Pūhoro STEMM Academy rewrites the tech books

Pūhoro founder Naomi Manu at her home in Palmerston North. Photo / Mark Mitchell

The View from My Window: Pūhoro academy founder Naomi Manu (Rangitāne, Ngāti Kahungunu) on putting an extra “m” in STEMM.

The word I’d use to describe my grandmother Selina is “awhi”, a cuddle. Warm and safe. That’s what she was for me growing up. That’s what she remains for me now. And that’s reflected in the way I’ve designed Pūhoro, as that steady hand of manaaki all the way through. For some of our students we may be the only people telling them how incredible they are, how incredible their potential is and that we believe in their dreams.

I was the first person on both sides of my family to go to university. At school, I was very much into the arts. I just didn’t see science or maths in my future. But by 2030, most jobs are going to require some level of STEM competency. Less than two per cent of the current scientific workforce identify as Māori, and we know our young people tend to transition into careers that follow their parents or their parents’ social network, so there’s a whole lot of work to do.

Recent research has shown the devastating impact of streaming in schools. And the students who are streamed out of maths and science are disproportionately Māori and Pacific, more than any other population group. By Year 11, when we start working alongside our rangitahi, many have already developed a deep sense of not being good enough.

They drop science and maths when it’s no longer compulsory, or they aren’t eligible to continue because they’ve been streamed into low-level programmes and don’t have the right achievement standards. Then if they do decide they want to get into something like engineering or medicine, they have to do a foundation-level course and end up paying an extra year of fees.

We disrupt that. It’s a requirement of our partnership agreement that students participate in programmes that pathway into Years 12 and 13 science and maths. If schools aren’t prepared to do that, we don’t work with them. At the end of 2022 our first cohort of engineering students finished their honours year.

The Pūhoro STEMM Academy stands for pūtaiao (science), hangarau (technology), pūkaha (engineering), pāngarau (maths) and mātauranga Māori — that’s the extra “M”. Sessions are timetabled. It’s not a homework or before-school club; it’s part of the school curriculum, so the system takes responsibility for its own failures. The achievement of STEM equity should not be the responsibility of Māori students to do in their own time.

The first step is working on attitudes and beliefs. There’s a lot of supporting literature that if you focus on relationships and cultural identity, there’s a correlation with academic performance. The second part is providing hands-on opportunities, and the third part is exposure, so they develop a line of sight into potential careers. At one of our Auckland workshops, an orthopaedic surgeon showed the students how a hip replacement is done.

Once students are at tertiary level, we employ them as part-time tutors back at their old school, so younger ones see their tuākana who only a few years ago were sitting where they’re sitting now. They start to feel proud of the fact that science is in their DNA. They descend from ancestors responsible for what is arguably the most sophisticated event in human migration, and they didn’t do that by accident. It was the sophistication of their ability to understand the world around them.

With mātauranga Māori, one of the differences is the symbiotic relationship we have with the land and the water, as descendants of Papatūānuku and Tangaroa. So we talk about water quality and how pollution in the river is causing harm to an ancestor. It’s a different relationship in terms of what environmental science and climate change might mean to you.

In this country, we have the luxury of enjoying two very sophisticated knowledge systems, and they need not compete. They’re just different. If we unpack or better understand the Rongoā Māori approaches to health and wellbeing, that different lens might enable us to solve problems where we haven’t yet been able to find the answers.

As told to Joanna Wane

• Naomi Manu is the manahautū (chief executive) and founder of Pūhoro, a charitable trust formed in partnership with Massey University to engage Māori students in STEM-related career pathways (puhoro.org.nz). In 2022, Pūhoro was the supreme winner in the 2022 Diversity Awards NZ and also won an international innovation award for the Most Forward-Thinking Equality, Diversity & Inclusion Programme in Engineering and Tech — a category that was won by Nasa the previous year.