New Zealand’s attempt to integrate indigenous ways of knowing with modern science takes place not only on the secondary-school level, but also at universities, including the most prestigious one in the country: The University of Auckland. The course below (“Aotearoa” is the Māori word for New Zealand, and is now inseparable from “New Zealand”) is required for all first-year science students at the University under the University’s “Curriculum Framework Transformation” (CFT) plan. There will be a version of this course for all other faculties as well, so it’s a general requirement.
Click below to read it (and download a pdf), and I’ll put the gist of the course below (bolding is mine):
Course Prescription
What does it mean to do science here and now? This course considers how knowledge of place enhances your learning, the significance of Te Tiriti o Waitangi, and how knowledge systems frame understanding. Students will think critically about the relationships between science and our environment, along with the ethics of science in practice.
Course Overview
Contemporary science is deeply entwined with place, knowledge systems and ethics. This course examines these concepts through the lens of sustainability to demonstrate how they shape research agendas, methodologies, and applications of contemporary science. To address the environmental, social, and economic dimensions of sustainability, science must recognise and navigate the complexities of these interrelated concepts.
Explore the role of place-based knowledge, the importance of embracing diverse knowledge systems for science and the ethical responsibilities inherent in contemporary science in Aotearoa New Zealand. This interdisciplinary course will challenge you to think critically, fostering an awareness of the intricate relationships between science and its broader context, including Te Tiriti o Waitangi.Capabilities Developed in this Course
Capability 1: People and Place Capability 2: Sustainability Capability 3: Knowledge and Practice Capability 4: Critical Thinking Capability 6: Communication Capability 7: Collaboration Capability 8: Ethics and Professionalism Graduate Profile: Bachelor of ScienceLearning Outcomes
By the end of this course, students will be able to:
- Demonstrate how place, and an understanding of Te Tiriti o Waitangi, are significant to your field of study (Capability 1, 3, 4, 6, 7 and 8)
- Critically and constructively engage with knowledge systems, practices and positionality (Capability 1, 2, 3, 4, 6 and 7)
- Employ a reciprocal, values-based approach to collaborating (Capability 4, 6, 7 and 8)
- Communicate ideas clearly, effectively and respectfully (Capability 6, 7 and 8)
- Reflexively engage with the question of ethics in academic practice (Capability 1, 3, 4, 6, 7 and 8)
- Demonstrate a critical understanding of sustainability (Capability 2, 3 and 4)
Seriously, is this going to be useful to the students, or will it just confuse them and waste their time?
Indeed, and that’s from someone familiar with science education in New Zealand. Now there’s no issue with teaching local “ways of knowing” in anthropology or sociology courses, but “indigenous science” often proves to be infused with nonscientific stuff like oral tradition, myth, and religion/spirituality. To pretend that the Treaty is essential for first-year students, and that alternative “ways of knowing” are just as good as modern ones, is to begin propagandizing science students in their first year at University.
At least New Zealand can’t say it hasn’t been warned of the consequences of this form of wokeness. As the country continues to drop in science rankings compared to countries like the U.S. and Canada, it may reach a point where people think, “Wait a minute; what are we doing?”
They haven’t gotten close to that point yet.
Hasty note on some keywords which might illuminate the epistemic setting – the exoteric vs. the esoteric:
“Transformation” can be found to originate Hermeticism. Pretty much Hegelian dialectics at this point. So it’s not like transformation of e.g. a material substrate in organic chemistry.
“Critically” and “Constructively” are very close to Joe Kincheloe’s Critical Constructivism in the Critical Pedagogy literature. So it’s not like “critical thinking” as conventionally assumed.
Lastly : Theosophy seeks to combine science and spirituality. See for example former UN Assistant Sec. General Robert Muller’s New Genesis (1982).
Hasty add-on bold added :
“Transformation is the red thread running through all the Sustainable Development Goals, the United Nations’ agenda for responding to global challenges facing humanity and the planet. ”
Parr, et. al.
Knowledge-driven actions: transforming higher education for global sustainability
2022
UNESCO
doi.org/10.54675/YBTV1653
Notice this is for higher ed, so, university etc.
Humanity seems to be having a hard time evolving past magical thinking. If only they would look at the dismal success rate of those types of delusion.
Good grief! Makes DEI movement in the U.S. look almost benign.
And the Jesus people in Louisiana haven’t reached this level of imposition; they merely want the Commandments displayed. That’s good news for the US.
In Australia one major university has paid for adverts extolling ‘Indiginous Knowledges in Practice’ (That plural mention of ‘Knowleges’ is not a mistake.), it’s definitely spreading.
Writing like that— place, knowledge systems, lens of sustainability — is a clue that what follows is BS. They’ve got science all wrong. It isn’t about place or perspective or knowledge systems. It’s actually about the opposite of those things: What is true regardless of place or culture or past assumptions?
Bingo.
I wouldn’t be too optimistic about Canada.
This could easily catch on by here.
I think it’s already caught on. Aided and abetted by false stories about native victimhood that are promulgated to children from kindergarten on. Orange shirt story: false. The Secret Garden: false.
Excuse me but here in Canada we sought to eradicate the native culture, convert them to our religions, and forbid them from speaking their native languages in schools.
We have fortunately stopped those practices and are now coming to grip with the abuses that occurred in many of our residential schools.
Agreed about mistreatment of indigenous people, but you have to admit that Canada is overreacting to it, e.g. the total denial of those who claim that bodies were buried en masse at some Native schools.
I’m puzzled by what you mean by this. I think you are correct that Canada is being manipulated into over-reacting to what are claimed to be past abuses. But the “e.g.” part doesn’t follow. There is no evidence that students were buried en masse at Canadian Indian Residential Schools to hide the crime of mass or serial murder or for any other reason. That is a hoax. It is not over-reacting to deny it. (Perhaps you mean it is over-reacting for the government to muse about criminalizing attempts to debunk this hoax as hate speech akin to Holocaust-denial.)
Even Chief Rose Casimir of the Kamloops band did not claim the “knowing” had uncovered a mass grave in 2021. That seems to have been ad libbed by the international media and then the serendipity manipulated for activist purposes. We don’t know to this day what or who if anyone is buried in that oft-excavated apple orchard. Neither the RCMP nor the BC Coroner thought it likely enough that a crime had been committed there to order exhumations. Excavations at other putative sites of “unmarked graves” not already known to be neglected, overgrown cemeteries have yielded no human remains. Chief Casimir herself now acknowledges that there are only radar anomalies in the orchard, not known graves. Contrary to normal research ethics, the university professor who did the ground-penetrating radar scanning has never been permitted to release her report to the public or submit it for peer review. It remains privileged knowledge held by the band.
Students (and staff) did die of tuberculosis and other infectious diseases at the schools — such were the times. Those who were too sick to be sent home to die, or whose parents had long abandoned them, were buried one by one in the cemeteries of the adjoining churches. Those who died back at home, often years after they supposedly “disappeared” from an IRS, were buried in Reserve cemeteries. The burials were properly documented and records can be found in provincial archives. (Shout-out to Nina Green.) Children died at home, too — attendance at schools was not compulsory until the 1920s when the newly formed provinces began to mandate compulsory school attendance for all children.
In the case of TB, the source of infection in children was nearly always an adult in the home, as is the case today, not acquired by contagion from other students. (Whistleblower Dr. Bryce figured this out at the dawn of the modern understanding of tuberculosis. His beef with his employer, the federal Indian Affairs Office, was over how to better heal the afflicted, not that the government was cynically encouraging contagion for genocidal purposes as is often alleged today by activists.)
So not only is there no evidence that there are mass graves of Indian children anywhere in Canada, there is good archival evidence that there cannot be. There are no missing children to have been put in them, at least not among those who ever registered in the residential school system. What happened instead is that a child runs away or is abandoned or possibly even murdered on his Reserve by a parent or new boyfriend. Years later, the legend grows up that Sally used to have a little boy named Johnny but he must have been taken away by the Mounties to a residential school and never came back. “And this will happen to you if you don’t behave!”
That wasn’t what I was addressing in my post. And I have to disagree (based on fact) with some of what you’ve said. Native language was not forbidden to be spoken in schools. Many teachers and principals were indigenous. Languages (heretofore unwritten) were created as written languages and dictionaries were established by schools across Canada, as well as by religious orders. Conversion to Catholicism and other western religions started with first contact 400 plus years ago. IRS schools had many festivals and ceremonies that celebrated native culture. Children went home, if possible, for all holidays and summers, so how that is eradicating native culture is kind of a mystery. Schools were demanded by chiefs as part of treaty negotiations and as time went on, more and more schools were staffed by indigenous teachers and principals. Having worked on over 300 of the hearings that comprised the “facts” what went into the TRC report, I’ll just say that most of the “abuse” that was described is pretty much what I endured as a school child in the 60s. Standard stuff. Spare the rod and spoil the child. Of course, that doesn’t mean there was worse abuse happening. Boarding schools in every culture tend to attract pedophiles and people like them. But what has happened now, as some kind of violent reaction unsupported by much of anything, is a kind of native exceptionalism wave is occurring in Canada, similar I suspect to New Zealand, where anything indigenous is not to be questioned.
Nothing to do with real ethnic groups… but the idea of the Noble Savage (and their ‘ways of knowing’) is a Noble Lie.
It is a more politically astute way of selling myths – a noble lie is a myth or a lie knowingly propagated by an elite to maintain social harmony.
Yup. IMO the official genuflecting towards aspects of Māori culture is a convenient apparently-low-cost means of distracting from large-scale land theft after the treaty, typical-for-the-era racism, current disadvantages, and other uncomfortable facts. Whether this actually aids social harmony I do not know, especially for the long term. But of course for most politicians (of any ethnicity) the long term is the time until the next election.
Nobody has brought this up but where is capability 5? It just skips right over it.
I think Capability 5 is “Solution Seeking”.
Now I have not really discovered what is really afoot here in this course, but the verbiage in the document is not greatly different from what many of my colleagues would write for their syllabi. Yes, there are a few Maori words in there that no one will understand, and that thing about “diverse knowledge systems” could promise some magical thinking trying to stick its nose into the science tent, but the rest is simply larded with what I call “edu-speak” that some of my colleagues are into doing. The learning objectives are full of active buzzwords, which is a must for all syllabi these days. The students are to do writing and “critical thinking” (you can’t just say that students will think), and another biggie is “self – reflection”. So other than a few suspicious bits, this could pretty much just be a course about care of captive animals, or about about ethics in medicine — those being some examples of courses that my colleagues would teach with very similar language in their syllabi.
Not an academic.
This isn’t about science at heart, it’s a push of ideology to combat colonialism. Maori have been very active politically and probing every area to make themselves heard. It’s been over decades, in the arts, language preservation, Maori specific policies at the local level. I do not have a problem with Aoteroa New Zealand for instance. A name doesn’t change who we are or where we are, in fact I think gives us a Sth Pacific flavour.
It’s when it’s applied with activist arrogance that I have a problem. Myths, legends, folk law, have a place but not in the science’s dealing with the laws of reality.
I’ve just written to ACT MP Dr Parmjeet Parmar about this, forwarding her the link to this article. She’s that party’s spokesperson for universities as well as ethnic affairs, and has a Uni Auckland PhD not in postcolonial guilt but in neuroscience.
I’ve pointed out to her that in the 2023 census for Keyaurastan New Zealand, the Asian population is 16%, only just under the Maori population of 17%; and so contribute probably the greatest amount in tax dollars of any ethnic grouping to the education budget. Therefore, if there is going to be identity politics in Auckland university science education, there should jolly well be compulsory Matauranga Mahabharata , Matuaranga Confucius and Matauranga Buddha courses alongside the maorification modules. This is justified because ‘capability 4’ in the above science document is ‘critical thinking’, and logic determines that multi-ethnic societies cannot privilege one ethnic belief system over another.
One bit of good news from New Zealand is that the University of Auckland had its butt kicked by the Employment Court for its treatment of Dr Siouxsie Wiles.
During the Covid pandemic Dr Wiles was one of the most effective commentators on the science and management of the pandemic she was particularly effective at reaching a very broad audience including through social media. As might be expected, especially as Dr Wiles is a woman, became the focus of a deluge of hostile and threatening communications. The response of Auckland University was largely reactive and lukewarm and while some safety processes were put in place it was also suggested that she should withdraw from her role as a commentator either fully or partially. There were also a number of actions that came close to disciplinary measures or at least measures that suggested she was acting outside her role as an academic and in breach of the terms of her employment.
If academic freedom and the public role of universities is to be meaningful it is incumbent upon universities to proactively take steps to support or protect their academic staff engaged in public debate. That such obligations have legal teeth has been made clear by the Employment which makes it clear that universities have legal duty to ensure that such support and protection is provided as part of a university’s employment and health and safety obligations.
Several key conclusions can be drawn from the decision. First, it provides strong support for the public role of universities and of the importance of academic freedom. Second, the Court was unsympathetic to arguments that attempted to limit the scope of “academic work” so as to avoid its health and safety and employment obligations. Third, it stressed the need for a proactive approach, rather than a reactive one, to the health and safety risks posed to academics engaged in legitimate and expected public debate.
Given the current debates in universities relating to academic freedom and freedom of speech it is a decision that the management of universities will need to consider seriously.
Well, sure, the university shouldn’t try to muzzle anyone, including Dr. Susanna Wiles. She should say what’s on her mind, and be prepared to be criticized for what she says. Some folks who criticized her were misogynist jerks. But others criticized her because she is a shameless narcissist and self-promoter (cf. the raspberry hair and Doc Martens shit kickers) who used the coronavirus pandemic to boost her own profile. Dr. Wiles is a bacteriologist who has never studied viruses, and she’s not an epidemiologist, but nevertheless inserted herself into the public conversation about SARS-CoV-2 in New Zealand. She was resented for telling working-class New Zealanders they needed to mask up, stay home, and lose their incomes, while she worked her laptop job at the University of Auckland from home and broke various lockdown rules along the way. The evidence she had nothing important to say about the pandemic is that she had ~zero impact anywhere outside New Zealand. Of course none of that is justification for the hate (not the mere criticism) that Wiles got as well. No place for that in the discourse.
@ Gordon: Be careful what you wish for. I am more cautious about welcoming this judgement. The Employment Court ruling said UoA breached its health and safety obligations. I don’t think it says that her academic freedoms were not upheld. That is, the university behaved as a bad employer, not a bad university. This ruling could open the door to universities and allow them to interfere directly with what staff say and do in the interests of “keeping them safe”.
The full judgement is here:
https://www.employmentcourt.govt.nz/assets/Documents/Decisions/2024-NZEmpC-123-Wiles-v-University-of-Auckland.pdf
It basically says that there was a breach of Dr Wiles’ contract, for which she was awarded $20,000, but that academic freedom was only tangentially involved.
Science that loses sight of the scientific method is not science at all. I can only think of one teacher in my schooldays who explicitly described the scientific method, and I suspect we would be better off if it was taught to all so that they would at least know what it involves before they go off and study in detail the styles of the recurved legs of French 18th century ormolu éscritoires, or some other fascinating but unscientific study. As it is, we have the ill-informed complaining about “scientism” as if it were some kind of religion.