This study investigates Maori (Indigenous people of New Zealand) and Pacific (people living in New Zealand who identify with Pacific Islands heritage) student success in Psychology at The University of Auckland, casting a net around the barriers and facilitators of academic learning to better understand and delineate pathways to transform the…

How are Pacific students redesigning their own learning environments, in response to the cultural distance between Western tertiary education and their needs as Indigenous people? This study explores how Pacific students are applying their cultural values within tertiary learning spaces in which teachers are absent, disrupting educational…

Higher education in Aotearoa New Zealand -- we have a problem. Maori and Pasifika academics are not given time to talk together about Maori and Pasifika student success. Often framed by 'the academy' from a deficit position, initiatives to address the 'problem' of Maori student and Pasifika student success is often ad hoc and disconnected, rarely…

Limited attention has been paid to the experiences of Pacific Early Career Academics (PECA) in utilising their culture-specific systems of knowledge in their pedagogical practice. As a cross-section of PECA employed in a variety of disciplines and faculties, we explore how our Pacific identities infuse our pedagogical approaches in a way that…

Recent provocations by Maori and Pacific/Pasifika academics have called for a collective response to the under-representation of Pacific/Pasifika academics in universities across Aotearoa New Zealand. Drawing from Indigenous concepts and frameworks foregrounds Pacific language and ideas as being central to our worldviews and validates the lived…

Indigenous academics are often faced with a balancing act between the danger and risk of critiquing the institutions within which they reside, and the duty or obligation they feel to do so. As Indigenous Maori academics located within three different business schools across Aotearoa New Zealand, our work in both research and teaching is often…

Pacific women's narratives offer insight into how universities currently under-serve and exclude Pacific communities in their everyday practices. Utilising a women-centred Pacific research methodology (masi methodology) this article shares the results of talanoa with twenty-seven Pacific women who collectively represent 216 years of experience…

Common university spaces are often lauded as inclusive spaces where everyone is welcomed, but is that really the case? Universities in Aotearoa New Zealand receive social, material, and financial benefits from positioning themselves as ethnically and culturally diverse, yet these institutions were established through acts of colonial invasion that…

The ongoing challenges in equitable research involving Indigenous peoples and their communities and ways to overcome these are discussed in this article. Central to this article is the narrative reflection of a non-Indigenous researcher following research on Indigenous spirituality, well-being and resilience in the Yaegl community of northern New…

Globally, universities show an outward strength partly built upon imported and exported commonalities that are measurable and therefore accountable, rankable and marketable. While there are advantages to this, it can create a barrier within each institution to acknowledging and valuing indigeneity, local flavour or special character. Such a…

This paper explores the nature of postgraduate research in the broad area of Pacific education completed in New Zealand universities. First, a number of basic trends are identified in terms of institutional affiliation, area of educational research, MA and PhD balance, growth over time, national/ethnic focus and the expected beneficiaries of the…