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Feeling Responsible Towards Aotearoa New Zealand’s Past: Emotion at Work in the Stance of Five Pākehā History Teachers

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Abstract

In this article I interact with the narratives of five Pākehā (European) secondary school teachers, who choose to teach Aotearoa New Zealand histories including about Te Tiriti o Waitangi at senior level (years 11–13). I highlight characteristics of the active stance adopted by participants towards teaching and learning the difficult histories of home, central to which are the effects of colonisation and Indigenous Māori–settler entanglements. Drawing on Sara Ahmed’s (2015) understanding of the key role played by emotion in shaping social and political attachments, I argue that emotional work was just as important as intellectual effort on the part of participants for helping form and fortify their stance. Subject knowledge and effective pedagogical skills are crucial, but neither transcend the affective realm, where teacher orientation toward the content itself can influence the quality of student engagement. To provide background context for participants’ narratives, I outline active elements in history education discourse featuring Pākehā positionality and the practice of ignorance in relation to school curricula and settler constructions of history. This study has implications for teacher professional development as schools prepare to respond to forthcoming changes in national curriculum policy making the study of New Zealand histories compulsory for primary and junior secondary students.

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Notes

  1. Names attributed to all research participants are pseudonyms.

  2. The research was part of a Royal Society Te Apārangi Marsden-funded project entitled Tāngata Tiriti: Learning the trick of standing upright here, which focused on engagement with Te Tiriti o Waitangi amongst non-Māori from a range of professions.

  3. Te Tiriti o Waitangi (‘Te Tiriti’ or ‘the Treaty’ for short) refers to the Māori language text of the 1840 agreement, which the majority of Māori leaders signed.

  4. ‘Entanglement’ serves also as “an analytical metaphor” in history writing to explore complex, large-scale “webs of interdependence” (see Ballantyne, 2014, p. 17).

  5. See Waitangi Tribunal (2016) for an introduction to the differences between the Māori and English language versions of the Treaty and associated politics.

  6. For an introduction to the sociology of emotion specifically within the field of education, refer to Boler (1999) and Zembylas (2005).

  7. For example, see Harcourt (2020b) and Kunowski (2006).

  8. For a detailed discussion on the kinds of emotions that may surface in the senior history classroom within a New Zealand context, see pages 192 to 199 in Harcourt (2020b).

  9. For examples of pedagogical approaches that involve engaging with emotional content in History and Social Studies, see Barton and McCully (2007), Harcourt (2017, p. 140), MacDonald (2020) and Tallon (2016).

  10. Refer also to Sheehan (2017b) and the views of international and New Zealand teachers of history in the ‘replies’ section.

  11. A history textbook for primary school children published in 1930 from the series Our Nation’s Story (Whitcombe & Tombs Limited) presents British colonisation as a source of pride claiming that “[t]he bond between the white New Zealanders and the brown is a very strong one” (p. 40).

  12. Some examples include Belich (1996), King (2003), Harris, (2004), Walker (2004), Byrnes (2009), Keenan (2012), Ballantyne (2014), and Anderson et al (2014).

  13. See Barton and McCully (2007) for a critique of the view that “teachers should not reveal their own positions on controversial issues, lest they unduly influence students” (p. 16).

  14. Tāngata Tiriti refers to non-Māori citizens of New Zealand as opposed to tangata whenua (original people of the land/indigenous Māori).

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Acknowledgements

My heartfelt appreciation to the five teachers featured in the article and to the other five participants I interviewed but could not include here – all of your narratives contributed to my thinking. Thanks to the anonymous reviewer for their thoughtful comments. For collegial support, my thanks also to Avril Bell, Lincoln Dam, Frances Hancock, Alison Jones, Billie Lythberg and Christine Woods. This research was funded through a Royal Society Te Apārangi Marsden grant.

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  1. Department of Sociology, The University of Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand

    Rose Yukich

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Yukich, R. Feeling Responsible Towards Aotearoa New Zealand’s Past: Emotion at Work in the Stance of Five Pākehā History Teachers. NZ J Educ Stud 56, 181–199 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40841-021-00218-z

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