Pacific Dynamics: Volume 4 • Number 1 • Mar 2020

FULL EXCERPT: Rural Training Centres (RTCs) in the Solomon Islands are community-based initiatives that offer vocational education to men and women. Since the 1960s, RTCs have grown to become an organised movement of 47 centres present almost in every province. Based on learnings from fieldwork in three RTCs, we explore the centres’ training model, and the dialectic between indigenous and Western schooling traditions that converge at some points and deviate at others. We argue that the idiosyncratic features of the RTC learning experience can support the acquisition of skills like independent and critical thinking; important for communities to collectively shape their own development. Our research shows nonetheless that increasing influence from external actors is forcing RTCs into a more Westernised study-for-employment model of vocational education. A shift too far in this direction could significantly hinder the potential of these institutions to foster students capable of addressing Solomon Islands’ urgent and unique livelihood and environmental challenges.

FULL ABSTRACT: This article discusses the perceptions of Solomon Island mentors and regional administrators of a Solomon Islands aid-funded school leadership professional learning and development intervention. The focus is on contextualisation, used here as a broad term to refer to the adoption of ways of understanding, thinking and working recognisable and coherent within local practice. The scope of the article includes the significance of the configuration of relationships between delivery partners, the power of cause-based motivation, programme delivery protocols and ways of understanding successful outcomes. Using data drawn from two perspectives in a multi-facetted programme construction and delivery model, the article offers some provocations regarding the potential of re-framing relationships and practices in aid-funded development programmes in educational leadership and beyond.

FULL ABSTRACT: This article examines how New Zealand has framed recent security dynamics in the region and asks how this framing aligns with the priorities of Pacific partners. There are some indications of increasing alignment with ‘like-minded’ partners such as the US and Australia, prompted in part by increased concerns about Chinese engagement in the region. However, New Zealand has also been circumspect in seeking out opportunities to continue to engage with China and, perhaps most importantly for its Pacific partners, has increasingly responded to regional concerns about understanding climate change as an existential security threat. Recent uptake of Pacific imagery and narrative in the Ministry of Defence’s Advancing Pacific Partnerships policy document is particularly evocative in suggesting a more genuine recentring of Pacific priorities, although enduring engagement is needed to support rhetorical commitments (New Zealand Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade, 2018). Here relationships with diasporic populations, youth and women, in particular, should be more strongly pursued as New Zealand navigates its way in and through the Pacific and its politics into the future.

FULL ABSTRACT: Pacific people in Australia are less likely to access university due to structural disadvantages, including isolation from the dominant culture; the overlapping nexus between low socio-economic status and race; and cultural expectations. The PATHE (Pasifika Achievement To Higher Education) program addresses this inequity by a range of interactive student workshops and on-campus visits, support meetings, peer mentoring sessions, and a yearly conference. This paper analyses the effectiveness of the PATHE program through online and paper surveys. The program’s effectiveness was then evaluated utilising the Social Return on Investment (SROI) methodological framework. The methodology assigns a financial proxy to the impacts and places participants at the centre of the research process. The results showed the PATHE program is appropriate, effective and efficient. Critically, Pasifika students reported an increased understanding of how further education and training can help their future, an increased confidence to go onto further study, increased interest in university and a deeper understanding of how to use time appropriately to cater for study. The success of the PATHE program is demonstrated by the SROI ratio (represented as a return in dollar value, for every dollar invested), which equated to 1 spent on the program.

FULL ABSTRACT: Mōteatea are the orally sung literature and one of its most famous composers was Ngāti Tuwharetoa and Ngāti Maniapoto’s Puhiwahine. This paper will explore the political philosophy and theory contained within Puhiwahine’s waiata pakanga (war song) ‘Mā Wai Rā’ written for Ngāti Toa relations particularly their war leader, Te Rangihaeata. The observations from these forms of indigenous oral literature are based in a form of emerging indigenous philosophy called whakaaro based philosophy and method. Additionally, the author introduces a Kaupapa Māori Research method Marae ā-Rorohiko which outlines how social media, in particular Facebook, can be used as a form of group validity or qualitative data gathering. The analysis of the moteatea will focus on building a first person understanding of Māori philosophy and undestandings of mōteatea settler colonialism, colonisation and the centrality of mana and aroha in Māori society. It will reveal the that Puhiwahine had a deep understanding of Māori philosophy and what was to come from her people. It will also provide new understandings around the white possessive doctrine and mana motuhake.