Ask the posts of our house: using cultural spaces to encourage quality learning in higher education

Abstract

When the Māori goddess, Hinetitama, asked the Māori god, Tāne, who her father was, he replied, ‘Uia ki ngā pou o t whare … Ask the posts of your house’. This traditional Māori (indigenous people of New Zealand) story implies a cultural teaching pedagogy that utilises the marae (a Māori building complex including a carved meeting house) as a learning and teaching tool. Marae complexes have slowly been embraced by tertiary education institutions throughout New Zealand since the early 1980s, as acknowledgement that they provide an authentic instructional space that enhances quality learning. This article considers the New Zealand university application of traditional marae-based teaching approaches and explores the transformative learning such cultural spaces can encourage. It shares how traditional Māori pedagogies are being modelled by contemporary Māori academics, and how the experiences of learning in a marae environment are perceived by their students.