm, a few within positivist and emancipationist paradigms, and none at all within deconstructivist paradigms. The authors suggest that a Pacific education system underpinned by socially-critical theoretical perspectives, particularly deconstructive ones, can better respond to the twin challenges of creating universal and equitable access to education and arresting the loss of language, culture, identity, and life skills via rapid globalization.

ABSTRACT The article draws on the elements of poststructural theory to explore the mismatches and alignments in language and literacy teaching discourses in urban Fijian primary schools. More specifically, it compares the liberal progressivism of whole language and literacy pedagogies with the culturalism that informs a key reading resource in the teaching of literacy and language. The constitution of urban Fijian childhoods emerging from these two major discourses is then compared with several cohorts of urban Fijian children’s own accounts of their lives. Major discursive mismatches and alignments between these discourses and the children’s own expressed life ways are noted. Where alignments exist between sets of discourses, children’s language and literacy development are more likely facilitated. However, where mismatches occur, there are implications not only for children’s effective language and literacy learning but also for more equitable access to language and literacy pedagogies for all Fijian children.

This paper examines thesis acknowledgements written by Pacific students who have done education research as part of their Masters or Doctor of Philosophy degrees. Thesis acknowledgements, including dedications, altogether different by genre to the main body of the thesis, are a source of insight into postgraduate student identity construction as well as the research experience itself. Insights gained into the study experience serve to provide better support for students undertaking postgraduate study in education in the Pacific region. Better support is critical as these mainly middle to late career educators return after study to their Pacific education sectors of origin to influence in more positive ways the implementation of education in those places. The flow of postgraduate research students back into Pacific education communities after completing their programmes is a significant yet under-researched conduit of educational change in the Pacific region. This paper reports on a ...

This article reports on a preliminary study of five primary school teachers who taught through the years of ethnic conflict between 1998 and 2003 on Guadalcanal in the Solomon Islands. It is grounded in a belief in local experienced teachers’ intimate understanding of their own teaching contexts and their ability to persevere in difficult circumstances. The teachers voices, like those of teachers elsewhere in the Pacific region, are barely audible amid a cacophony of educational discourses (Smyth, 2001) authored by a variety of groups both within and outside the Pacific community that tend to disavow teachers’ lived experiences and understandings. The articulation of these voices in this article, firstly, affirms the professionalism of Solomon Island teachers and, secondly, opens up understanding of conflict as it relates to teaching and learning in the Pacific region. It is hoped that this study will also contribute to a more informed understanding of how conflict related trauma im...

This paper explores the nature of postgraduate research in the broad area of Pacific
education completed in New Zealand universities. First, a number of basic trends
are identified in terms of institutional affiliation, area of educational research,
MA and PhD balance, growth over time, national/ethnic focus and the expected
beneficiaries of the research. Secondly, and more significantly, trends in the
theorisation of Pacific postgraduate education research are identified using a
positivist-interpetivist-emancipationist-deconstructivist paradigm typology as a
basis for analysis, in particular the degree to which the latter two research
perspectives have been embraced. It is argued that research done within
emancipationist and deconstructionist paradigms has the most socially
transformative potential. The completion of socially transformative educational
research is significant given increasing calls from within Pacific communities to
decolonise and re-indigenise both educational research agendas as well as
systems of Pacific primary and secondary schooling influenced by educational
research. The paper demonstrates, however, that very little emancipationary and
deconstructivist education research has been completed. This apparent mismatch
is explored in the light of the wider competing educational discourses of Pacific
colonisation and indigenisation.

This paper is part of a larger project in which we are interested in producing forms of system-based and other government agency data as a basis for understanding the phenomena associated with the gaining, training and retaining teachers in rural and remote NSW -the ARC Linkage project entitled the "Rural [Teacher] Education project (R[T]EP)". Our position is that more than inducements need to be identified to attract teachers to the bush and keep them there. In this paper we consider the issues associated with what data are most useful and how these data might be presented in responding to our research questions. Technical issues are discussed. In the paper we present examples of processes and protocols to obtain access to educational and sociological data and suggest ways they might be utilised to more ably equip teachers for life and work in rural NSW schools and their communities. The issues of public data and public knowledge emerge as generate ideas for our analysis.

ABSTRACT English literacy competence in the Central Pacific Republic of Kiribati is considered important for employment, overseas study and general engagement with a globalizing world. It is also considered as a key factor in the current government's response to climate change and sea level rise, enabling skilled relocation of I-Kiribati to other countries if necessary. This article synthesizes a range of literature sources based on Kiribati literacy education to highlight: a general perception that English literacy standards are in decline; the role of the teacher in addressing that decline; pedagogical approaches to teaching literacy, particularly the historic swing from a highly structured and socially conservative teacher-centred approach to that of a very liberal student-centred approach; and the reliance on Australian and NZ educational aid and consultancy in literacy education. These issues require further debate and investigation in light of unique development problems in Kiribati marked by: rural to urban drift; an increasingly youthful population; limited employment possibilities, and eventual possible large-scale repatriation due to sea level rise. The article tentatively suggests an approach to literacy education based on a four resources model that balances teacher and learner-centredness with socio-cultural and political aspects of literacy.

Desires for relevant, locally-determined social futures in the Pacific region are often made contingent upon a view of the colonial past that re-asserts Pacific agency, culture and identity, albeit in an often singular and essentialised form. These views of the Pacific past, understandably perhaps, have emerged in response to a perceived erasure in the dominant colonial historical record of local Pacific institutions, social structures, values, cultures and identities. This chapter rejects historical colonial erasure where it still exists, but also calls for caution in re-thinking familiar contemporary Pacific institutions, such as schooling, using simplistic singular and essentialised views of the Pacific past as a basis. The tensions between historical discourses of reduction and erasure, ‘one-ness’ and ‘nothingness’ and debates about new Pacific futures are illustrated well in the call to re-indigenise Pacific education systems and the accompanying focus on so called Pacific epis...

The experiences of students from Pacific backgrounds at the University of Otago, marked in part by problems of achievement and retention, are similar to those faced by Pacific students elsewhere in New Zealand’s tertiary sector and also in the education sector generally. However, there are some differences in both the study and wider social context of Otago and its location in the south of New Zealand’s South Island, and, according to results from a small student experience study, a difference in the cohort of students itself that may call for a different means of addressing student needs. This article examines the context of tertiary study for Pacific students in New Zealand’s south and some of the popular culturalist frameworks put forward for understanding and addressing Pacific student need in the education sector generally. The southern study context as well as student self-reported study experiences demonstrate the need for a set of frameworks that are more sensitive to the di...

This paper makes a case for exploring underlying anxieties and desires possessed by final year teaching students prior to seeking employment in New Zealand schools. Anxieties and desires are understood in terms of ‘teaching’s intimacies’ (McConaghy, 2006), that is, the often unconscious and thus unspoken and unexplored feelings pre-service teachers have toward their teaching futures. Following calls by McConaghy (2006: 64), the reflections of at times controversial New Zealand educator Sylvia Ashton-Warner on her ‘inner life’ as a teacher, serve as both a type and a stimulus for the type of teacher reflection education students might also productively engage in. Reflective teacher practice of this type seeks to bridge the gap between the public and private worlds of teaching degree students during a significant period in their process of becoming teachers, the final year of their degrees. Reflection in this sense involves a greater ethic of care for the teaching self by addressing t...

This article examines the theoretical foundations for the teaching of language and literacy in the Pacific region’s primary schools. While there has been an increasing uptake of critical pedagogies and literacies in Pacific Rim countries such as Australia, North and South America and New Zealand this has not been the case within the Pacific region itself. There is a marked resistance from indigenous and Pacific educators, researchers as well as policy makers to ground language and literacy teaching practices within a socially critical tradition. This reluctance is explored in the light of popular Pacific-led policy responses to colonial discourses that seek to re-claim and re-insert Pacific vernaculars into formal school curriculum. The article also explores old, but lingering, colonial discourses of schooling in the region that support the teaching of language and literacy in mainly liberal progressive ways. In the analysis a number of colonial and contemporary language and literac...

This article briefly discusses values and values in education. It represents an attempt to move the debates past those common in the Fiji media that tend to simplistically point the blame at schools and teachers for perceived drops in standards of societal civility, politeness and respect. Rather than directly teaching a prescribed set of core values the article examines the nature of values and change and the underlying reasons for values difference in our communities. Teachers need to negotiate a diverse range of value positions in their day to day work with the children in their care. The article suggests a 'critical' approach to values education that aims to teach children how values arise in the community and how they circulate. This critical approach to values in schools, it is believed, is best suited to the climate of change and diversity, increasingly key markers of contemporary Pacific life.

The present secondary education system in Kiribati is little changed from its establishment and growth through the colonial years, and is marked by a heavy emphasis on English language and an academic western curriculum with the aim of placing students in white collar civil service employment. There appears to be little desire for change with most educational stakeholders seeming to give consent to the system. This article critiques the dominant voices in the educational and colonial past in Kiribati with a view to exposing the legitimising technologies and discursive practices that shape the post-colonial condition of education. Presented here is a postcolonial discourse analysis of the contradictory liberalism, articulated in key texts, that began to inform educational decision-making after the Second World War. Examined are the ways in which dominant voices perceived themselves and the I-Kiribati other, the power differential between the two and their tendency to silence other voices and ways of talking about education. The act of exposing 'how they did it' helps create the conditions for more just educational futures in Kiribati, as well as offering an alternative to popular culturalist perspectives on rethinking education in the Pacific.