Running the Gauntlet: A Gifted Māori Learner's Journey Through Secondary School
Teacher behaviours and practices that disadvantage gifted Māori students
There are many teacher behaviours and practices that disadvantage gifted Māori students. Although these arise from a multitude of causes, low teacher expectation is at the foundation of many of them. For example, teachers spend more time interacting with students for whom they have high expectations (Persell, 1977), present them with more challenging material (Keddie, 1971; Alpert, 1975), show more warmth towards them, teach them more, call on them more often, give them more chances to reply and ask them more frequent and difficult questions (Rosenthal, 1974). These students are also praised more frequently when right and criticised less frequently when wrong or unresponsive (Brophy & Good, 1970; Rosenthal, 1974).
Consequently it can be hypothesised that because many teachers have low expectations for Māori students, these students are missing out on instructional advantages available to students for whom teachers have high expectations. This hypothesis can be challenged because it is extrapolated from overseas research findings. However New Zealand research suggests that it may be true. For example, Dame Marie Clay (1984) in a study of teacher-child interaction in six Auckland schools showed that teachers attended unequally to different ethnic groups. The lowest rates of interaction were directed at Māori children. Teachers did actually start as many contacts with Māori children but they asked less often for elaboration of what was said. This finding arose from detailed running records in a situation where teachers knew their responses were to be analysed for research purposes. Given this, it is reasonable to suppose that the teachers involved were unaware that they were interacting less with Māori children. For me this makes the finding doubly disturbing how can teachers rectify behaviour that is disadvantageous to Māori students when they are unaware of engaging in such behaviour?
"Culture is a crucial, if not the ultimate, mediating factor in academic achievement" (Gay, 1997, p. 223). Overseas research shows that minority group students are disadvantaged by having resources, facilities, teachers, financing, instructional materials, programmes, and environmental settings of a poorer quality than majority group students. (Gay, 1997). Surely this is not the case for Māori students in New Zealand, after all, don't they have access to the same schools, teachers, curriculum, programmes and resources as Pākehā students? In fact Māori students are underrepresented in the well-resourced schools situated in wealthy areas and overrepresented in the less well-resoureed schools in poorer areas but this is not the point at issue here. Having exactly the same lessons and resources as their Pākehā counterparts can be the very crux of the problem for gifted Māori students who identify strongly with their Māori culture. If these lessons and resources reflect only the life experiences, aspirations, values, and frames of reference of Pākehā society, then the gifted Māori student is at a decided disadvantage. Similarly, the progress of the gifted Māori student is also likely to suffer if the teaching methods and processes used are solely Pākehā-centric. Geneva Gay explains this in relation to the situation in the United States:
Most graduates of typical teacher education programs know little about the cultural traits, behaviors, values and attitudes that different children of color bring to the classroom, and how they affect the way these students act in and react to instructional situations. They do not know how to understand and use the school behaviors of these students, which differ from their normative expectations, as aides to teaching. Therefore they tend to misinterpret them as deviant and treat them punitively. Because teachers' cultural backgrounds and value orientations are highly compatible with middle-class and European American culture, they can use these cultural connections to facilitate the learning of white students. This is done routinely and without conscious or deliberate intentions. It is their shared cultural orientations that make instruction more relevant and personally meaningful. The absence of these for students of color places them at a learning disadvantage (1997, p. 211).
A story that illustrates this point in the New Zealand context concerns a gifted Māori student who was found to be wagging her accelerate maths class. The pupil was in the bilingual unit but joined the mainstream accelerate class for maths because of her advanced ability in this subject. When questioned about why she was wagging she explained that she felt uncomfortable with the atmosphere and style of teaching, both of which were quite different to what she was used to in the bilingual class, "Nobody talks, they all hide their work and won't even lend you a rubber!" (Bevan-Brown, 1995).