Saving Maori culture and improving student access, success

Though wearing traditional black gowns and mortarboards, the graduands of New Zealand’s Te Wananga o Aotearoa (TWoA) – one of the nation’s Maori tertiary education institutions – do not walk down paths bisecting lawns that echo the quads in Oxford, Cambridge or the country’s premier and largest institution the University of Auckland.

Instead, in more than 70 small towns as well as in Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch, graduands gather in buildings with not a fluted column or statue of Athena, the Greek goddess of wisdom, in sight.

On the walls and, in some cases, the walls themselves, are boldly carved wood utilising the three-dimensional Maori grammar, forming a visual archive that is a half millennium older than Raphael’s School of Athens, the signal painting featuring Plato and Socrates that symbolises knowledge in the West, painted between 1509 and 1511.

“Our campuses are not focused on bricks and mortar,” explains Evie O’Brien, Kaiwhakatere or chief executive of TWoA. “They are not built in a mirror image of Western universities, what’s sometimes described as containing ‘empires of knowledge’.”



In towns and rural communities dotted across New Zealand are small buildings that testify to the vision of Rongo Wetere, TWoA founder, of bringing higher education to the people – rather than having people move to the major cities for it.

While most campuses are in purpose-built buildings, a number form non-traditional sites of education.

“Our buildings include traditional Maori longhouses, as well as repurposed buildings, which raised some concerns,” O’Brien tells University World News.

“Historically, in many communities, the main gathering places were often only a church and a pub – spaces that are often seen as symbols of colonisation. Pubs can also bring up sensitivities around alcohol use, particularly given the longstanding and often unfair stigma that has affected Maori.

“But, by buying these pubs, Rongo put a stake in the ground about what you could do with these buildings. He converted them into the most beautiful, radically inclusive sites of learning.”

Like their longhouses, the rebuilt pubs and purpose-built facilities are instances of Maori phenomenology.

“Maori have a holistic view of the conditions required for transformational learning. Such learning takes place in the ritual of encountering each other in the classroom. A central part of this encounter is the wrapping of the ritual in the context of place and land.

“We always ask ourselves, ‘When you walk into a space of learning, and you look at the walls, and look at the ceiling, and you look at the pictures, are we saying you belong here? You are welcome here.’

“It’s our job to make sure the architecture and everything else says ‘You belong here’, to make sure that the stories of the Maori are told in architecture that’s our equivalent of the Bodleian Library” in the University of Oxford, O’Brien said, adding that she had been in the role of executive director of the Atlantic Institute: Rhodes Trust for several years before returning to TWoA.

Western education a poor fit

In 1983, despite being only 10% of New Zealand’s population of 3.2 million, Maori made up 50% of the country’s prison population. Young Maori, particularly boys, were struggling in the mainstream education system, which was not equipped to engage and embrace cultural differences.

In response to this crisis, Rongo Wetere and a number of other Maori, including teachers at Te Awamutu College in Te Awamutu, about 150 kilometres south of Auckland, began organising a carving project to engage some of the students from the college.

The project would become Tawhao Marae, the birthplace of TWoA. With the support and aid of important Maori, such as Dr Pakariki Harrison, a famous carver credited with regenerating the ancient craft, Wetere and others fashioned an indigenous curriculum for the Maori.

“The education system focuses on the European model, the European culture, the European language. Everything was built around that. And, until that situation changed, there wouldn’t be any great improvement for Maori,” Ken McOnie, founding director of teacher and training programmes at TWoA, explains in a commemorative video produced in 2002. (Video: minute 3)

“Indigenous people have been downtrodden and their religious thoughts and their culture have been rubbished, and their language has been virtually destroyed and ignored,” Wetere tells University World News.

“Giving these young people back a sense of who they are, where they belong, their place in the world was pretty important.”

“Carving and crafts give them back their culture,” says Wetere, who is descended from Maori chiefs. “It gives them back their language, gives them back their history.”

The centrality of carving and other crafts to the founding mission can be seen from the fact that two of Harrison’s elaborate pouwhenua (akin to totem poles in America’s Pacific Northwest) that serve as markers that connect to the ancestors, define territorial boundaries and embody cultural identity, were placed outside the institution’s doors.

When asked about the fact that they provided classes in the business of selling their art (and running a traditional tattoo studio), Wetere deftly combined the Maori world view, and the world of commerce he was familiar with from his years as a successful financial advisor with the Australian-based insurance company, Ameriprise Financial (AMP).

“We taught them that artists,” he tells University World News, “were esteemed members of the tribe” and “we taught them how to market their art properly. And, most importantly, we taught them not to undermine themselves by undervaluing their works.”

Out of a rubbish dump grew a cultural centre

In 1984, Wetere spearheaded the establishment of an additional cultural centre that would also be a technical college, Waipa Kokiri, also in Te Awamutu. The Department of Maori Affairs put up NZ$80,000 – NZ$265,000 or US$159,000 today – which was insufficient.

So Wetere and other Maori education leaders put their homes up as collateral for a bank loan. Even this was insufficient, so the organisation had to take out short-term loans at high interest rates to finance the project.

Built on land reclaimed from a rubbish dump by Wetere, other centre leaders, students and tutors, the centre was constructed from materials, including girders, dismantled from a disused building owned by a dairy company with the help of the New Zealand Army.

In addition to teaching carving and weaving – excellence in the latter could now be recognised by a newly created Master Weaver certificate – the college taught technical skills, such as carpentry and drain laying, which opened the door to work that kept the students from recidivisms.

“I would say that within six or eight months of it commencing, we started to see a tremendous difference in the discipline they were bringing in themselves. They were starting to feel they belonged to something,” Joe Arrell, who was on the council of the TWoA from 1983 to 2002, said in the video. (Video: minute 13).

Neither the technical courses that would be taught at the centre and at the other colleges and other centres set up around New Zealand, nor those at TWoA itself, would have succeeded had the problem of endemic functional and real illiteracy not been addressed.

“Maori knew how to work with their hands, build and fix things. What they didn’t have was the literacy needed to pass the state qualification exams for licences. When they did get licences, they got work everywhere in New Zealand and even in the mines in Australia. But first we had to deal with illiteracy,” Wetere tells University World News.

Unlike most literacy upgrade programmes that take place in a classroom, Wetere and Marcia Krawll, a Canadian clinical social worker who had moved to New Zealand in 1990 and married Wetere in 2008, developed a home-based intensive literacy programme that leveraged the technology available in 2001 and evolved with changing technology.

Based on a programme Wetere studied in Cuba, the programme is tailored to each student. For a student who was functionally illiterate, for example, it might start with a picture on the screen of a cat on a mat and ask to choose the correct word to complete the sentence: The cat is sitting on a _____.

Students at a higher level read short selections and first answer questions about the topic and then write a short paragraph. The material is often based on Maori culture, so it might be about building a canoe or, in the case of a student reading at near college level, about the Maori canoers and celestial navigation.

The programme takes an average of two hours per day and during that time, tutors check in with students and can be called upon for help. The programme can take a non-reader to college level literacy and, now, to digital literacy in less than a year, Wetere says.

Battle to get tertiary status

Despite the success of the technical college, signalled by its high graduation rate, Wetere’s proposals to create a free-standing tertiary educational institution, which even people he’d worked with for years found audacious, were turned down by the New Zealand’s Minister of Education a number of times.

Accordingly, the public announcement in 1993 that the government was going to recognise TWoA, and another Maori-run college, came as a surprise.

Ken McOnie, then a teacher at Te Awamutu College, said on the commemorative video that the statement that the government was authorising a Maori institution of higher learning may have been a mistake by Lockwood Smith, the then minister of education in the centre-right National Party government.

At the time, McOnie explains, Tainui (an iwi/tribe) were putting forward their claim, for 1.2 million acres 100 kilometres south of Auckland that was settled in 1995, through the Waitangi Tribunal. “And I think that Dr Lockwood Smith mistakenly thought that Te Wananga o Aotearoa (TWoA) was part of Tainui. But of course, that’s not the case,” said McOnie. (Video: minute 35)

Wetere’s hope that he and his supporters could get on with the business of establishing the tertiary institution were quickly dashed when it became clear that Smith’s words were not followed by funding to build a central campus.

As Turoa Royal, who in 2002 was TWoA’s director, explained on the video, the absence of an establishing grant was very different from the situation in 1986 when he was tapped to establish a polytechnic: “We got millions of dollars right from the start.” (Video: minute 23)

“They gave us the status but no funding,” Wetere recalled on the video, before suggesting in a pained voice that the government had dark motives. “In retrospect, if you look at it in the cold light of day, we were meant to fail. How can you run an institution with no capital injection?

“Every other tertiary institution in the country had substantial funding from the Crown, particularly the universities and the polytechnics. And the TWoA was supposed to exist and make an impact with no funding.” (Video: minute 24)

For his part, when interviewed for the video almost a decade after the fact, Lockwood Smith defended his actions: “I believe it was a reasonable compromise, although I recognise that there was then a further battle to achieve capital funding.

“But I don’t feel bad because given the fiscal crisis at the time, it was either a compromise or nothing.” (Video: minute 25)

For the first five years after the establishment of TWoA, Smith and his successor, Wyatt Creech, refused every proposal Wetere sent asking for capital funding – even as TWoA had begun running programmes and even graduated its first class. New Zealand’s Labour Department provided the operational funding.

Nor was the National Party moved by the demonstration before parliament held on 14 May 1998. On that cold, rainy, blustery winter’s day, 700 students, staff and supporters stood outside parliament in Wellington demanding capital funding.

Not a single member of the governing party came to speak to the protesters, while several members of the opposition Labour Party did and at least one spoke to the protesters, stating his party’s support. Three days earlier, three members of the faculty filed a complaint before the Waitangi Tribunal, the same permanent government body that ordered the Tainui land settlement.

“We stated that our goal of increasing Maori participation in tertiary education had been, and was continuing to be, compromised” by the denial of capital funding, says Tihei Wananga (1983-2005: Our History by Te Wananga o Aotearoa, a history of the university published in 2005.

The plaintiffs also argued that without this funding, TWoA was a “grave financial risk”. Swayed by these arguments, Judge Richard Kearney moved the case from number 718 to number one on the tribunal’s docket. (Published by Te Wananga o Aotearoa, p 37f)

Following two days of testimony in October and November 1998, on 28 April 1999 the tribunal agreed with the plaintiffs and recommended that the Crown pay for capital costs and three years of operating expenses while providing additional resources to Wananga to grow.

The tribunal’s findings were not binding, so Wetere and his team readied to take the government to the High Court to force it to fund TWoA.

Two months after the tribunal handed down its findings, the Labour Party led by Helen Clark defeated the National Party. Labour’s support of TWoA stated at the protest held, and after two years of negotiations Minister of Education Trevor Mallard signed a capital funding agreement with the Wananga before 1,000 people on 6 November 2001.

TWoA today

Today, TWoA offers programmes that range from Maori language, culture, philosophy and performing arts to environmental studies, education and teaching, business, health and fitness, and indigenous development. As well, TWoA continues to offer courses in carpentry and work-based learning.

Additionally, TWoA offers postgraduate programmes: masters of applied indigenous knowledge, masters in Maori language excellence and a postgraduate diploma in bi-cultural professional supervision.

In keeping with Wetere’s vision of bringing education to the people most in need, many of the programmes are tuition-fee-free, especially those at foundation levels and programmes that focus on Maori language and culture.

“This is because many students have been failed by the compulsory schooling system in New Zealand and we believe that there shouldn’t be a personal cost to getting to the same levels that they should have reached at high school.

“For Maori language programmes, it is about recognising that it is a national language and the importance of ensuring that it survives and thrives,” explains O’Brien.

“The enrolment of some 6,500 non-Maori in TWoA, with its Maori-infused curriculum and ethos, as well as the thousands of these students enrolled in Maori programmes and courses, represents a sea-change in New Zealanders’ attitude towards the Maori,” O’Brien tells University World News.

Like other settler-colonial societies such as those in the United States and Canada, the dominant culture used education policy as part of its effort to erase the indigenous culture of the people who lived on what the Maori call Aotearoa or ‘Land of the long white cloud’.

“In the 1800s, the belief was that the Maori were less intelligent (‘millet-seeding testing’) [a racist test of brain size] than non-Maori, and that it would be a disservice to them if Maori were taught literature and maths because they were more likely to make their living through manual work than intellectual work,” says O’Brien, who then explained that in the 1800s to 1900s the education system was used to try to assimilate the Maori.

“The education policy of the time was to teach Maori boys to be good farmers and Maori girls to be good farmers’ wives.”

The enrolment of thousands of non-Maori in TWoA is a manifestation, she continued, “of what’s been called the ‘quiet educational revolution’ in New Zealand, a revolution of hearts and minds, that has occurred in the last few years.”

Undergirding this revolution and government financial support for TWoA is the fact that – as is the case in Canada, Australia, Britain and many other countries – the population is rapidly ageing.

Maori, who make up about 20% of New Zealand’s population of five million, are a much younger population than the dominant population. Accordingly, O’Brien explained, they represent an answer to the questions, “Who’s going to be the young people, the skilled workforce that will be taxpayers for the growing number of retired people?”

“So it’s no longer an argument about educational equity, about doing the right thing. It’s an economic argument that is an answer to an existential challenge for New Zealand,” O’Brien tells University World News.

All programmes infused with Maori ethos

Maori ethos is infused in all of TWoA programmes, not just in those devoted to Maori studies. The nursing curriculum of a wananga allows students to learn about indigenous approaches to Maori culture and language. O’Brien highlighted the importance of this with a family story.

“Several years ago, when I took my mother to a mainstream hospital, she was cared for by a wananga graduate, an incredibly skilled nurse who spoke Maori, who understood Maori culture and the nuances of Maori families,” says O’Brien.

The experience highlighted for her that an embedding of Maori knowledge in any field of study can lead to a more positive experience for families, Maori or not, whom the graduates interact with, she says.

O’Brien’s academic specialty is leadership development, which has a different focus at TWoA and, like all of the institution’s courses, is taught differently.

“Our leadership management doesn’t reject Western theories. We teach Jim Collin’s theories [about entrepreneurship] and many other theories, but we do it in the context of also legitimising Maori knowledge, both about leadership and the classroom experience itself,” explains O’Brien.

“Traditional Maori views of leadership stress the values of empathy and kindness, of collectivism rather than individualism. Contemporary researchers in the field now write about these as though they’ve just been discovered.

“People say to go to Oxford, go to Harvard to study leadership. But we can say, ‘Look in your own community, you see leadership at its very best, both in the form of character and approach to relationships, but also in the skill sets that people have’.

“Maori approaches to leadership are seen in all aspects of cultural life from marae [communal, sacred place] to board rooms. There is a practicality to leadership that has a focus on kaupapa [purpose] and people. On our marae, we are able to respond at short notice to huge gatherings with precision planning, logistics and attention to programming and hosting – exactly the kind of skills required to run an organisation with 2,000 people.

“The whole point of our programming is to make that link – to legitimise the knowledge that already exists in the room,” says O’Brien.

Students are not, O’Brien further explains, viewed as empty vessels waiting to be filled up. Rather, their experiences and views are taken into account. Professors create the conditions for people to reflect on what they’ve been introduced to.

“The aim is to get them to answer, ‘How does this resonate with me?’ ‘How do I find meaning in that?’” O’Brien’s words, here, echoing the Latin root of ‘education’ – ‘educere’ – which means, ‘to lead out’ or ‘bring forth’, both of which imply that classroom encounter draws forth knowledge, experience and ideas embedded in the students’ life experiences.

Paiheretia Aperahama, who, as he wrote in an email, “hails from the tribes of the north of Aotearoa, ie New Zealand”, grew up in a Maori speaking home and studied in the Te Panekiretanga o Te Reo – the Institute of Excellence in the Maori Language – explains the culture of TWoA, where he is now works in the Communications Department.

“There was a strong Maori ethos in everything. The way we were taught, the way we engaged with each other and the way knowledge was bestowed.

“One whakatauki [proverb about working together] that comes to mind is, ‘ehara taku toa i te toa takitahi, engari taku toa, he toa takitini’.” It technically means, ‘My strength is not that of a single warrior, but that of many’, but Aperahama translates it as, “The journey is not the journey of one individual, but rather it is the journey of those that have come before you, and those who will come after you.”

Learning at TWoA, Aperahama continues, is “about collective growth. It is about carrying the language with integrity and purpose. That kind of learning doesn’t just shape your thinking. It shapes who you are and how you move in the world.”

Respect for education

Like the graduates of Western universities, many graduates of TWoA celebrate by tossing their mortarboards in the air. But for many across New Zealand, graduation is more than a moment of personal triumph and family joy.

Because a large number of the graduates are first generation graduates – a fact that O’Brien is both proud of facilitating and considers a shameful statement about New Zealand’s history – their diplomas have a social significance absent for most in many of the graduation ceremonies in Auckland, Wellington or Oxford and Cambridge, where most students come from families that expect them to go to college.

In each of the graduation ceremonies that O’Brien went to this year, she saw among the graduates a respect of the education they received and a passion for lifelong learning and transformation.

Looking at Te Wananga o Aotearoa on its 40th anniversary, O’Brien tells University World News that leading the organisation that has made a huge impact on tertiary education in New Zealand is an honour.

“It is an organisation with a history of ‘can do’ and ‘innovation’ – doing what hasn’t been done before. In 2025, we celebrated the 40th anniversary and we are thinking about the next 40 years and the role that artificial intelligence, augmented reality and virtual reality have in our future,” she says.