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Title: Culture Counts : Changing Power Relations in Education by Russell Bishop, Ted Glynn ISBN: 1-84277-336-4 Publisher: Zed Books Pub. Date: 29 November, 2003 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $65.00

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Average Customer Rating: 4 (1 review)

Rating: 4
Summary: Making culture count in Aotearoa and beyond
Comment: This book continues a trend in Maori education research looking beyond the Western research paradigms to those appropriate to the culture the indigenous peoples of Aotearoa New Zealand, and which is instructive to researchers working with other indigenous peoples. Both authors are highly placed academics in New Zealand universities and experienced researchers with Maori people. Bishop is himself of Maori and Celtic origins.

In Aotearoa the Treaty of Waitangi gives a legal standing to the relationship between the colonised and coloniser which is lacking in many other postcolonial societies, particularly in Australia. Although the treaty may be considered to have failed Maori people in the past, its presence is now being used to promote self-determination and power-sharing in a more articulate Maori society. The treaty is fundamental to the purpose of this book but this doesn't compromise the book's applicability elsewhere.

The book is organised into five chapters. The first takes a historical perspective on the development of the pattern of dominance and subordination of Maori, even with the presence of the Treaty of Waitangi, its impacts on New Zealand society in general and on Maori in particular. A model for evaluating power relationships is devised using five issues: initiation, benefits, representation, legitimation and accountability. This becomes a template used in further chapters. The second chapter looks at recent Maori educational initiatives using the model of power-sharing relationships, as well as developing community-controlled education facilities.

The third chapter relates to power and control relationships in educational research with Maori, and in a wider context Indigenous, peoples. It questions who gets the value from the research, the researched or the researcher, and looks to ways in which the imbalance can be rectified. It suggests moving towards structured "interviews as conversation" as a research methodology with some examples. The template is used again to allow a researcher to evaluate the purpose of their research, which they would also need to place in the context of those they are researching.

The last two chapters deal with power relationships in classrooms, the first with dealing with unequal relationships and the second with new approaches. These chapters should not be seen as separate from the rest of the book and the last chapter is synthesised from the experiences throughout it.

I found the book very engaging and easy to follow. The template with its five fields should be useful to researchers working in similar situations, as a way of orienting their research. The lack of a glossary of Maori words makes it difficult for an outsider to remember their meanings while working through the text. Many of the references are from New Zealand but I would have liked to see, for instance, how their research methodologies relate to some western ones, such as Guba and Lincoln's hermenuitic cycle.