Ready for Partnership? will help you to create written or visual texts which welcome ākonga Māori. We hope that this tool will give you ways of reflecting on texts as you create them, before you then go on to do further work with kaupapa Māori colleagues.
Ready for Partnership? has two sections. Section 1 provides seven lenses which focus on the ways in which we’re using various Māori cultural perspectives when creating texts, and Section 2 presents some annotated examples which show how the tool may be used.
Ready for Partnership? is for use in the early stages of creating texts. By using this tool to develop text, we can increase the likelihood that the text will engage a diverse group of Māori students. We will avoid the risk of focusing our texts on any one essentialised or idealised Māori subgroup. This tool will enable us to begin creating a range of texts which in sum are culturally relevant to all children and which reflect the value of mātauranga Māori—to date, this has often not been the case.
As creators of texts and users of this tool, we come from a complex array of cultural positions. These cultural positions include:
- ages
- genders
- whakapapa
- inherited and learnt cultural knowledges
- education backgrounds
- physical locations
- socioeconomic milieux.
We think that this tool will help us all move beyond our own cultural complexities. The users of our texts are similarly complex. We can use the lenses in this tool to focus on welcoming and engaging diverse ākonga Māori, excluding as few as possible, and validating all.