Investigation A

Explore ideas, and find a way that works for you, for extending your contacts with one family or a group of families of your Pasifika students. (See items 3 and 4 under the heading below.)

1. Use this as an opportunity to exchange views informally with them about a range of issues related to education.
2. Offer your own views for discussion and evaluation, as well as discussing theirs.
3. Note down any differences in values or approach.
4. Discuss with a colleague how you can take account of these differences in your teaching.
5. Record your conclusions and plan future actions.

Ways of supporting students and families

Schooling is easier for students when their families support their education in all the direct ways that teachers generally hope for. If this doesn’t happen, then the students depend even more on their teacher and school to ensure they get an effective education.

What can teachers of Pasifika students do to make sure these students succeed at school?

1. Operate on the assumption that all students need and want to learn, and can do so with appropriate support. See The Complexity of Community and Family Influences on Children’s Achievement in New Zealand: Best Evidence Synthesis (Ministry of Education, 2003a) for research that provides evidence for this approach.
2. Establish good learning relationships with the students so that they trust you, as their teacher, to show them what to learn and how to learn it. (See the video clip Effective teaching relationships .)
3. Establish relationships with the students’ families and exchange views and information. Refer to the Home–School Partnership Programme and Team-Up , and to the video clip Bilingualism .
4. Establish relationships with Pasifika organisations and groups. See the Pacific Islands School Community Parent Liaison Project Case Study (Gorinski, 2005).
5. Ensure the school has effective policies for pastoral care for students or their families’ health care or safety.

The following examples demonstrate how important it is that teachers find out about their students and don’t work with them on the basis of unsupported impressions:

• Teachers in a South Auckland primary school thought some of their students had low levels of literacy because of their family background. Further inquiry revealed that the teachers had seriously underestimated the students’ actual level of literacy attainment (Coxon, Anae, Mara, Wendt-Samu, and Finau, 2002).
• Nakhid interviewed non-Pasifika teachers and found that some of them “tended to regard Pasifika students primarily in terms of low socio-economic status” (2003, page 223). On the basis of this perception of the students, the teachers restricted the quality of the educational experiences they provided for these students.

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