Implementing New Zealand Curriculum

This article is written for primary teachers who are not fluent in the Māori language (te reo Māori), about how and why te reo Māori can and should be used in the classroom. This article aims to help teachers understand the relevance of current policy documents, and to present useful guidelines on ways classroom practice can support the larger goals of the Ministry of Education, the government, and the nation as a whole, for ensuring a bright future for this beautiful indigenous language with which we have been entrusted.

In recent years Learning Languages has become a learning area in its own right in the New Zealand curriculum, and there have been initiatives to facilitate more language learning in primary and intermediate schools. Less has been done to increase the number of students in senior secondary classes. This article outlines the findings of a study into the number of students studying international languages at National Certificate of Educational Achievement (NCEA) Level 3, both nationally and in individual schools, and examines contributing policies and practices.

The New Zealand Curriculum [NZC] identifies an understanding of science that supports informed citizenship as a major goal for the Science learning area. The Nature of Science strand, which explores how science itself works, is the overarching and compulsory strand in Science for Years 1–10. New Zealand primary schools vary in their choice of approach to science, but many employ generic inquiry approaches, most commonly aligned to information literacy processes, to address a range of learning areas, including Science.

Future focus is one of the eight principles of the New Zealand curriculum. However, the term is sometimes conflated with the more-expansive term 21st-century learning, which, this article argues, accepts uncritically dominant assumptions that New Zealand’s future is as part of a hyper-globalised, fast-paced, capitalist world. This article insists on future focus as a means of developing the curriculum to support pupils as they learn to think critically about globalisation, sustainability, enterprise, and citizenship.