I’m a priority – that’s what I’m told,
From the time, my mother held me in her arms, my father on his shoulders I stood, always trying to look beyond the horizon,
I’m a priority… learner – That’s what I’m told, lowering my head, lower statistics reveal…this dichotomy is my story.
Priority learner to lift the outcomes of success, yet when I hear my grandfathers words I am a success in his eyes no less...I am his story and he is mine...sensing more than education outcomes to define...me. My wairua, my mauri, my life force.
Why the obsession to fix me?
Do I need to be fixed?
How is education shaped by taken for granted truths?
Am I reduce-able to one’s perception taken in brief moments of assessment?
When in brief moments, solidified are my fears, my fears to fail, to be another statistic another rhetoric, to persuade others that I need to be fixed, I am broken.
The pieces of me, become pieces of you – fragments in politics, policies of change...priority education plans.
What motivates you to help me, to achieve higher degrees, responsive to policies, a responsive tap to funding...and in changing my perceptions of wisdom, what it is to know, and who’s knowledge matters most?
And still, with fire in my eyes, and warmth in my soul, the horizon I seek beyond one’s control. Responsive, inclusive, equality, terms coined in differentiating difference….of culture, of colour, of ability…my hopes, for education is that our eyes may meet in search of the horizon, and for that moment, knowing the potential in me, is knowing the potential in you. How can we navigate potentiality, to bring forth new subjectivities, what it means to lead and to know, to traverse tides of change in a globalised space, spaces together, yet spaces apart, spaces of difference, spaces in space in our connections to the wider cosmos. These are our oral histories, that bring us together, the va of our ancestors, within me, within you, and the hope for wisdom for a people yet to come.
