Introduction
This chapter stakes a claim for writing as a research method, under the activist intellectual umbrella of Kaupapa Māori. That te reo Māori is an oral language and culture is such a deeply engrained idea that the title ‘writing as a Māori method of inquiry’ has a ‘jarring’ effect—like an interruption or intervention in thinking. I am bound to write from my identity as a Māori, but my arguments also apply more generally under the umbrella category of Indigenous research. This chapter argues that ‘writing’ (in English, Māori or both) is a powerful method for exploring what it means to be Māori: a way to interrogate Māori subjectivities and advance Māori political aspirations. Inspired by Laurel Richardson’s classic text, Writing: A method of inquiry (Richardson 2000; Richardson and St. Pierre 2008, 2018), this chapter is mainly methodological, with cognisance that methodology rests on the bedrock of philosophical commitments, on the values and ethics that inform one’s research design and practice.
In education and related fields there is currently an imbalance in favour of empirical qualitative research to the extent that “doing research” in education has become almost synonymous with “conducting interviews”—an imbalance even more pronounced within Māori education research, given the emphasis on bringing forward Māori voices, and the cultural preference for face-to-face methods expressed as ‘kanohi-ki-te-kanohi’ or ‘kanohi kitea’ (Pipi et al. 2004). This imbalance is especially relevant for postgraduate research in Education, given that Education is currently one of the leading fields of Māori postgraduate study and research.
This chapter looks at the thinking behind writing in research, including interview research, of the kind commonly done in postgraduate research on topics in Māori education (Mika and Southey 2016). In taking on such research, there is often an unspoken belief on the part of the student researcher (possibly also shared by the supervisor) in ‘empirical data’ and ‘method’ that reflects the influence of forms of scientism: ideas imported from science and applied in distorted form in education (Sorell 1991).
There is no escape from theory in research, and if, as Māori researchers, we reject ‘theory’ on the grounds of being a tool of the coloniser, we implicitly accept by default the ‘unspoken beliefs’ of the dominant epistemology. Just to claim to follow Kaupapa Māori methodology is not enough. All researchers and specifically Māori researchers need to interrogate the thinking behind every decision they make in research. Research decisions to be interrogated range from deciding on the research question at the start of the study, to the writing decisions represented on every page of the final written research output. Willingness to interrogate our thinking and decisions is a key aspect of critical Kaupapa Māori research practice.
The approach to research taken in this chapter aligns with the principles of Kaupapa Māori (G. H. Smith 2003; L. T. Smith 2012), using rather than explaining Kaupapa Māori theory and research methodology. I use Kaupapa Māori theory to guide all my research decisions, including all writing decisions made in constructing texts through which I explore Māori ways of thinking about education and society, by which my research gets published and therefore ‘counts’. This approach is open to narrative forms of research, which respect the power of stories (King 2003) and align with Kaupapa Māori, given the cultural importance of narratives in Māori knowledge (Lee 2009). This chapter explores how this one word—Māori—modifies and indigenizes the already-radical idea of ‘writing as a method of inquiry’ (Richardson and St. Pierre 2018).
The post-qualitative impulse responds to the current educational moment, in which qualitative research remains dominantly shackled and subordinate to the false idols of quantitative science. Post-qualitative inquiry enlarges rather than replaces qualitative inquiry, as signalled by the continued appearance of Richardson and St. Pierre’s chapter on writing in the latest edition of the Sage Handbook of Qualitative Research (Richardson and St. Pierre 2018). Similarly, this chapter argues that writing as a post-qualitative method of Māori inquiry enlarges the terrain of Kaupapa Māori research.
Writing Kaupapa Māori Research
Writing is a useful form of ‘post-qualitative inquiry’ for Kaupapa Māori research in education and related fields of social science (L. T. Smith 2012). The original statement by Laurel Richardson (2000, p. 923) that ‘writing is a method of inquiry’ remains radical today, and just as urgently needed, given the expanding role of reductionism (and scientism, etc.) with the evolution of big data, standardization and AI, in the postdigital era of global education policy (Olssen et al. 2005; Verger et al. 2012). Poststructuralist ideas have found resonance with scholars writing in critical traditions, including the traditions of feminist and Indigenous research (Harding 1998; L. T. Smith 2012; St. Pierre and Pillow 2000). Post-qualitative inquiry is a quest for better alignment with poststructuralist philosophies than is possible by remaining within the bounds of traditional qualitative research methodology (St. Pierre 2018). As a leading form of Indigenous research, therefore, it should be no surprise that Kaupapa Māori research can make use of post-qualitative approaches in general—and writing as a method of inquiry in particular. Post-qualitative approaches such as ‘writing as a method of inquiry’ provide further novel possibilities for Kaupapa Māori research and build on existing scholarship such as the Pūrākau work by Jenny Lee-Morgan (Lee 2009).
My interest in ‘writing as a method of inquiry’ arose from my personal trajectory, rather than any strategic decision. I first learned about research by studying science, when I enrolled as a school leaver in a Bachelor of Science, completing a Master of Science in Chemistry four years later. From there, a convoluted path led to my current position as an academic in Māori education, and this chapter draws on examples from my experience to help explain why writing is a Māori method of inquiry, and why it is in Māori interests for writing to be more widely discussed as part of Kaupapa Māori research methodology. My personal examples add to the confession by Richardson that she found most qualitative writing ‘boring’ to read (Richardson and St. Pierre 2018, p. 818), and the description by St. Pierre of how she ‘encountered the incommensurabilities’ between poststructuralist theories and qualitative methods as she wrote her doctoral dissertation (St. Pierre 2018, p. 603).
Writing as a method of inquiry allows for the inclusion of various forms of non-empirical research, such as policy analysis, philosophical analysis, literature work, auto-ethnography, narrative and poetic approaches (Denzin and Lincoln 2018). A Kaupapa Māori focus on ‘writing’ is, among other things, an attempt to counter the tendency to equate ‘research’ with ‘interviews’ that is widespread throughout education research including Kaupapa Māori education research. Certainly, there has been a need to hear voices, including the voices of Māori communities, which were silenced or distorted in previous Eurocentric forms of research; the importance of research interviews is not in question. But to equate Kaupapa Māori education research with interview research is a reductionist way of thinking, which goes against Māori interests and risks ultimately missing the point of Kaupapa Māori. This mis-match between theory and practice betrays the radical politics of Kaupapa Māori praxis, and easily succumbs to ‘domestication’ (G. H. Smith 2012).
Just as a piece of literature is not equivalent to its “plot summary,” qualitative research is not contained in its abstract. Qualitative research has to be read, not scanned: its meaning is in the reading. It seemed foolish at best, and narcissistic and wholly self-absorbed at worst, to spend months or years doing research that ended up not being read and not making a difference to anything but the author’s career. (Richardson and St. Pierre 2018, p. 819)
A doctoral dissertation requires a solid theoretical platform, whether or not it includes the collection of any empirical data. In the discipline of Education this theoretical platform is constructed using the key tools of academic writing: careful reading, thinking, and writing (Sword 2012). As researchers gain in seniority, they become more adept at using these tools, but their commitment to academic writing inevitably intensifies. The time required for writing research is uncountable, because each scholar has their own individual rhythms and flows. But every author of the kind of academic work we want to read understands and commits to the demands of the writing process.
Back in 1980 when I undertook postgraduate research in Chemistry, the theories, methods and data pertaining to my study were clear, unambiguous, and distinct from each other. Methodology concerned decisions such as which chemical substances to react together and why, under what conditions, and how to assess the reaction progress and products. The literature review was a relatively simple summary of previously-published papers on similar reactions. I don’t recall much attention being paid to the process of writing the thesis: it mostly equated to ‘writing up’ the conditions and results of the chemical reactions. There was no mention of paradigm, ethics, politics or philosophy during my two degrees in Science.
Apart from a one-year graduate diploma in teaching, I first studied Education at the doctoral level, using my then 20-year-old MSc to support my enrolment in a Doctor of Education (EdD), studying part-time as a distance student, beginning in 2001. My doctoral study was catalysed by my unusual experience as a teacher of Pūtaiao or Māori-medium school science, and I enrolled with pre-existing scientific frameworks of meaning for key research concepts such as theory, data, findings and methodology. The EdD programme is beneficial for students with prior degrees from other disciplines because of its scaffolded provisional period, typically comprising four part-time semesters of study, which cover the introduction, methodology and literature review elements of a doctoral thesis, and the writing of the full research proposal for confirmation as a doctoral thesis candidate. With my lecturer’s help, I submitted an essay I wrote during this period to an international journal (G. Stewart 2005). When the reviews came back, I was surprised to see my essay referred to as ‘research’—a disjunction caused by the clash between my former science-based ideas of research, on the one hand, and the nature of theoretical educational research, on the other.
Two Camps on Whether or Not a Literature Review Counts as Research
Eventually I realised that qualitative educational researchers tend to occupy one of two camps; those who consider a literature review to be research in its own right, and those who don’t, and that the difference relates to distinct ways of thinking about education, knowledge and research, all tied up with how to think about writing. These two camps relate to the way the ‘world of writing has been divided into two separate kinds: literary and scientific’ (Richardson and St. Pierre 2018, p. 819). Scholars in the first camp view all forms of writing as potentially contributing to advancing understanding about education, while those in the second camp equate ‘research’ with the process of collecting data (conducting interviews is commonly referred to as ‘the research’ in postgraduate dissertations) that is then ‘analysed’ to produce ‘new knowledge’. The scare quotes show my scepticism towards the claims made by this thinking, stuck in the pseudo-scientific mode.
The attitudes towards writing found in the first camp are linked to greater interest in the philosophy and theory of education. Those in the second group are often explicitly motivated by the need for a wider range of views and voices to be represented in national educational discourse. The second camp is more likely to privilege ‘scientific’ modes of writing as being valid in research. A researcher like me coming to qualitative research from a previous training in science is confronted by the ‘pseudo-science’ trappings found in qualitative research—both in form, such as numbering everything, and in crude ideas such as the view that a small-scale survey study is ‘quantitative’ research, or that using two sources is ‘triangulation’.
The blurring of the humanities and the social sciences would be welcomed, not because it is “trendy” but rather because the blurring coheres more truly with the life sense and learning style of so many. This new qualitative community could, through its theory, analytical practices, and diverse membership, reach beyond academia and teach all of us about social injustice and methods for alleviating it. What qualitative researcher interested in social life would not feel enriched by membership in such a culturally diverse and inviting community? Writing becomes more diverse and author centred, less boring, and humbler. These are propitious opportunities. Some even speak of their work as spiritual. (Richardson and St. Pierre 2018, p. 824)
This section has used close readings of this key text by Richardson and St Pierre to show why ‘writing as a method of inquiry’ is relevant to Kaupapa Māori research. The next section focuses more closely on how Māori theory and language relates to writing as a method of inquiry and includes a synopsis of academic writing as praxis.
Post-qualitative Research and Māori Education
Kaupapa Māori theory was developed in the 1980s by Graham Hingangaroa Smith (2003) and Linda Tuhiwai Smith (2012), with contributions from others, notably Tuakana Nepe (1991) and Pita Sharples (1994). These scholars laid the foundations of documentation that enabled Kura Kaupapa Māori to be legally mandated and funded by the state (Reedy 1992). Kaupapa Māori education and Kaupapa Māori theory can be said to have ‘co-evolved’ over the years, in the sense that developments in each have supported the other. With the emergence of Kaupapa Māori research methodology (Pihama et al. 2002) and the diffusion of Kaupapa Māori ideas into other fields of social science (Durie 2012), Kaupapa Māori can now be considered as a wide-ranging social, political and intellectual tradition (Hoskins and Jones 2017).
Kaupapa Māori theory aligns well with post-structuralist theories and philosophies, yet to date Kaupapa Māori research has been interpreted into practice largely using established qualitative methods, dominantly interview research (G. H. Smith 2012). Variations such as ‘hui’ or large group interviews, marae settings and so on, are sometimes hailed as significant new ‘methodologies’ but often with little or no discussion or theorisation. Such claims betray lack of understanding of the importance of theory in methodology, and allows standard research assumptions to continue to exert covert influence in the research. A doctoral research project requires a substantive theoretical component, but collection of primary data is optional: a doctoral research project in Education can and often does consist of theoretical work without empirical work, but never the reverse. Post-qualitative inquiry is an approach to critical Māori research that complements rather than replaces other kinds of research. The idea of ‘writing as a Māori method of inquiry’ is a karanga (call) to post-qualitative methods to come forward and be recognised in Kaupapa Māori research (following C. W. Smith 2000).
Te reo Māori
Any Māori project inevitably involves the language, te reo Māori. A central concept in sociolinguistics is the idea that the fortunes of any natural language are inextricably linked to the larger fortunes of its speakers (May 2012). In Aotearoa-New Zealand, the situation is even more complex, as te reo Māori has been a political football for many years. The government spends a substantial budget on funding te reo revitalization activities, and schooling shoulders much of the national guilt over the catastrophic decline of te reo (Walker 2016).
The cause of this guilt is that every Māori person alive today has a parent, grandparent or great-grandparent who as a small child was hit with a cane, vine or strap at school for being heard speaking a word or two in Māori, often called ‘swearing’ by teachers, despite being the Māori child’s home language or mother tongue (Selby 1999). The inter-generational impact of such histories is referred to as cultural and educational ‘trauma’ (Pihama et al. 2014). Today te reo Māori is an official language (New Zealand Government 1987), so activities such as Māori-medium broadcasting, arts and education are provided for in national budgets. The binary of bilingualism adds to the stack of binaries, many of them reified, involved in writing as a Māori method of inquiry. For example, the Māori-Pākehā relationship sets up a series of binaries, with Māori being seen as superstitious and physical while Pākehā are rational and intellectual. Māori knowledge equates with ‘myths and legends’ while Pākehā knowledge is science and history. This racialisation of knowledge influences the school curriculum but is absent from current policy discourse of Māori education.
Nevertheless there are two natural languages involved, English and te reo Māori, which form a true duality: a real (i.e. non-reified) binary, which are equal according to linguistic theory (May 2012)—though not politically equal, due to the effects of a history of Eurocentric domination, as noted above.
Academic Writing Praxis
Qualitative research conveys ‘knowledge’ through language and is therefore concerned with truth. Philosophically speaking, the unit of truth is the sentence. The gold standard of academic research is the journal article, and a journal article conveys one main idea or argument. The unit of argument is the paragraph. These basic points about academic publishing underscore the importance of good academic writing, which centres on developing our ability to write good sentences and paragraphs that are technically correct and clear in meaning. Unfortunately, much published research is poorly written: badly constructed, technically inaccurate and boring to read; written as if to mystify instead of enlightening the reader (Sword 2012).
Successful academic writing yokes together the discipline of writing with the creativity of writing. Academic writing deploys the rules and structures by which a language conveys precise and complex meanings about the phenomena under study. It is always necessary to proofread, craft and edit our first drafts, which often have a stream-of-consciousness quality. In working on our drafts, we pay close attention to syntax, moving phrases within the sentence to ‘uncurl’ the relationships between the ideas, and carefully choosing particles between phrases to avoid ambiguity and repetition. We look with fresh eyes at metaphors, adjectives, adverbs and intensifiers, using these sparingly. The process of crafting academic writing passes a critical eye over every word, phrase, sentence, paragraph and section of our text.
Well-written academic work appears deceptively simple, because it is the result of paying diligent attention to every word of the text. Ultimately every mark on the page contributes to building up the meaning and power of a qualitative research text. Committing to the discipline of the writing process is an outward sign of a significant shift of mindset for the typical postgraduate student researcher in Education, who often embarks on a dissertation project with superficial, technicist notions about research and its key elements. In recent decades, working science has become radically inter-disciplinary and multi-methodological, but in fields covertly influenced by science, such as Education, the norms of research often remain locked in outmoded notions of ‘scientific method’ that easily succumb to scientism.
The creativity of writing works together with the discipline of writing through careful consideration of a key combination of sources, including from literature, empirical data collection, and the researcher’s own experience, marshalled around a specific scenario or topic. The creative aspect of writing in academic scholarship (beyond the creativity inherent in crafting and honing one’s writing) is the construction in writing of an argument, thread or narrative—the appropriate image might vary in different kinds of work and for different authors—but it is the essence of the thinking (whakaaro, see Mika and Southey 2016) that makes a piece of writing travel, go somewhere, and hence become more than a simple recitation of what others have already written.
The construction of a sound argument is a key criterion by which education research is assessed. Academic writing derives from science, and sound argument supported by reliable sources is the most ‘scientific’ characteristic of qualitative educational scholarship. Yet the process of thinking that is involved in constructing an argument is very difficult to explicitly delineate or teach, and often seems to remain completely invisible in sub-doctoral research writing. Attention to the process of writing, and drawing on poststructuralist ideas and theories, help support emergent researchers in learning to construct sound written arguments.
Both the discipline of writing and the creativity of writing can be turned to the expression of Māori identities and ideas in academic writing. One example is the recent rise in bilingual and Māori-medium publishing across many genres, including academic journals and books. The next section presents an analysis of an example of my own post-qualitative Kaupapa Māori research writing.
Infinitely Welcome: An Example of Writing as a Māori Method of Inquiry
Narrative writing genres are inherent in research that starts from the researcher as a source of data, such as auto-ethnographic and poetic forms. Narrative research blurs the boundaries between data collection and analysis (Ellis and Bochner 2000) and harnesses the radical teaching power of stories (King 2003). Auto-ethnography emerges from the ‘auto-turn’ in research and theory, which destabilised both the authority of the text and the autonomy of the author (Ellis and Bochner 2000). There is a ‘pure’ form of auto-ethnography which focuses on the self or world of the researcher, but I find it useful to incorporate elements of auto-ethnography, together with close readings of literature and other sources. The common ground between the various elements, narrative and analytical, is academic writing. To use various combinations of writing genres, and to include elements of text in te reo Māori, naturally leads towards the idea of a ‘layered text,’ which is one of many possible creative analytical writing practices (Richardson and St. Pierre 2018, p. 834), and a claim I make for the article below, published with two co-authors (G. Stewart et al. 2015).
The initial catalyst for this article was being asked by Pākehā friends at a distant university to organize a pōwhiri, a formal Māori welcome ceremony, for the opening of an upcoming conference. The disjunctions between the perspectives of Māori and non-Māori academics on such pōwhiri provide telling glimpses of the intercultural hyphen or incommensurable gap between Western and Indigenous cultures (G. T. Stewart 2018). I involved two Māori colleagues to help me respond to the request, as part of which we agreed to co-write this paper. This article features five original ‘vignettes’ or typical snapshots, which delve into differences between Māori and non-Māori viewpoints regarding education pōwhiri. The topic of education pōwhiri is of wide interest across the education sector of Aotearoa-New Zealand, given the increasing demand for pōwhiri in schools, universities and other events such as conferences.
Education pōwhiri are a site of formal encounter between Māori and non-Māori subjectivities; a real-world illustration of the theoretical entity of the intercultural hyphen (G. T. Stewart 2018). Writing about this topic is an opportunity to investigate a topical conundrum in education, which contributes to my larger research agenda of exploring biculturalism and the place of Māori in society and in education. This article explores the range of possible meanings of education pōwhiri and begins to theorize the academic labour of Māori staff who are obliged to arrange and support such pōwhiri in their workplaces. My theoretical orientation aligns with Kaupapa Māori research methodology, which guides the theoretical framework and ethics, but holds open the possibility of incorporating any form of data. The complexities of the topic inspired me to take a narrative approach to this research.
The Process of Writing the Article
The first stage involved co-writing five original vignettes or short stories, to highlight tensions invoked by the Pākehā desire or demand for pōwhiri to be arranged in non-Māori contexts such as an academic conference. These vignettes present five ‘snapshots’ from typical education pōwhiri situations, rather than one unified story. We wrote these vignettes by mashing together and fictionalizing our combined experience as Māori teachers and academics. The five vignettes present a series of typical phases of an education pōwhiri: the first story is about a telephone call requesting a pōwhiri; the second features the karanga (call), then the mihi (speeches), waiata (group singing), and finally the kaputī (refreshments). Presented in sequence, the five vignettes or stories form a kind of meta-narrative of an education pōwhiri. The vignettes are labelled Story 1–5 for reading clarity, in addition to having Māori titles.
The second stage of the writing process involved literature research, to find other sources about the modern use of pōwhiri, and to examine the theoretical and philosophical ideas surfaced by education pōwhiri. The theoretical work was important to the claim of this work as ‘research’. I searched for literature on pōwhiri, most of which explains pōwhiri in an interpretation of Māori culture for non-Māori readers, finding a Māori Television documentary (Edwards and Ellmers 2010) and a short section in Joan Metge’s book, Tuamaka (2010) as two existing critical sources about contemporary pōwhiri. A third key source was Wally Penetito (2010), in particular his critique of university marae. In the submitted manuscript article, the five original stories appeared at the start of the article, followed by the literature sections, but in response to reviewer comments, the revision process resulted in significantly more integration of the stories with comments from published sources, especially the documentary, drawing and commenting on detailed parallels between the themes in each.
The overall plan of analysis in this article uses close reading methods of critical discourse analysis (Locke 2004), applied in a unified way across the various resources: fiction, literary criticism, original stories, research literature on pōwhiri, Māori education, etc. The Māori titles of the vignettes and pieces of Māori text at the start of four of the stories were untranslated in the final article, in a writing device to represent the gap in translatability, or incommensurability between Māori and Pākehā worlds. Also, three section headings: Mā wai rā e taurima? (p. 94); Mā te tika, mā te pono… and Me te aroha e (p. 100) are taken from a well-known waiata tangi (funeral song). These literary devices helped bring Māori sensibilities into the writing of the text.
The literature trail led to a key article titled The time of hybridity in which the author, Simone Drichel (2008), applies Derrida’s deconstructive practice to Māori-Pākehā relationships, drawing on the short story Parade, a famous exemplar of Māori fiction by Patricia Grace (1986), which itself became a useful source in writing the article. The theoretical analysis in Drichel (2008) using the concepts of iterability and performativity also clearly applies to education pōwhiri, and the concepts from Derrida as well as Levinas (time as the ultimate Other) enter into a productive engagement with the Māori cultural concepts involved in education pōwhiri.
The article opens by introducing the topic of education pōwhiri then the concept of narrative research, with reference to the Indigenous respect for the teaching power of stories. It then turns to the story Parade, with enough detail from the story to highlight its theme of Māori experience of the intercultural gap between Māori and Pākehā. This provided a springboard to introduce a more detailed discussion of the context of education pōwhiri from the perspective of the Māori academic, followed by the section on research approach or methodology, which included the story of the catalyst for the article. Story 1 came next, then the other stories, interspersed with comments linking the ideas in the vignettes to those explored in the documentary about pōwhiri (Edwards and Ellmers 2010). Not only are the five vignettes interwoven with comments on published literature, but the end of the final vignette is indeterminate, as the discussions lead organically back to the literature. The aim of this research was to theorize the use of pōwhiri in non-Māori contexts, for which the concepts of performativity, iterability and relational ethics proved fruitful.
Conclusion: Kaupapa Māori and the Power of the Written Word
Given the low reading rate of the vast majority of qualitative research, it is imperative to write for the reader, since like any writing, academic writing needs readers in order for its ideas to take root and flourish: writing that goes unread shrivels up and dies of loneliness. The reader, who stands outside the text and represents the world outside the text, determines the life and ultimate fate of each piece of writing in the cultural archive of history.
Māori scholars tend to push the boundaries of academic conventions and practices in writing, just as much as in any other activity. Kaupapa Māori principles usefully inform writing practices, which involve decisions with ethical dimensions, as with all forms of research activity. Understanding writing as a Māori method of inquiry means exploring the use of academic writing as a vehicle for our radical ideas and political aspirations in Kaupapa Māori research. This method is consistent with an understanding of the project of Kaupapa Māori as a deployment of the power of the written word to speak back to the Eurocentric ‘archive’ underpinning the entire academy; to take control of representations of things Māori in the public square of society, and re-position research within a Māori history of education, told by, for and with Māori.