The UN Sustainability Goals recognise the important efforts of organisations to meet global commitments to the terms of the Paris Agreement. This paper argues that the UN Sustainability Goals are deeply embedded in neoliberal goals for sustainable development. The result is that the goals require commitment to contradictory ends: achieving climate…

For Jean Herbison, learning in her early 20th century childhood world was relatively uncomplicated and predictable. Life was shaped by unambiguous family, faith and settler colonial prescriptions about how children "should" behave and what they should become. Approaching the centenary of her birth, children today must navigate a very…

There is a conflict between the claims of Maori sovereignty and the imposition of State legislation on Maori children. This conflict of interest has been given very little consideration in the public sphere. This research-informed article speculates that despite legislation ensuring that education attendance is fixed as a legal obligation for all…

This paper considers the distinctive and peculiar place that Presbyterianism and Presbyterian Church schools occupy in New Zealand's education sector. It offers a critical evaluation of the relationship between the church schools and their Presbyterian heritage and the values to which they refer as they seek to define their special character. It…

Globally, literacy can be conceived of in different ways. Two perspectives that have influenced adult literacy policy internationally are the economic functionalist and the sociocultural. In Aotearoa New Zealand, Maori educators have repeatedly advanced a matauranga Maori perspective of literacy. This perspective has parallels with the embodied,…

I offer this critical essay as a reminder of the prevalence of unproven negative dialogue about Initial Teacher Education (ITE) in New Zealand, taking selection practices as an example. The focus of this critical essay is the evidence base about selection of students into English-medium undergraduate ITE programmes. In New Zealand and elsewhere,…

Published accounts of school interventions often focus on a small 'slice' of the complex systems and layers of learning across schools and homes. A series of studies into a digital intervention in low SES schools, is summarised here providing a fuller picture of how students' engagement in digital contexts contributed to their social and emotional…

This article explores a P4C-style of response to criticisms addressed to P4C's inconsistencies. The main argument against P4C is that, although P4C theory stands for, by, and with children in terms of educational philosophy, P4C advocates do not follow the same approach when they defend P4C theory from criticism. By developing a discussion about…

This article seeks to explain how Aotearoa New Zealand moved from a consensus that the New Zealand Curriculum (NZC) should grant a high degree of autonomy to teachers, to an emerging view that it ought to be more prescriptive about content. To do this, it takes an assemblage approach to policy analysis, understanding policies as constantly…

Parental engagement is a common theme of education policy in most countries. In Aotearoa New Zealand, policies frame parental engagement in broad terms giving schools flexibility in enacting them. However, the generality assumes the complex and differentiated activities associated with parental engagement are well understood, leaving schools with…

From 2022, New Zealand schools are teaching a new compulsory history curriculum that aims to teach diverse New Zealand histories, while foregrounding the centrality of Maori histories and the impacts of colonisation. The new curriculum will upend a long history of 'forgetting' the nation's contentious and conflictual past, and in particular the…

Compulsory teaching of Aotearoa New Zealand histories has potential to change how this country's young people think and feel about themselves. However, achieving the new curriculum's vision of a more thoughtful and responsible citizenry is unlikely to be straightforward. For Pakeha secondary school students, descendants of European settlers, the…

I use Edward Said's (in: Culture and imperialism, Vintage, 1993) theory, that nations 'are narrations: who owned land, could settle, plan its future, are all stories of imperialism. The history teacher could not only consider 'what to read', but also 'how to read' taking account of the processes of imperialism; of the macro-history of world…

In the 30 years since the advent of the fundamentally system-altering 'Tomorrow's schools' reforms in the 1990s, the education system of New Zealand has undergone many reviews and changes. The recent Taskforce Inquiry into the suitability of the current system to deliver equitably for learners as we approach the third decade of the 21st Century…

This article interrogates the kind of research that is useful for teachers. The teacher is a reflective practitioner who draws on research findings, but also uses personal reflection, to work with students, with a focus on evidence-based practice. The strengths, but also the controversies of this research paradigm are discussed. The role of…