He aha tēnei mea te pakirehua? What is pakirehua

Tammy Gardiner:
Mā te ruku, mā te wānanga, mā te kōrero, mā te aro atu, mā te wetewete e whakamārama ai te upoko o te kaupapa. So that saying comes from the Rukuhia Rarangahia position paper on aromatawai that was put out in 2014. We really need to start looking at the kupu itself, that’s the question, "He aha tēnei mea te pakirehua? What is pakirehua?" 

Marama Reweti-Martin:
Inquiry is a habit of mind. It’s what a lot of us, I don’t think, really understand that, that we have to be continually framing questions for ourselves, it’s also reflective practice, so reflection in action on action and for action, it’s also part of our pedagogical practice so for it to be effective it needs to be evidence informed. It also requires adaptive expertise so that through the evidence a teacher needs to be able to adapt their practice to suit their individual students and in the process of that, we’re building up this body of knowledge that we have about what makes good practice and what makes effective practice and personally, how my personal practice is developing as well. Because it’s coming from a Māori perspective, it feels natural for them to think in that way. Also, they’re able to extend those ideas into a lot of the other Māori myths and legends, pūrākau, they can also extend it into their local histories and their local stories as well.

Jason Ruakere:
 ...the word paki, we thought about pakitara, paki ā-tara, ko ngā walls of a whare, of a wharenui, he aha ngā mea kei runga i ngā pakitara? The kōrero of our whānau, our tūpuna, koirā ngā pou, hei pou tokotoko ake i te whare, they hold our houses up, so ko paki one tērā.

Tahu Paki:
Te wāhanga paki, i whakaaro ake au ki te āhua o te rangi, a fine day, he rangi paki so usually before a fine day after a storm, you have a rainbow, a rehua some call it rehua sometimes which is your pathway to seeing the fine of day, to the gold which is at the end of the rainbow. So your pakirehua if you take it into that context, what we were talking about is a, you know, how do we get from the ugly to the beautiful.

Tammy Gardiner:
Pakirehua comes about because you get to the point you’re āhua ngaro, there’s something not right, and to get to the point that you want to kia tū hei rā paki anō so that it’s nice and clear and sunny and of course you’re going to feel nice and warm inside and happy, you actually have to go from that negative space to get into that positive space so it’s like how do I get from here to there? If you develop your pakirehua, cos kei te āhua raru koe, kei te āhua ngaro and kia paki anō te rā, kia whai hua, so whatever you do that you make sure that there is that fruit at the end of the, exactly like the rainbow, your pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. Another one too is the kupu rehu also means to, when you’re carving a waka, you actually, when you go to tarei waka, it’s a, a rehu is to chip away at it in small pieces so that’s another thing that if you have a āwangawanga or a raru or something, or he momo pakirehua that small chips will get there quicker than just hacking away at it.

Janelle Riki:
If you have that collaborative inquiry, or pakirehua at the top, we want this, you could have ten staff underneath and they have got ten different inquiry, or actually three of them might have the same and then they can work together on their little part and these two might have the same but this one’s sort of their own waka kei te pai, they’re doing that but that power in the collaboration I think is how you can see it is that it’s almost like a iwi, hapū, whānau kind of level.

Marama Reweti-Martin:
We have this process of knowledge building, mai i te kākano in this case, mōhiotanga, mātauranga, and māramatanga and just making the distinction here between knowledge being a factual thing and in one’s head and wisdom is knowledge integrated at one’s center or at one’s heart. When we start feeling that passion then we can take our knowledge to a different level.