Restoring Māori Time-Space: Decolonising English Classrooms Through Māori Storytelling

The English curriculum and Western concepts of time are two of settler colonialism’s key foundations, both framing and illustrating colonial norms as common sense. In recent years, there have been various calls for the English discipline in Aotearoa to be ‘decolonised’, although what this might entail in practice remains a subject of debate. By contrast, colonial conceptualisations of time-space remain largely unquestioned, continuing to underpin all aspects of life in Aotearoa, including teaching and learning in the English curriculum area. These temporalities, imposed upon existing Māori understandings of time and space, continue to prescribe what is considered possible or real, relationships between people, place, and time, undermining rangatiratanga, and presenting an invisible, but powerful means of reproducing and justifying colonial practices. Stories, at the heart of the English discipline, and which exist within a relational in-between time-space of imagination, offer a way to not only deliver the English curriculum but to decolonise mainstream classrooms, challenging colonial temporal constructions and contributing towards restoring Māori temporalities. Narratives by Māori writers, such as those in Anthony Lapwood’s collection Home Theatre, provide an ideal portal to this liminal time-space where teachers and learners can explore and experience the Indigenous temporalities of Aotearoa and begin to reimagine the nature of time.