The advancement of globalization around the world shifted South Korea’s rapid change into a multicultural society. As a result, the characteristically homogenous school environment in Korea has seen an increase in students from diverse cultural backgrounds. Currently, the total number of multicultural students is 109,387 (1.9%), a large comparative shift from previously when there were solely Korean students in classrooms. In addition, multicultural areas with schools where over 50% of students are multicultural are increasing in Korea. However, because of the national curriculum guidelines in Korea, all classrooms operate in the same way regardless of student backgrounds. The language barrier and other cultural differences pose difficulties for multicultural students to keep up in coursework.
Overall, schools that are accustomed to the traditional national curriculum have difficulties in school reform regardless of the changes in student demographics ratio. However, in an endeavor for school reform, the Gyeonggi Provincial Office of Education has designated for school reform multicultural international innovation schools where multicultural students make up over 30% of the students. These schools have at least 50% autonomy in curricula, whereas other Korean schools have to follow the national school curricula. There are three elementary school curricula designed as multicultural international innovation schools in Gyeonggi-do. This article examines school reform in a multicultural society by focusing on how three primary schools are designated as multicultural international reform schools.
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School Reform for Multicultural Society in South Korea
Insil Chang and Lydia Harim Ahn
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Science Education in Classrooms and Qualitative Research in Latin America
Antonia Candela and Gabriela Naranjo
There are several different ways of understanding ethnography. On one extreme there are studies that use certain “ethnographic techniques” for practice observation, and on the other, there is the assumption that it is a complex theoretical-methodological framework that implies an ideological, political, and sociocultural approach, in order to describe the perspective of the participants. A third perspective seeks to broaden the understanding of the complex construction of scientific knowledge in the classroom. Surveys can unearth a clear tension between the etic and emic approaches, each one related to the theoretical-methodological allegiances of their researchers which can be modified somewhat through their findings. A future inquiry into the complex and heterogeneous contexts of Latin American classrooms can suggest a way to bridge macro with micro contexts of different socioeconomic and cultural and political conditions. Other growing topics that could be developed more thoroughly in the future are, for example, the multimodality of communication processes within the classroom, and studies on scientific education from an intercultural perspective, particularly considering the debt we have with the 50 million indigenous people in our region in taking into account their cultural perspectives and contributions to knowledge.
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Seeding Rightful Presence and Reframing Equity in STEM Education With Historically Minoritized Communities
Edna Tan and Angela Calabrese Barton
Equity as inclusion maintains as settled the epistemological, ontological, and axiological bases of Western STEM. (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics) In exchange for participation in Western STEM, historically underrepresented and minoritized people in STEM need to deny salient aspects of their epistemologies, ontologies, and axiologies in order to assimilate into Western STEM culture. The existing structures in STEM and STEM education, built for White middle class heteropatriarchal norms, have alienated and oppressed minoritized youth of color. In response, a framework has been proposed, called “rightful presence,” for justice-oriented teaching and learning to critique and perturb the guest–host relationality operating in most STEM classrooms. The rightful presence framework is undergirded by three tenets: (a) allied political struggle is necessary to disciplinary learning; (b) rightfulness is claimed through making justice and injustice visible; and (c) collective disruption of guest–host relationalities amplify sociopolitical engagements. A case study from a 6th grade engineering project called the “Happy Box,” illustrates how these three tenets worked together to support students’ desires to address a community-identified problem—low student morale related to LGBTQ2S+ bullying—with rigorous engineering practices. How students came to frame the community issue and their iterative engineering process in prototyping the “Happy Box” illustrated the expansive epistemologies, ontologies, and axiologies made legitimate and important in 6th grade STEM teaching and learning. It is important to pay attention to both temporal and spatial dimensions when engaging in rightful presence sociopolitical work of surfacing injustices in STEM education. The process of disruption involves taking both a temporal (past-present-future) and spatial lens (spaces in which one may engage in STEM-related activities, in which contexts, and with whom). A temporal and spatial dual focus allows for making STEM-related justices visible across space and time that have a cumulative impact on how historically minoritized students might engage with STEM in the present. One way to keep our focus on both the temporal and spatial is to engage in community ethnography as pedagogy. Community ethnography as pedagogy involves: (a) an anchoring stance that community knowledge is valuable and essential to disciplinary learning; (b) a repertoire of pedagogical moves that support teacher–student, student–student, and student–community interactions in ways that identify, invite, integrate, and build on students’ community-based knowledge and embodied experiences; and (c) tools that position teachers and students as colearners of a community-identified, STEM-related phenomenon. Thus framed, community ethnography as pedagogy eschews the ideology of equity as inclusion with an eye toward new, justice-oriented social futures in youth-STEM relevant spaces and experiences. Allying with youth and community members in sociopolitical struggles is not an easy undertaking. Sustained efforts are required to make youth’s lives, communities, histories, presents, and hoped for futures visible and integral to reimagining what engaging with STEM education is and could be.
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Selection Methods and Professional Development of School Leaders in Greece
Evageloula A. Papadatou
The effective operation of a school unit relies on various factors, the most critical of which is leadership, as it this which shapes the working environment through which the school succeeds or fails. Indeed, an effective leader can inspire vision and promote educational policy in the interests of the school and other stakeholders. This leadership role in schools is undertaken by head teachers, who are called to act as supervisors of the school’s human resources in parallel with their purely administrative work. In order for school leaders to achieve these outcomes, however, they must be adequately trained so as to be competent in undertaking the arduous task of leading a school unit. Consequently, in order for school leaders to carry out their daunting tasks successfully—in other words, achieve the best possible results with the fewest sacrifices and least effort—they must possess certain knowledge and aptitudes.
For this reason, the staffing of the school units in any country (and hence in Greece) with capable school leaders should be the top priority of the State, while measures should be taken to ensure that the processes for selecting school leaders and for their professional development remain objective and systematic, if the country intends to implement an educational policy efficiently and effectively. Taking into account that the school leader is not born but becomes, and that school leaders are central to the administration of a country’s educational system, it is vital that a system of selection and development of schools’ head teachers be institutionalized.
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Sensuous Curriculum
Walter S. Gershon
Education is a sensory experience. This is the case regardless how a sensorium is constructed. A sensorium is how a group defines, categorizes, and conceptualizes the senses, a Western five-senses model for example. Regardless of the sociocultural norms and values a sensorium engenders, animals, human and nonhuman alike, experience their lives through the senses. From this perspective, anything that might be considered educational, regardless of context and irrespective of questions of what might “count” as schooling, is a sensory experience. Sensuous curriculum sits at the intersection of two transdisciplinary fields, curriculum and sensory studies. As its name suggests, sensuous curriculum is an expression of ongoing critical educational studies of, with, and through the senses. In so doing, sensuous curriculum brings to the fore the extraordinary nature of everyday experiences in educational ecologies, from entangled sociocultural norms and values to the ways that sensory input and interpretation inform every aspect of educational ways of being, knowing, and doing. Sensoria have always been tools for understandings, particularly for continually marginalized groups whose claims are often dismissed through Western, Eurocentric framings. For the notion and instantiation of framings require both a set of universally understood constructs and their applications as well as the necessity of the act: when framing, someone or something is always framed. Providing critical tools for the interruption of such constructs and their use, sensuous curriculum is a rich site of study in ways that are theoretically and materially significant, while offering often underutilized trajectories for the exploration of educational understandings.
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Social Sciences Education in New Zealand Schools
Genaro Oliveira and Bronwyn Wood
Prior to colonization, tangata whenua (people of the land) in Aotearoa (New Zealand) developed robust knowledge traditions. Formal social sciences education in New Zealand began with the schooling system introduced by European settlers in the late 19th century. It has been subject to recurrent review and reform since its foundation. The Education Act of 1877 led to the first formal national curriculum that introduced geography and history teaching in primary schools. During the first half of the 20th century, social sciences education in New Zealand saw a greater emphasis on citizenship education due to increasing migration and geopolitical changes resulting from the two world wars. Enduring and contentious curricular changes would follow the recommendations of the Thomas Report (1944), which introduced social studies in secondary schools as a new integrated school subject to promote learning across the social sciences.
Since the 1990s, the social sciences have been named as one of New Zealand’s eight curriculum learning areas. Social studies (junior social sciences) remain as a core integrated subject taught compulsorily from years 1 to 10 (primary, intermediate, and junior secondary years), while a suite of discrete social sciences disciplines is optional for students at senior secondary levels (years 11–13). For almost 80 years, social sciences curricula have been the primary vehicle for citizenship education. The most recent curricular reforms have emphasized the importance of Mātauranga Māori (indigenous knowledge) to promote culturally-responsive social sciences learning in commitment to Aotearoa New Zealand’s bicultural foundations.
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Sociocultural Factors and the Global Goals of Education for All
Eric A. Hurley
All over the world, nations have spent much of the last 20 years scrambling to increase and improve access to basic education. Globally, the number of people without access to a basic education has fallen significantly in the years since the goals of Education For All (EFA) were announced in 2000 at the World Education Forum in Dakar, Senegal, and extended at Incheon, South Korea, in 2016. This is ostensibly very good news. While universal access to a basic education is certainly a worthy goal, one can raise significant questions about the orientation of these efforts and the manner in which they are being pursued. For example, very little attention seems to have been paid to what the schools are or will be like, or to how the nations and people they must serve may be different from those for whom they were designed.
To understand the inevitable problems that flow from this potential mismatch, it is useful to examine education in nations that have achieved more or less universal access to basic education. Many of the educational, social, economic, and social justice disparities that plague those nations are today understood as natural effects of the educational infrastructures in operation. Examination of recent empirical research and practice that attends to the importance of social and cultural factors in education may allow nations that are currently building or scaling up access to head off some predictable and difficult problems before they become endemic and calcified on a national scale. Nations who seize the opportunity to build asset-based and culturally responsive pedagogies into their educational systems early on may, in time, provide the rest of the world with much needed leadership on these issues.
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Sociocultural Perspectives in Science Education
Sara Tolbert, Paulina Grino, and Tenzin Sonam
Since the late 20th century, scholarship in science education has made considerable shifts from cognitive psychology and individual constructivism toward sociocultural theories of science education as frameworks for science teaching and learning. By and large, this scholarship has attended to the ways in which both doing and learning science are embedded within sociocultural contexts, whereby learners are enculturated into scientific practices through classroom-based or scientific learning communities, such as through an apprenticeship model. Still, science education theories and practice do not systematically take into account the experiences, interests, and concerns of marginalized student groups within science and science education. Critical sociocultural perspectives in science education take up issues and questions of how science education can better serve the interests of marginalized groups, while simultaneously creating spaces for marginalized groups to transform the sciences, and science education.
These shifts in science education scholarship have been accompanied by a similar shift in qualitative research methods. Research methods in science education are transitioning from a focus on positivistic content analysis of learners’ conceptions of core ideas in science, toward more robust qualitative methods—such as design experimentation, critical ethnography, and participatory research methods—that show how learners’ identities are constituted with the complex spaces of science classrooms, as well as within larger societal matrices of oppression. The focus of this article is to communicate these recent trends in sociocultural perspectives on science education theory, research, and practice.
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Sonic Ethnography in Theory and Practice
Walter S. Gershon
As its name suggests, sonic ethnography sits at the intersection of studies of sound and ethnographic methodologies. This methodological category can be applied to interpretive studies of sound, ethnographic studies that foreground sound theoretically and metaphorically, and studies that utilize sound practices similar to those found in forms of audio recording and sound art, for example. Just as using ocular metaphors or video practices does not make an ethnographic study any more truthful, the use of sonic metaphors or audio recording practices still requires the painstaking, ethical, reflexivity, time, thought, analysis, and care that are hallmarks for strong ethnographies across academic fields and disciplines. Similarly, the purpose of sonic ethnography is not to suggest that sound is any more real or important than other sensuous understandings but is instead to underscore the power and potential of the sonic for qualitative researchers within and outside of education. A move to the sonic is theoretically, methodologically, and practically significant for a variety of reasons, not least of which are (a) its ability to interrupt ocular pathways for conceptualizing and conducting qualitative research; (b) for providing a mode for more actively listening to local educational ecologies and the wide variety of things, processes, and understandings of which they are comprised; (c) ethical and more transparent means for expressing findings; and (d) a complex and deep tool for gathering, analyzing, and expressing ethnographic information. In sum, sonic ethnography opens a world of sound possibilities for educational researchers that at once deepen and provide alternate pathways for understanding everyday educational interactions and the sociocultural contexts that help render those ways of being, doing, and knowing sensible.
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Southern Theory and Postcolonial Comparative Education
Mousumi Mukherjee
Since the late 1960s and early 1970s, there has been a great deal of criticism of the colonial heritage of early ethnographic research. In the first decade of the twenty-first century, scholars have also raised concerns also about the colonial heritage of comparative education. Erwin Epstein defined comparative education as “the application of the intellectual tools of history and social sciences to understand international issues of education.” Hence it is important for comparative education as a global field of study to engage with the recent debates in social sciences to generate deeper understanding about educational problems embedded within specific international contexts. The dominance of Northern theory in analyzing research data from the Global South has been increasingly critiqued by scholars in a number of scholarly publications since Raewyn Connell published her book Southern Theory in 2008. They have argued that Northern theory arising out of the colonial metropole is provincial in nature and, therefore, provides incomplete interpretation of data and generates misunderstanding or limited understanding of social phenomenon occurring in the hybrid contexts of the Global South. Therefore, lately scholars have been debating about postcolonial comparative education to argue for the relevance of Southern theory in conducting postcolonial comparative education research for both analytic (ideological), as well as hermeneutic (affective historical) engagement with research data. Drawing on the methodological insights from an empirical case study, this article demonstrates why Southern theory drawing on Tagore’s philosophy of education was found more suitable to analyze research data arising out of a case study designed to conduct an institutional ethnography in a particular international context. It demonstrates how contextually relevant Southern theory helped to provide deeper comparative understanding (verstehen) of a social phenomenon, i.e. inclusive pedagogic work of an old colonial school within a particular historical, geopolitical and cultural context in postcolonial India.
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Special Education and Gender in the United States
Nickie Coomer and Chelsea Stinson
Historically, Western hegemonic order has been established through cultivating and legitimating social categories of difference. Schools, among other institutions, reinforce difference through marking ability, race, and gender to signify which bodies are productive, deficient, or dangerous and therefore in need of control. This process of differentiation and control is evident in the social, political, and education contexts of disabled youth whose race, gender, and sexuality are read, controlled, and resisted through policy and pedagogy. Through the processes of hypervisiblity, pathologization, and underserving of Black girls in schools, and especially within special education, this animates the nexus of gender, race, and disability.
Parallels are drawn to paradigms of the female body and femininity, where difference is constructed as inferior to the normative male body. Similarly, special education policy, practice, and literature conceptualize disability as subtractive difference, wherein what is considered a “deficit” relies on a subtractive interpretation of a normative body or a normative way of being. In this regard, disability, gender—and, crucially, race—are often thought of as a negative departure from a normalized embodiment. In special education, such normalized, essentialist approaches to gender, race, and disability contribute to the disproportionate overidentification of some social identities and the underidentification of others, most often along raced and gendered lines. Importantly, disabling processes are institutionalized in education through the mechanism of special education, which not only serves as an instructional and academic response to a student’s disability but also acts as an institutional process that determines a student as disabled. The determination of a student having a disability is mediated through law, policy, and interpersonal interaction between school professionals and parents and caregivers. Disproportionate identification has been the focus of research, and studies show that overidentification occurs most often in disability categories that are considered “subjective”: for instance, specific learning disabilities and emotional disturbances. Such identification has an impact on students’ learning; opportunities to interact with their peers in general education settings; access to high quality, challenging curriculum; and opportunities to engage critical thinking in educational activities that go beyond direct instruction. Disabling processes in schools related to the intersection of disability, gender, and race, in particular, are mediated by the local, cultural interactions of school personnel and are evident in the ways in which Black girls, in particular, are disabled in school.
Article
Spirituality and Education in the United States
Roland W. Mitchell, Nicholas E. Mitchell, and Chaunda A. Mitchell
Spirituality and education have historically been tightly intertwined concepts. Spirituality is the timeless pursuit by humanity for certainty, understanding, and an abiding connection to each other and the cosmos. Education represents humanity’s efforts at grouping practices, insights, and often contested knowledges in such a manner that they are passed across generations, groups, and communities. The combination of the two reflects humanity’s pursuit at making sense out of the environment.
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STEM Education, Economic Productivity, and Social Justice
David E. Drew
Just as the factory assembly line replaced the farmer’s plow as the symbol of economic productivity at the beginning of the 19th century, so the computer and its software have replaced the assembly line at the beginning of the 21st century. In the United States, and in countries around the world, STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) education has moved front and center in national discussions of both productivity and social justice. This article will include (a) a review of how the world of work has changed, with a special focus on the history and impact of digital technology since ca. 1970; (b) lessons from research about K-12 education—elementary, middle school, and secondary education—and about higher education; and (c) research about how to increase access to education, and facilitate achievement, for those who traditionally have been under-represented in STEM education. Rigorous research has demonstrated how psychological and sociological factors (e.g., self-concepts, instructor expectations, and social support) often make the difference between student success and failure. To fully contextualize consideration of STEM education, many advocate broadening STEM to STEAM by including the arts, or the arts and humanities, in building educational programs.
In today’s world a young person who wishes to secure a better life for himself or herself would be well advised to study STEM. Furthermore, a nation that wishes to advance economically, while reducing the gap between the have’s and the have-not’s, should strengthen its STEM education infrastructure.
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TACKLE: Supporting Learning and Identity Formation in a Native American Community
Lorraine Orosco, Olga Vásquez, and Charles Underwood
Identity development involves complex processes through which individuals enhance their senses and come to understand themselves. This follows in the contextual state of the various cultural demands and the norms of the society. The development of identity could be viewed as a process that is crucial to adolescents and that enables individuals in transiting from childhood dependency into adults responsible of their needs, aspirations, interests, and desires. The process of transition includes a cognitive reorganization in the way the youth think and their relation to other individuals as they mature. Identity development is often associated with adolescence, but it is a continuous process throughout adulthood. It creates a sense of belonging in a bigger and contextual cultural transition. In Native America, universities and indigenous communities have had collaborative work to support learning and identity development among the communities. It has, however, had its share of challenges for a long time as the collaborative processes are complex in nature. One of the collaborative processes in the Native American community was the Technology And Culture Kumeyaay Literacy Education (TACKLE). The historical development of TACKLE as a university–community partnership is described in terms of the emergence of two key strategies—participatory collaborative activity and context embedded change—which came to guide the partners’ interactions as they worked together to bridge their cultural differences in developing the TACKLE program.
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Teacher Education and Refugee Students
Kevin Roxas and Ramona Fruja
Refugee children and youth encounter challenges in the process of resettlement and as they transition to schools. Their needs and specific situations have to be considered both structurally and at individual levels, and their narratives of transition should not be oversimplified, with resettlement as the end point of challenges. Backgrounding these considerations, teachers can be prepared to understand the vast scope of refugee students’ adaptive experience and its impact on educational practice. Teacher education that is attuned to these needs can be informed by several anchoring principles: recognizing the complex educational and sociocultural challenges refugee students face in schools; actively engaging with both conceptualizing and enacting effective practices within and against public school structures; and participating in ongoing reflection and reconceptualization of the tensions that arise in academic and identity work with refugee youth.
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Teacher Education and Whiteness and Whiteness in Teacher Education in the United States
Cheryl E. Matias, Naomi W. Nishi, and Geneva L. Sarcedo
A litany of literature exists on teacher preparation programs, known as teacher education, and whiteness, which is the historical, systematic, and structural processes that maintain the race-based superiority of white people over people of color. The theoretical frameworks of Critical Race Theory (CRT) and Critical Whiteness Studies (CWS) are used to explore whiteness and teacher education separately; whiteness within teacher education; the impact of teacher education and whiteness on white educators, educators of Color, and their students; and cautions and recommendations for teacher education and whiteness.
Although teacher education and whiteness are situated within the current US sociopolitical context, the historical colonial contexts of other countries may find parallel examples of whiteness. Within this context, the historical purposes behind teacher education and the need for quality teachers in an increasingly diverse student population are identified using transdisciplinary approaches in CRT and CWS to define and describe operations of whiteness in teacher education. Particularly, race education scholars entertain the psychoanalytic, philosophical, and sociological ruminations of race, racism, and white supremacy in society and education to understand more fully how whiteness operates within teacher education. For example, an analysis of psychological attachments found in racial identities, particularly between whiteness and Blackness, helps to fully comprehend racial dynamics between teachers, who are overwhelmingly racially identified as white, and students, who are predominantly racially identified as of Color.
Whiteness in teacher education, left intact, ultimately affects K-12 schooling and students, particularly students of Color, in ways that recycle institutionalized white supremacy in schooling practices. Acknowledging how reinforcing hegemonic whiteness in teacher education ultimately reifies institutional white supremacy in education altogether; implications and cautions as well as recommendations are offered to debunk the hegemonic whiteness that inoculates teacher education.
Note: To symbolically reverse the racial hierarchy in our research, the authors opt to use lowercase lettering for white and whiteness, and to capitalize “people of Color” to recognize it as a proper noun along with Black and Brown.
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Teacher Education for Cultural and Linguistic Diversity in the United States
Ann Mogush Mason and Bic Ngo
Teacher educators in the United States generally agree that teachers must be prepared to teach for cultural and linguistic diversity. In the first two decades of the 21st century, efforts to do so have occupied much of the literature in critical teacher education and have pervaded the institutional practices at many colleges and universities. However, not all approaches to teacher education for cultural and linguistic diversity demonstrate understanding of the role that white supremacy plays in maintaining structures and institutions that limit possibility in the lives of people of color. Even when teacher educators themselves are critically conscious of this role, institutions are often more powerful than individual consciousness. Specifically, because teacher education is located in institutions that are rooted in white supremacist practices, efforts to shift practices toward teacher education for cultural and linguistic diversity are typically swallowed up by the recuperative power of white supremacy. If teacher education is going to be part of building a more just society, it must orient itself explicitly to understanding the role it plays in maintaining white supremacy and then to mounting new efforts that can stand up to its recuperative power.
Article
Teach For America
Spencer J. Smith
Since its founding in 1989 by then–college student Wendy Kopp, Teach For America (TFA) has influenced education policy and public perceptions of schooling both in the United States and abroad. By placing recent college graduates as full-time teachers in schools located in low-income communities, TFA attempts to solve educational inequity. This work has often met with resistance from teacher educators and traditional teacher preparation programs. Central to this resistance is the brevity of TFA’s training. TFA recruits, called corps members, undergo a 6-week training the summer before stepping into a K-12 classroom they control. Over 3 decades, TFA has responded to some of these criticisms and has changed. Even though TFA teachers make up a small proportion of teachers in the United States, scholars still study TFA since many elements of contemporary U.S. schooling are encapsulated within the TFA program. Understanding TFA’s history is necessary for the way scholars and educationists engage with the organization to think about issues in education, including the effect of teachers on student achievement, the standardization of neoliberal schooling, appropriate responses to academic achievement gaps, and the use of culturally responsive pedagogies and cultural competency in classrooms of historically marginalized students. Importantly, these issues are not just entirely theoretical when TFA actively influences public policy and TFA alumni create new school networks, lead large school districts, and become education scholars themselves. Additionally, TFA’s international expansion in 2007 means that TFA’s influence can be felt globally.
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Testimonio in Education
Marcela Rodriguez-Campo
Testimonio involves bearing witness to the collective experiences of historically marginalized communities, particularly as it relates to their oppression, resistance, and resilience. As an approach, it is an inherently decolonial process since it decenters Eurocentric knowledge and challenges power. Unlike oral history, memoir, or autoethnography, testimonio positions itself as an urgent and political voicing that rejects notions of objectivity and neutrality. Instead, it posits that there exist multiple truths of which each contributes to producing our understanding of a collective reality. Similar to these different practices, testimonio does not have a predictable or set structure as it can take the form of a poem, speech, interview, letter, and so on. Each of these, however, involves a public accounting of human experiences that have the ability to build solidarity.
Testimonio finds its formal roots in Latin America; however, as a practice it could be argued that it predates most traditional approaches as it has long existed within indigenous cultures that observe oral traditions and storytelling. Testimonio has been used primarily for movement building and resistance as marginalized groups globally named the oppressive practices of their governments and institutions. Since the late 1990s, testimonio has found a home in education, where scholars have deployed it as a strategy for visibilizing the experiences of people of color and women, especially Chicanas and Latinas. Additionally, testimonio has been adapted as a pedagogical tool, research method, and methodology. In the classroom, testimonio can help reveal the varying experiences and knowledge that students bring into the classroom. As a research method and methodology, testimonio compels researchers to reenvision their role in the research process and their relationship to their participants.
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Theater, Drama, Education, and Pasifika Youth in Aotearoa New Zealand
Michelle Johansson
Pasifika people constitute a young, diverse, and growing portion of the population of Aotearoa New Zealand, with multiple cultural identities originating in the Cook Islands, Niue, Tokelau, Samoa, Tonga, Fiji, Tuvalu, Tahiti, and Kiribati. Pasifika people are also subject to both new and historical disparities in income, employment, education, housing, and health in comparison with other ethnic groups. Significantly, education in Aotearoa continues to fail Pasifika youth, reporting a persistent long brown tail of underachievement in standards-based assessment. Multiple government interventions have been implemented to address these increasing disparities, but these have been ineffective in achieving the widespread systemic change necessary for true equity.
Pasifika youth are regularly required to code-switch between Western colonial worldviews, systems, and structures and those of indigenous-Oceania. Theater in Aotearoa provides a powerful site in which to navigate these multiple cultural identities, advocate for societal change, and negotiate the heritage literacies associated with storytelling and the performing arts. South Auckland, in particular, is a crucible for nurturing young Pasifika creative artists interested in re-storying their world.
