Overcoming dualistic pedagogy: reframing Māori–Pākehā histories for New Zealand students

Abstract

Decades of social and political contention have challenged Pākehā (White) understanding of Māori Indigenous history in New Zealand from a simplistic them-and-us. Non-dualistic pedagogies in the classroom are required to deepen and embed such fundamental structural change in people’s minds. The teaching practice described here non-confrontationally engages students still constructing dualistic Pākehā identities in New Zealand. A simple class exercise visually combines modern and pre-modern examples with Māori and Pākehā categories. By creatively assembling and re-interpreting familiar socio-historical pieces of information using the table, previous assumptions are reframed in the classroom. Exclusive or non-reflexive White narratives were increasingly challenged after the 1975 Land March, the 1981 rugby tour and establishing the Treaty of Waitangi Tribunal 1975/1985. A new generation’s learning requires recognition of binarised you or us “facts” and new framing. Otherwise, merely “adding on” Māori information in the old dualistic fashion leaves unchanged dominant White narratives of modernisation, settler colonisation, and racialised beliefs of superiority.