Te reo sees students ‘light up’, says teacher
Teacher Stu McLean has a dream: that one day he will be able to teach junior mathematics in a bilingual setting or in te reo Māori.
McLean, who is of Scottish and English heritage, is a student of Te Ahu o te Reo Māori, a Ministry of Education funded programme to teach the teachers te reo and tikanga Māori.
At Nelson College, he has a whānau homeroom, with many Māori and Pasifika boys in his year 11 class, kids who help him with his pronunciation and with learning new kupu.
‘‘It’s really nice to be a learner and to be supported by people that are normally my students,’’ he says.
Through the course, he’s learnt that the reo and te ao Māori are inseparable.
The programme has highlighted how mainstream education is a ‘‘colonial construct’’, but by teaching local iwi history and tikanga, it’s helping teachers move forward towards bicultural practises.
McLean said it was important work, which was evidenced by the number of people giving up their own time to do it.
The time and energy put into learning was paying dividends in the classroom with his students.
‘‘It’s like they light up a bit more when you use some of the reo.’’
Kaihautu Tom Alesana said the programme had grown via word of mouth among educators.
The first intake in November 2021 had around 35 taking part, a figure that grew to over 150 in the next intake in February 2022.
Since its inception, Alesana said 700 people had graduated from the programme, which has seven levels, each taking around 20 weeks to complete.
‘‘Te reo Māori gives people a window into te ao Māori. But in our programme, we always say that you can’t learn a language without learning the culture, without learning the history.’’
The local history of Te Tauihuo-te-Waka was important for Māori and non Māori whānau to understand the past and to look to the future, he said.
Alesana said it was important for educators to be able to pronounce te reo Maōri properly, particularly for rangatahi and tamariki who had Māori names, ‘‘giving honour to those names and to the names of the tı¯puna and even the names of our places’’.
‘‘There’s a lot of mana held in the name, a lot of mana held within a word. That’s what we want, is to elevate the mana and the status of our language so that it lives on for our future generations, for all people in Aotearoa.’’
Alesana said it had been 50 years since the te reo Māori petition, and 50 years since the first day of te reo Māori, turning into te wiki o te reo Māori.
A lot of Māori language speakers celebrated Mahuru
Māori, and ‘‘kōrero Māori as much as possible in that month’’.
Te reo Māori was ‘‘on the rise,’’ Alesana said, ‘‘and that’s evident in Te Tauihu alone, with the 800% increase of employment that requires or would prefer candidates to have te reo Māori’’.
‘‘But it also has a long way to go.’’