Call For More Investment In Pacific Early Childhood Education By Pioneering Pasifika ECE Professor

Coco Lance
RNZ Pacific digital journalist

The world’s first
professor of Pacific early childhood education (ECE) says
her desire is “to see Aotearoa New Zealand as the future
Pacific hub for the whole region”.

“We’ve got over 50
years of early childhood education legacy in New Zealand,
and it started off in garages and church halls and in
playgroups, just very grassroots,” Fa’alogo Aganoa Jacoba
Matapo, who is the inaugural Pro Vice Chancellor Pacific at
Auckland University of Technology (AUT), said.

Pacific
ECE has been built up over more than five decades of
community efforts across Aotearoa, with Matapo pointing to
pioneers such as Teupoko’ina Morgan and Jan Taouma.

“I
wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for the legacy of all of our
pioneers who actually paved the way before me … these are,
majority are Pacific women,” she said.

“They’re our
mātua, our elders, who saw the vision and value of
sustaining language, culture, and identity, and the
connections, back to ancestral lands and to villages, to
sustain that … through their migration to New Zealand and
retaining that as part of, a sort of an everyday practice
that our Pacific children can access.”

Matapo’s own
interest and dedication to early childhood education was a
byproduct of her own upbringing.

“It started in my
home from my own early years, the way in which my mother
practised cultural healing methods within our home,” Matapo
said.

Her mahi (work) has spanned upwards of 20
years of dedication to the Pacific education
space.

She grew up around infants and toddlers, and
later pursued a teaching qualification in early childhood
teaching, before gaining her Masters of Educational
Leadership and a Doctorate of Education.

“I’ve really
enjoyed this labour of love in Pacific early childhood
education, especially as the first Pro Vice Chancellor
Pacific at AUT, but also an alumni of AUT,” she
said.

“Being able to contribute in so many different
ways to Pacific education, and specifically to Pacific early
childhood education, from family ties and connection to
culture and language, all the way through to my later years
as a researcher … deeply tied to our Pacific communities
and Pacific early childhood,” Matapo added.

At the
same time, she said the sector needs more attention and
continuous investment to ensure Pacific languages and
cultures continue to thrive – adding that, cultural
grounding gives children the “strongest start to
life.”

Language as ‘a point of access’

Matapo
said New Zealand was in a unique position as “the first
nation in the world to have a bicultural curriculum”, laying
the foundation to “build our Pacific early childhood
education”.

“I like to think of language learning not
as subtractive, but as additive. If you are grounded in
whichever your first language is, you are able to build on
that foundation language as an additive language, and that
gives you an advantage in later years to think differently
in terms of building your abilities for inquiry, to
understand the world differently, and to actually be open to
other perspectives of meaning making in the world,” Matapo
explained.

“So, language is an access; it’s a point of
access to other worldviews and other knowledge
systems.”

Matapo added that the early years of a
child’s development are the most “fundamental building
blocks for any academic success”.

“For Pacific
children, part of growing that confidence in who you are,
that sense of wellbeing, as well as your belonging – not
only in education, but to your community, to your society,
to your nation, it is about understanding your
positionality,” she said.

“It’s about the strengths of
your uniqueness in your culture and the richness that that
diversity brings into any learning context.”

Matapo
hopes the childhood sector does not stay an “afterthought”
when it comes to policy, funding or direction.

“Again,
I just want to say that the absolute foundation years cannot
be underestimated.

“The power of early learning … we
need to be investing more into early childhood education, we
need to be supporting our Pacific ECE and really leveraging
the legacy before
us.”

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