In the face of persistent challenges within Aotearoa New Zealand's education system, "Building on our Strengths" offers a fresh perspective on ways of improving the system by focusing on what we are good at. With the OECD highlighting our system's high quality but low equity, this book shifts focus from mere problems to uncovering what…

The notions of inclusion and diversity are increasingly used in a wide variety of areas in public debate and policy, as well as in educational curriculum and policy documents in New Zealand and internationally since the UNESCO Salamanca Statement in 1994. What is meant by inclusion and diversity in many of these contexts is often rather unclear,…

Background: The health-care community has a responsibility to address the environmental impact of delivering health-care services. Educational programmes present ideal fora to confer 'environmental competencies' to future health system leaders, managers, practitioners and researchers. The aim of this review is to synthesise the literature on…

This article draws primarily on a policy discussion hosted by the New Zealand Association of Research in Education's (NZARE) Science Special Interest Group at the 2016 national conference, arguing that an ecosystem view of science education is a useful metaphor when considering both what is being done to implement the vision for science education…

Public education is not just a way to organise and fund education. It is also the expression of a particular ideal about education and of a particular way to conceive of the relationship between education and society. The ideal of public education sees education as an important dimension of the common good and as an important institution in…

Our purpose is to provide an exploratory statistical representation of initial teacher education as a complex system comprised of dynamic influential elements. More precisely, we reveal what the system looks like for differently-positioned teacher education stakeholders based on our framework for gathering, statistically analyzing, and graphically…

Systems of monitoring and control have left many educators and organisations in the field of post-compulsory education struggling to find ways to meet the needs of an increasingly diverse society. Education is complex. Many educators would agree that it is influenced by many, often contradictory, voices and power structures. Based on the findings…

Rhizoanalysis is introduced here as a way of processing through an assemblage involving research methodology, data generation and analytical possibilities entwined within. In concert, rhizomethodology is presented as a way of working (with) data, complexly; a way of putting the Deleuzo-Guattarian philosophical imaginary of rhizome to work.…

Despite a growing body of knowledge about what content, processes and arrangements for learning may result in more effective initial teacher education, there remains a problem with the variability of outcomes from teacher education programmes. This paper reports on a multi-perspective exploration of what influences learning to teach in valued ways…

Bullying is a major concern in education worldwide, particularly in countries such as New Zealand that are reported to have high rates of bullying in schools. In this article it is proposed that, in order to effectively prevent or substantially reduce bullying in schools, a systemic approach needs to be adopted, with interventions organized at…

How do schools maintain momentum with change and enter new cycles of growth when they are attempting to do things differently? This article draws on a two-year evaluation of the "Positive Behaviour for Learning School-Wide" initiative to identify key factors that enabled schools to engage in a long-term and iterative change process.…

A multiple-fatality outdoor education event in New Zealand in 2008 revealed that a 'systems approach' towards managing risks and training staff was widely considered to be normal and 'best practice'. This approach champions audit trails and economic efficiency, and one of its characteristics is the volume of paperwork required. One of the…

Using international data on child well-being and educational attainment, this article compares child well-being in the United States to member countries in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). Multiple measures of child well-being are analyzed, such as material well-being (including poverty, unemployment, and income…

"Working theories" are described as one of the two principal outcomes of Te Whariki, the early childhood curriculum in Aotearoa New Zealand. Despite its prominence as a curricular outcome, the theoretical positioning of the concept of working theory remains relatively undebated, with researchers readily attributing the term to a…

Debates on literacy inequalities have been powerfully advanced through Jan Blommaert's work, which demonstrates the ways in which discourse forms can lose function as they are moved into different environments. Looking through a south-north lens, Blommaert maps this feature of loss of function against world wide inequalities conceptualised through…