Kei Tua o te Pae

Kei Tua o te Pae/Assessment for Learning: Early Childhood Exemplars is a best-practice guide that will help teachers continue to improve the quality of their teaching.

The exemplars are a series of books that will help teachers to understand and strengthen children's learning. It also shows how children, parents and whānau can contribute to this assessment and ongoing learning.

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Book 3: Bicultural assessment – He aromatawai ahurea rua

Introduction - He kupu whakataki

Te Tiriti o Waitangi is one of the guiding documents for education in Aotearoa New Zealand. It guarantees partnership, protection, and participation to the two signatories. Quality in Action/Te Mahi Whai Hua (1996, page 67) states that management and educators should implement policies, objectives, and practices that “reflect the unique place of Māori as tangata whenua and the principle of partnership inherent in Te Tiriti o Waitangi”.

This book, the third in a series on assessment in early childhood education, looks at bicultural assessment practices and how these practices can embody the principle of partnership fundamental to Te Tiriti. Te Whāriki is a bicultural curriculum that incorporates Māori concepts. The principles of whakamana (empowerment), kotahitanga (holistic development), whānau tangata (family and community), ngā hononga (relationships), and the different areas of mana that shape the five strands provide a bicultural framework to underpin bicultural assessment. This book of exemplars builds on Te Whāriki framework and includes examples of many developments in early childhood settings that indicate movement along their pathways to bicultural assessment practice. More examples are woven throughout the other books in this series.

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