Maori Approaches to Assessment

Maori Approaches to Assessment

I feel like we as teachers are so programmed to assess the students to find what they’ve learned and still need to learn that I don’t think about looking at the child as a whole. The Maori approach to assessment moves away from the way the schools look at assessment but instead look at what it means to be Maori. While I was reading I thought of some expressions that I heard from several people when observing a person that is not of our culture. The expression is “tua-i Yup’igtun” or “tuar-tang Yuk” (just like a Yup’ik, looks like a Yup’ik), meaning that the person is acting or behaving like a Yup’ik. Once in a while I’ll hear these expressions at school, but I wonder if the immersion school was to make an assessment of being Yup’ik how others would take it.