Encounter: Pacific tide

The first person to hold a Pacific chair at a New Zealand university, Peggy Fairbairn-Dunlop is committed to unlocking the potential of her students. She knows where to start looking, Edward Rooney reports.
The grounds around the new AUT Manukau campus are a lush park of manicured lawns and mature exotic trees, a large duck pond with fountain, tennis courts and swimming pool.
It is not what I'd expected at New Zealand's newest university and nor - I soon find - is Peggy Fairbairn-Dunlop.
Tagaloatele Professor Peggy Fairbairn-Dunlop is AUT University's professor of Pacific studies and the first person to hold a Pacific chair in New Zealand.
I've sought a conversation with the professor to see if she can throw any light on the confounding situation facing people in Auckland - the first city of the Pacific, as it has sometimes been called.
That is: Pacific people feature prominently as artists and writers, and Pacific speed and flair has made our sportspeople household names.
In music also - from church, swing and rap through to opera - Pacific musicians are challenging, and often ahead of, New Zealand's British-grounded cultural icons. Why, then, are they doing less well in education?
Peggy is an educator, researcher and mother of five daughters. She's New Zealand-born and breaks into classic Kiwi-isms from time to time, such as "righty-oh" when we arranged the time and place for our chat.
Most importantly, Peggy's also a community activist looking at ways Pacific people can find their place within our national education system. Those few who break through and succeed seem to be doing so despite the system, rather than because of it.
We meet in her office, in the former Carter Holt Harvey headquarters on Great South Rd that has passed into the hands of AUT University. The corporate offices are much the same as when the powerful merchants of wood, paper and pulp straddled our business world.
Outside, in the grounds, we find a park bench and this gracious and handsome woman reveals what she has learned so far and what she hopes to achieve.
Wellington-born of Scottish and Samoan parents, she's just arrived from a four-year stint at Victoria University.
This is a change of direction for AUT, which hasn't previously held a specific Pacific focus. Peggy's first assignment was to deliver a professorial address.
"This outlines who you are, what you stand for and what you hope to achieve. Normally, it's given to about 30 or 40 colleagues. When I stood up there to speak, there were more than 200 people there, including all the community leaders from around the area."
She says this is typical of Pacific culture, which holds a philosophy that no individual achieves by themselves, it is always a collective effort. "This new campus is not called a Pacific campus, but because of where it is, the majority of students here are Pacific people."
Ultimately, she wants more post-graduate Pacific people at universities. "We have a problem, if you look at the achievement levels of Pacific in education - especially males. We are lagging behind with education and that is holding us back in areas like employment and all areas of social participation generally. We end up at the bottom of the heap."
she looks down at the wooden park bench table as she says this. I sense this is a source of some discomfort for her, but she continues to speak with authority.
Here, at Manukau AUT, she hopes to make a serious difference. She's clearly heartened by the facilities.
"We're very lucky. AUT is very lucky. It's an indication of forward-looking. Spaces can be expanded for more studies and it's so easily accessed by Pacific students.
"The timing is another big thing.
"This has spaces open 24-7 so people can come when it fits them, not so much the other way around. Institutions, particularly tertiary institutions, can be pretty inflexible."
She would know. When Peggy first went to Victoria University as a student, she was the only Pacific Islander to get there from a Wellington secondary school, where she'd also been among "the only brownies in the class".
She evades saying when that was exactly as this may tip me off to her age, which she'd rather not disclose. "I'm very, very old," she says. Peggy hung out with Maori students such as Whetu Tirikatene-Sullivan and Georgina te Heuheu.
She has filled many roles in academia since, but remains saddened that so few Pacific people have followed.
Her recent attempts to find answers have focused around the successes of "Polynesian clubs".
It's an area of huge participation.
There are more than 85,000 performers each year at Auckland's Polyfest Secondary Schools Festival.
Peggy now believes these groups may hold keys to unlocking the Pacific potential. She's specifically looked at how these cultural groups impart a sense of identity and belonging to the members. "That leads to confidence and security and is the springboard to success."
One of the surprises was that cultural groups were quite often the only reason some students were still going to school.
"At schools that have high absenteeism rates, that's a significant thing."
Another thing that occurs at these groups is a connection to culture in the modern context that the students don't get anywhere else.
"These students often have parents who are working long hours to keep their kids in school and they are also busy with church. They do not have time to explain to their kids what their culture and language means. But what I found is probably quite new: these students are constructing their identity together, piecing it back together, within these clubs."
Another surprise is the hierarchical nature of the school clubs, which evolve separately from teaching staff.
"These groups have Years One to Nine and the seniors run everything, and no one questions them.
"There is constant practice going on. They have discipline, unity, attention to tasks and socialisation."
And, Peggy says, those levels of concentration and commitment carry over into schoolwork.
"I looked at the data and they each had 10 per cent higher achievements than Pacific boys who weren't in the club. They are more likely to pass than boys not in the club."
Peggy's insights from cultural groups form part of a global study called Youth Connecting: Youth Voice. Her next question is: "If young Pacific males can achieve so much in the Polynesian Club spaces, how can these positive attitudes to learning be developed into other areas of the school curriculum?"
As I bid Peggy farewell, she makes a few references to time being short and her hopes to make some change in her new role.
It's too early to call it a Brown Renaissance. But it's never too early to try.