Research 1 Assignment

I have decided to concentrate on Blended Learning. I have been thinking about confining it to a New Zealand context but a lot of the literature comes from overseas so I might include a subsection which includes New Zealand. Also I need to think about whether I should confine this to a certain school level such as secondary school. However, I imagine that the issues around blended learning a often the same for all teachers and learners.

Start of Research and Community Informed Practice.

Getting myself organised for online learning with second part of the Mindlab course.
Senior students have just left school and a number coming back to complete tasks or partake in tutorials. This does not leave a lot of time for Mindlab work at the moment. Hopefully more time next week.
I am halfway through Alex Barnes Kaupapa Maori research. His two questions: 1. How have Pakeha become involved in Kaupapa Maori educational research  and 2. What issues do Pakeha believe inhibit and facilitate their working with Maori communities makes for interesting and useful reading. A link from the research to Martin Tolich's research abstract proved to be quite provocative:

Abstract

The emergence and dominance of the Māori-centred research paradigm is leaving Pakeha researchers out in the cold. “Pakeha paralysis” draws on my experiences as author, teacher and university ethics committee member to account for the reasons why so many Pakeha postgraduate students are caught in a state of paralysis, deliberately excluding Māori from their general population research samples. 

(Tolich, M. 2002)