Aroha Puketapu Part 2
View comments from Aroha Puketapu, Project Advisor – Literacy and Numeracy Implementation Team at the Tertiary Education Commission, taken at the Symposium in Hamilton, July 2011. Aroha talks about initiatives and projects funded by Putea Arapiki Ako and profiled at the symposium.
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Key content
Some outcomes from the Putea Arapiki Ako funding initiative
Transcript
The different organisations who were... successful recipients of the fund went out and basically had six months to a year to implement their different various projects. Which range from research projects right through to taking groups of people to maraes where they wouldn’t normally do because they didn’t have the money, or trailing new types of methodologies of engaging Māori and Pasifika learners.
So it gave people permission to move out – step out and try something new. The other thing that it did was it gave organisations an opportunity to step out and find out a few things. Who are tangatawhenua in this region? What’s the name of the iwis, all the different, how many are there, and what type of dialect do they speak? What are their tribal characteristics? – those types of key information. And then they can answer a question, "Why don’t they come to our polytech, because apparently we’ve got 17% Māori in this, or 24% or 25%, and we’ve got 1% Māori learner inside of this organisation". These are key questions, especially with the demographic change of the country at the moment, and I guess the changing student body in front of a tutor. So those were really important things that needed to be answered in this new performance based funding arena.
What did come from those projects was a new enthusiasm for teaching these types of people inside of my class: "I can use this or I can use this". It gave the tutors more skills, more tools to have in their kete, to actually pull out and trial in a safe environment.
One good thing about the Graceland’s project was that they’re thinking about taking people onto a marae and actually showing them the function of these processes of a pōwhiri, which is something that's often at times taken for granted. We're really teaching them principles for relationship and communication building between people, which are vital for their personal development. So this might be this thing that they do on a marae – but actually if you know the function of a karanga, a function of a korero, the function of sharing food and drink, you can then take those things that you’ve learned out into your life and actually use them to your benefit, because they’re principles that attend to relationships.