White Privilege and Entitlement: Confronting Conscious and Unconscious Bias in Kura/School Hautūtanga/leadership

It is only by acknowledging the struggle ākonga Māori /students face to assert their own ahurea tuakiri/cultural identity in a positive way that kaitātaki/school leaders can redress the inequities of the past.

 This paper explores initiatives employed by kaitātaki/school leaders committed to redressing the consequences of Pākehā western centric approaches to kura/school Hautūtanga/leadership on ākonga Māori /student angitu/success as Māori at kura/school. Using the newly introduced Professional Growth Cycle as a secondary lens, the discussion focusses on how kaitātaki/school leaders might best demonstrate a commitment to tangata whenuatanga and Te Tiriti o Waitangi partnership in Aotearoa New Zealand as outlined in Our Code, Our Standards/Ngā Tikanga Matatika, Ngā Paerewa. It has been argued, Burrows (2018), that ākonga Māori /students feel their ahurea tuakiri/cultural identity is subjugated by dominant Pākehā imperatives of culture. There is a moral imperative for kaitātaki/school leaders to effect positive change for ākonga Māori /students to address this impermissible phenomenon. It is only by acknowledging the struggle ākonga Māori /students face to assert their own ahurea tuakiri/cultural identity in a positive way that kaitātaki/school leaders can redress the inequities of the past. It is argued here that the experiences of young Māori rangatahi/teenagers’ in state schools in AotearoaNew Zealand are often brutal if and when they assert their own ahurea tuakiri/cultural identity. The struggle for legitimisation of indigenous cultural identity illuminates the need for kaitātaki/school leaders to understand the correlation between strong ahurea tuakiri/cultural identity and confident connected Māori rangatahi/teenagers. Kaitātaki/school leaders will only see the realities of the struggle ākonga Māori/students experience at kura/school if they listen to authentic waha kōrero rangatahi /ākonga Māori/student voice. Positive change will occur when with fidelity Kaitātaki/school leaders acknowledge the importance of those voices and ensure professional best practice within their institutions protects and enhances the authentic ahurea tuakiri/cultural identity of ākonga Māori. The paper closes with the author’s reflections around the confronting nature of the interrogation of self as a kaitātaki/school leader and the wero/challenge such an approach has on an individual’s courage to acknowledge their own flawed personal assumptions, deficit thinking models, and entrenched cultural perspectives. The leader laid bare is a recurring motif throughout this paper underpinning the search for new interpretations of meaningful kākanorua/bicultural hautūtanga/leadership in AotearoaNew Zealand. 

NGā PAEREWA/Our Standards https://akopanuku.tki.org.nz/pumanawa/our-standards/

Burrows, P. M. A. (2018). Fostering biculturalism: exploring principal hautūtanga/leadership in a South Island secondary school in AotearoaNew Zealand. https://ir.canterbury.ac.nz/bitstream/handle/10092/16366/Burrows%2C%20Peggy_Final%20PhD%20Thesis.pdf?sequence=1