Ko te mana o te tamaiti te aro o tātou mahi: Listening to voices from Tai Tokerau to re-frame literacies

Western literacy theories and models often reflect Eurocentric notions of literacy and literacy practices. In Aotearoa New Zealand, the prevalence of these conceptualisations is linked to issues of power and result in a narrow and inaccurate framing of Māori tamariki (children). In this article Tiritiria, a Māori philosophical view of knowledge, knowledge generation and knowledge exchange is used alongside Webber and Macfarlane’s (2020) Mana Model to challenge this dominant framing of literacy. Using the whakataukī ‘Ko te mana o te tamaiti te aro o tātou mahi', translated literally as ‘Let the mana of the child guide our work’, tamariki Māori are (re)positioned as maurea (treasures) to further support the (re)framing of literacies. In this study we focus on listening to the voices of whānau Māori from Te Tai Tokerau (Northland, New Zealand), including the voices of tūpuna (ancestors). Through a developing understanding of tiritiria and an analysis of data sets from Tai Tokerau a nascent definition of literacies, as multitudinous, practical enactments of tirititia, emerged. Findings indicated that Māori literacy practices (both traditional and contemporary) move beyond subject learning, to incorporate multiple interpersonal, cultural, environmental and textual processes of knowledge transfer which affirm the inherent and inherited mana of tamariki.