Margie Hohepa

Ngāpuhi

Mahi: Senior lecturer, Te Puna Wānanga School of Māori Education, Faculty of Education, The University of Auckland

What does it mean to be a Kaupapa Māori researcher?

When I finished school I told my dad I wanted to be a psychologist. He said only crazy Māori do psychology and told his workmates I was going to do law.

My early understandings of developmental psychology revolved around three tenets; description, explanation and optimisation. What became clearer was that the ‘description’ of Māori, if we were described at all, was not always particularly flattering; much of the ‘explanation’ as to why we were like we were, was insulting and ‘optimisation’ often involved de-mäorification – of our reo, our tīkanga, our very wairua. So my understandings of developmental psychology have involved notions of change, although not necessarily always positive change. In traditional developmental psychology, ‘change’ is located at the level of the individual, or in more recent times, at the level of the immediate social contexts in which the individual develops and learns. At issue is whether conventional approaches in developmental psychology can be used as tools for changing existing socio-political orders, rather than simply a means by which ‘descriptions’, explanations’ and ameliorative ‘optimisations’ for an existing order can be developed.

In contrast, as Graham Smith explains, Kaupapa Māori is also about change - but of a different kind. Kaupapa Māori involves change in the context of validation of who we are (or want to be) as Māori, through conscientisation , resistance to, and transformation of (though not necessarily in this order) social and political dimensions that stand in the way of that.

Through my time as an undergraduate psychology student in classes with rats and pigeons in the late seventies, I came to understand that rather than being apolitical and removed from notions of power (people and society) or as some like to describe it ‘objective’, psychology is inextricably connected to, develops from, and in turn contributes to power and power relations within society. During the years I taught developmental psychology in undergraduate courses, it was often subject to criticism in predominantly Māori classes for its failure to recognise the role of ‘culture’, ‘colonisation’, and ‘power’ in development in any significant way. What we often ended up exploring in our classes was how a requisite for understanding the inherent nature and history(s) of the discipline ‘Psychology’ is understanding the ‘power of discourse’ and ‘discourses of power’ (Burman, 1994) that have supported the development of the powerful positions held by conventional western developmental psychology.

In terms of developmental psychological research, Burman (1994; 138-9) conceptualises power as “a position set out within relationships; in this case relationships structured by the history of psychology and the positions elaborated… within discourses of scientific research”. Power is inextricably involved in what gets studied, the selection of critical developmental domains, the determining of research questions, what gets measured and how measurement occurs, the selective structuring of ‘evidence’ and what gets optimised. Rose (1990; 30) links the identification and development of optimisations with the technologisation of development - the industry of developmental maximisation and acceleration along a specified, predetermined, ‘normal’ path or trajectory.

Within the identification of ‘important’ or ‘critical domains’ of development, power of discourses are evident in decisions made as to how these domains are defined and by whom. Power is played out in the domain of language development (including literacy development) with which I am concerned and have a passion for. Power “structures the selection, production and investigation of language” (Burman, 1994; 139). A strategy for exploring “the ways in which power has entered into the structure” of psychology - particularly research - “is to recover multiple meanings that have been obscured.” (Burman, 1994; 146). Kaupapa Māori on a practical and/or research level for me is about uncovering practices that can aid (or impede) a Kaupapa Māori approach to the study of Māori development and learning in general, and language and literacy in particular.