Journal article

When children and young people participate in education visits to green spaces such as parks, zoos, and nature reserves, little is known about the connections they make to sustainability issues or how they conceptualise sustainable futures. This article uses insights from interviews with children and young people who visited Zealandia Te Māra a Tāne, a predator-free conservation environment in the heart of Wellington, New Zealand. It suggests three place-based approaches to using nature sanctuaries and other learning environments to enrich sustainability education outside the classroom.

This Q&A is based on a conversation with primary school teacher Dianne Christenson about her use of place-based learning in science. The idea for the column took shape as Rose Hipkins listened to Di report back to her co-researchers in a Teaching and Learning Research Initiative (TLRI) project team meeting. Di was talking about her experiences of taking her class to a neighbouring beach, not once, but multiple times. This pricked up the ears of Rose, who was writing a book about complexity theory in education. Rose wondered if revisiting the same place over time might give students a fuller sense of its ecosystem and a deeper connection to it. Set editor, Josie Roberts, followed up by asking Di some of the questions Rose was keen to know more about.

This article tells the contrasting stories of two Auckland secondary school principals who faced different challenges in leading their schools through a number of COVID-19-related lockdowns. It explores the extent to which leadership practices have been shaped by school closures. The focus is on community priorities, system changes, strengthening community connections and communication, and distribution of leadership. Connections with existing research and implications for leadership practice are also discussed.

Teaching in superdiverse multicultural classrooms: Ideas from New Zealand secondary school teachers
Increased migration in recent years means that New Zealand classrooms are growing in cultural diversity—and in some communities, the extent and complexity of this has reached levels of “superdiversity”. This article reports on how teachers (n = 23) in four superdiverse secondary schools in New Zealand were responding to the growing cultural diversity in their classrooms. Four key approaches that were used by teachers in all schools to develop supportive relationships and foster greater inclusion are outlined. In addition, several teaching strategies are provided to help support teachers to face the growing complexity of mixed, hybrid, and evolving identities of multi-ethnic students in their classrooms.

This article addresses the question: What would it take for collaborative teacher–librarian partnerships to flourish in Aotearoa New Zealand secondary schools? We provide a three-part model that explores how professional expectations and local (school) conditions can influence whether the school librarian is siloed or integrated within a school. Our analysis is based on Patricia Montiel-Overall’s 2005 categorisation of teacher–librarian partnerships. The article concludes by discussing how change can be effected in the role of the library in schools, arguing that school managers and teachers can take steps now to provide the local conditions to enable teacher–librarian partnerships in the interests of student learning.