Family background and teachers
- Pasifika communities support and value education.
- It is important to establish good relationships and communication with Pasifika families.
- It is also important to find out about the students themselves, and not work with them on the basis of assumptions.
- Effective home–school partnerships can have very positive effects on students’ achievement.
The LEAP writers asked 168 teachers of Pasifika students to describe the characteristics of their high-achieving Pasifika students. The teachers considered family background to be of primary importance. In order of frequency, they mentioned the following top four characteristics:
- The student’s family is supportive and values education.
- The family is involved with school and schooling.
- The family is educated and achieving.
- The family has high expectations of the student.
Throughout the world, most parents have high aspirations and want their children to succeed in education. Pasifika parents want this, too, and for some of them an important aspect is that the children can be useful to their community as a result. Students talk about this in the video clip Value of bilingualism . Pasifika students remain in schooling for as long as Palagi students do, as you can see in the associated material Student retention . This suggests that Pasifika families probably value education as much as Palagi families, and that when groups of Pasifika students do not achieve well, it is likely to be because practices in their schools have not been entirely suitable for them.
It also seems that Pasifika families may support their children’s education in a range of ways that are not always obvious to teachers. In one study, some Tongan parents said they felt that they contributed in a very significant way to their children’s education, but they gave their support in a general way to ‘education’, rather than to the school in particular. For example, the mothers believed that their role was to give their children a grounding in religion and values, and to emotionally orientate their families. Their involvement with the details of their children’s schooling was less direct and intimate.
You can read about the Pasifika parents’ views in Ministry of Education (2003a, pages 114–119); Coxon, Anae, Mara, Wendt-Samu, and Finau (2002, page 100); and Franken, May, and McComish (2005, page 43).
