Without fail, every Alternative Education site that I visited had one major thing in common: explicit values.
And, with the exception of the church-based community partnership (whose values were related to religion), all other value systems were rooted in Māori culture. This is important to note, as we know, because the Māori population is far overrepresented in Alternative Education in Aotearoa. So, by and large, these value systems provided a basis for culturally relevant pedagogy.
These value systems were organized from the top-down, and therefore included the entire school setting – not just one classroom or group. Furthermore, there were explicit links from values to classroom expectations, academic habits, and social interactions. The photo artifacts below show examples from different sites that I visited.
Lead with explicit values.
Many educators these days are familiar with the importance of culturally relevant text choices. My time here in Aotearoa has shifted my understanding of the meaning of ‘text’ and ‘literacy’ in regards to cultural relevancy. When we only value written text, we devalue the rich oral and visual traditions that are honored in many Indigenous cultures.
In observing Alternative Education sites, I saw a huge range of multimodal text types being used – including movies, short films, plays, and more –that were all based in Māori stories. These visual texts were used a jumping off point for deep thematic understanding in first half of the school year, so that those skills could be transferred to written text later on. Deep thematic understanding was required by students to compare and contrast texts relating to big ideas such as colonization, marginalization, and stereotype threat. Furthermore, this type of text study happens to be supported explicitly by New Zealand’s literacy standards.
Teachers expressed the value that they saw in choosing such a range of text types:
“[We use] texts where they can see themselves or their culture reflected, that they can connect with on that level.”
“Exposure to texts that are of high interest and relevant to their lives. Short and to the point and unpacked and discussed orally first.”
This links back to a core element of this project — literacy as a practice:
“Teaching literacy as a ‘human practice’ utilizes the funds of knowledge that students bring to the classroom, changing perspectives on normative definitions of text and knowledge itself” (Curtain, 2024, pg. 1018).
Use of multimodal, culturally sustaining texts that lift up literacy as a practice.
The importance of high expectations in student success really cannot be overstated. As Dr. Chris Sarra states:
“[A]s educators, we work within a policy environment where public discourse around educational underachievement and failure frequently relies on deficit accounts that attribute blame to ‘disadvantaged’ groups. For Indigenous communities ... this is compounded by historical conditioning where the communities and the children themselves have often been seen as the cause of their educational failure” (Sarra et al., 2018).
For this reason, it was even more hopeful and encouraging to this narrative being reversed in my observations in AE schools. All teaching was related to NCEA achievement or unit standards, everywhere. There were examples of systems that linked high expectations and values, as shown in the artifacts below.
The power of high expectations are shown in these teacher and student quotes:
“I think that [our principal] is really good at setting a high standard and for us as teachers, we know where we kind of need to be and ...there's a flow. So she sets the standard... And then the girls can see that expectation and it's something that they can like work towards as well.”
“She believed every single student was a capable of anything...she was able to adapt her teaching to the learning style of every student.”