Doubt cast on teaching in Maori

By ANGELA GREGORY Maori issues reporter

Many teachers at Maori-language immersion schools are not fluent enough to explore complex ideas with students, says a top Ministry of Education manager.

The ministry's education manager (Maori language), Atawhai Tibble, said kura kaupapa teachers were second-language learners and limited in their ability to get students to probe issues.

Few teachers had expertise in both Maori language and specialist subjects.

That meant Maori-language immersion schools would struggle to teach some high-school subjects unless they were prepared to resort to English, he said.

His comments followed the release of a ministry report suggesting that intermediate-school Maori students taught in te reo were achieving about as well as those taught in English.

Mr Tibble said the report highlighted a lack of Maori-language teaching resources. There were not enough textbooks at the primary level, and virtually none at high-school level.

Many new Maori words had to be invented to cover the curriculum.

Though he supported kura kaupapa, Mr Tibble thought the Maori language would have a better survival rate if resources were pitched at the family.

The principal of a Rotorua kura kaupapa school, Cathy Dewes, believed it was possible to teach all subjects in Maori and cited her school's successes in sixth-form maths as an example.

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