Science and knowledge

I would like to add to the debate (“The meaning of science”, August 7) by pointing out that although mātauranga Māori can well stand on its own, there is strong evidence of its value in addressing issues where the dominant discourse of science has failed.

In the early 1990s, I used Māori concepts such as whanaungatanga (extended family-like contexts) metaphorically to illustrate how qualitative research interviewing could be significantly improved. This study identified how interacting within relational contexts could benefit all research participants and not just often-university-based interviewers.

These understandings were extrapolated in the early 2000s to secondary-school settings, suggesting that where teachers established classroom relationships and interactions as if they were an extended family – with all the rights, commitments and obligations that such contexts generate – they were able to do their job much more effectively than those educated under the status quo that remains dominated by Western modes of thinking.

This hypothesis then suggested that as a result of these changes in pedagogy, Māori student achievement would improve. The implementation of these ideas in a Ministry of Education-funded research and development project, Te Kotahitanga, demonstrated, for example (among a wide range of outcome measures evaluated using standardised empirical quantitative and qualitative measures), that by the fifth phase of the project, Māori students in project schools were achieving at three times the rate in NCEA as were their peers in