Belonging, Vulnerability and Indigenous Pedagogy: lessons on designing transformative encounters
How do you create an academic book about embodied, social learning that resists the pull to theoretical frameworks and evidence-based research? This is a question that animated the writing of Design for Transformative Learning. Along with figuring diagrams and convivial footnotes I settled on the practice of interrogating closely my lived experiences of transformation. The auto-ethnographic narratives that emerged are not models of learning as much as a space to sense-make my own positionality and be disciplined in noticing how shiftwork is activated. Paradoxically, in attuning to the most personal of experiences universal truths were surfaced.
The Indigenous lessons below from a play-based learning encounter shifted forever my understanding of how we might collectively navigate generative disorientation. For if we can stay inquisitive, not defensive, we can catalyse new ways of seeing, doing and being in the world.
1992 — With my Te Ataarangi Peers
I am in Aotearoa, New Zealand, sitting in a circle with more than 30 Māori peers. This is our first chance to speak English since our total immersion Māori language course began a week ago. It is also the one time we will share why we are here. I am the only person who passes as white in the room so I am excited, yet apprehensive, to introduce my Māori ancestry so I might shed the Pākehā (non-Indigenous) label I have worn all week. This feeling won’t last. The phrase check-your-privilege did not exist decades ago but within the hour I will get a life-changing lesson that will turn upside down the world as I know it .
My smug, educated twenty-something self is excited to share with my peers how I want to improve my Māori pronunciation for interviews in a book I am working on. As the conversation moves closer to me, and I tune in to what my peers are saying. People are here because their children are coming home from Kōhanga Reo (Māori Kindergarten) assuming they can korero (talk) with their parents in te reo, the language of their ancestors. They have committed a month to this course because the elders who speak Māori in their communities deserve the assurance the language won’t die with them. Suddenly, my book sounds so academic. When it’s my turn I resist sharing the reasons I enrolled, aware of the ego-centredness of my motivations compared to the grounded in-place and cultural reasons this community have come together to learn.
We move around the circle. The last person to speak is a guy in my learning team. He is the slowest learner I have ever spent time with. Shamefully, this is a challenge for me because the course’s pedagogical approach has us move at the speed of the slowest learner. I am young, naive and a product of a meritocratic university system that has led me to believe I am wasting my time when I wait two hours for this guy to grasp a concept that I get in 20 minutes. As I wait for him to speak, I am bored, impatient and disengaged.
He is self-conscious as he stammers through the reasons he found himself in this class. He has returned to Aotearoa after being away for more than a decade. When he left, the fact he couldn’t speak Māori was okay, normal even. But things are different now. He tells us that before he returns to his turangawaewae on the East Cape (the place where he belongs) he wants to learn how to respectfully greet his iwi (his tribe) in Māori. Everyone nods. On some level, his reason for being here is why we are all here.
I do not recall the name of the young man who in one vulnerable gesture upended the way I made sense of the world. But in retelling this story over the years I have given him the name Tama.
Tama moves on to talk about his experience in my group. I listen to him describe how he dropped out of school the day he turned 15. He shares what it feels like —for the first time in his life — to be in a learning environment that has not left him behind. His voice cracks as he acknowledges that some people in his group are frustrated by having to wait for him. Tears of gratitude surface as he shares what it means to him that we are not running ahead without him.
This disclosure happened 30 years ago, yet my body still remembers the intensity of the shame I experienced in that very moment.
I felt the personal shame of the self-absorbed, competitive narrative that had run through my head while Tama was simply striving to do his best. I also felt an institutional shame for an education system that accepts failing the Tama’s of this world while serving the likes of me. I smarted to recognise a system that privileges not just personal success over collective thriving but also certain types of intelligence over other ways of knowing. If, as Edward Deming said, “every system is perfectly designed to produce the results it gets”, then the education I had been a part of was designed to sacrifice one individual at the expense of the other.
With gratitude, humility and vulnerability, Tama managed in one moment to remind us that we were in this together. My faulty memory has me instinctively, with certainty, apprehend that Tama’s story exposes the very foundations on which my ideas about learning had been built. Lucky, this story doesn’t end with his declaration and my ignorance, for this was just week one of a four-week program.
I left that day ready to dismantle what I had internalised from 15 years of institutionalised education. Today, my claim is that, over the weekend, I surrendered to the purpose-driven intrinsic motivations of the Indigenous-led, cooperative learning culture of the community. I committed to advancing the learning of my peers. In reality, I am sure I did not reinvent myself overnight. No doubt, I just reframed my definition of personal success and sprinkled in some white saviour hubris.
Come Monday our small group was back. We dived in together. As we individually grasped the concept being taught, we switched to become partners with our learning coach in supporting the whole group. Tama now had a team of peers dedicated to his personal and our collective success. Liberated from the anxiety he was holding up the group Tama only needed half-an-hour to grasp new concepts. Unsurprisingly, my language acquisition was improved greatly by teaching others instead of passively waiting for my peers.
I have told the story of Tama to students, teachers, in pubs, at conferences, to white people, to Indigenous folks. I have told it lightly as a self-deprecating confessional and I have let myself feel and let others hear my shame and Tama’s pain. I recognise that my retelling of this well-worn story might now bear little resemblance to what actually happened. Perhaps, when Tama was choking up, I defensively thought, “you’ve got to be kidding me?” Perhaps Tama spoke with less gratitude and more burning resentment. Yet, this is how I have come to remember it. Him benevolent, me forever changed.
Over the decades, the subject of critique has shifted in ways that ensure I have been changed by the retelling. Decades ago I wondered how I had not seen other’s potential, more recently I wonder how I had not seen my privilege. Whereas once I saw the Indigenous pedagogy as the ‘answer’, I now see the transgressive value of a sense-making practice that can attune to the sensorial wisdom of this whole-person approach. My epiphany did not come only from Tama’s heady mix of courage and vulnerability. We began every day with a hongi line, where we silently yet intimately greeted each person by sharing the breath of life. We were taught Māori through a material-based pedagogy that had us playing with blocks and rods. This hands-on approach meant you didn’t have to be articulate, creative or a good writer. The prerequisite for learning here was simply being curious and open, a way of being Tama excelled at. These play-based, embodied moves and Indigenous values fostered belonging, met people where they were at and ultimately created an environment that invited vulnerability and courage.
The integrity and candour of Tama’s share that afternoon was a direct consequence of the sense of belonging he felt in that carefully curated learning environment. In hearing his truth, in seeing my complicit role in his story, I could use the weeks ahead to dismantle the narratives of my educated, white and economic privilege and rehearse a new way forward.
I choose to never forget that my humble transformative epiphany happened in a small town continuing ed class. The disruption here was not some future-thinking EdTech innovation, but the perspective-shifting insight that emerges from a deeply relational, social, embodied, reciprocal encounter.
This story is an adaptation from my recently published book Designing for Transformative Learning: a Practical Approach to Memory-making and Perspective-shifting. The 12 auto-ethnographic narratives in the book are the anchor by which I grounded the interdisciplinary literature and international case studies. Check out the book website for more stories and digital resources.
