Narratives from Aotearoa New Zealand: Building Communities in Early Childhood Through the Visual Arts

This article reflects the voices of the authors who are three early childhood tertiary educators and who have presented at the Aotearoa New Zealand Association of Arts Educators Conference held in Wellington in July 2007. The authors revealed many common threads that interwove throughout their individual presentations and made visible an emerging collective voice in early childhood education. This article highlights the significance of the child in the context of family and community and the acknowledgment that the child brings rich prior experiences to the early childhood context, presenting a sociocultural perspective of teaching and learning. This approach to teaching and learning is based on four principles that have been developed around principles of Maori pedagogy: empowerment ("whakamana"), holistic development ("kotahitanga"), family and community ("whanau tangata"), and relationships ("Nga Hononga"). These four principles form the basis of the national early childhood curriculum "Te Whariki" (Ministry of Education) in which there is a strong expectation for teachers to acknowledge and, as Gould and Pohio urge, "to hear the real lives of children". A glossary for some Maori terms is presented.(Contains 2 notes.)