An introduction to Rauhuia: Terenga Huihuinga | Symposia series

Rauhuia aims to support all teachers to develop their leadership capability.  Teachers are leaders in their own right, teachers can grow their skills knowledge and confidence as leaders within the communities they serve. 
  
Rauhuia Terenga Huihuinga | Symposia series aims to introduce leadership perspectives, concepts, and contexts to the profession based on themes that came directly from members of the profession.  Strong themes drawn from our initial conversations focussed on ensuring well-being of leaders, understanding Mana as leadership, and understanding how the communities we all work in can support us and help us to lead the teachers, whānau, and the tamariki we are working with daily.    

The symposia are designed to be a brief introduction to a leadership context and a conversation starter for the profession. We have curated the presentations from the symposia to enable conversations to then continue in your setting, developing leadership capability at place.  
  
You can register for upcoming symposia and find videos of past symposia below, as well as questions that could be used to continue the discussion in staff meetings, mentoring sessions, and professional learning groups. 

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Register for upcoming symposia

Thursday 24 August

Mana o te whenua – Moana

Exploring Pacific Perspectives on leadership. How we can connect with other leaders and traverse the vast oceans between our contexts. 

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Thursday 26 October

Mana o te whenua - Awa

Exploring Māori perspectives on leadership. How we engage and learn in our unique contexts to grow our own community network of leaders.

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Thursday 23 November

Mana o te whenua - Ahi Kā

How do we keep the home fires burning for future generations of leaders. Exploring concepts of intergenerational knowledge, future focussed education, and clearing a path to the future.   

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Date to be confirmed

Mana o te whenua – Maunga

Exploring our immediate physical landscape and the impact it has on our practice.  Understanding the unique strengths of our community and their demonstrated leadership capability.

 

 

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Mana Oranga - Well-being

Mana Oranga – The Leadership Capability Framework highlights the need for leaders to actively attend to their own well-being.  This is often thought of at a personal level from a health perspective.  Through our conversations with teachers and leaders across all sectors it became clear that consideration for well being of leaders needs to take into consideration the connections they have with people and environment too. 

The Mana Oranga series explores well-being from multiple perspectives.  You can see the past and upcoming presentations from this series below.

Symposium one: Tino Rangatiratanga me te Mana Motuhake

The Leadership Capability Framework  highlights how capable leaders bring their knowledge and experience to make improvements to local and national professional networks.  Leaders take or make opportunities to develop things that are collectively more than the sum of the contributing parts, which others can draw from and use to improve educational practice. 

Pania Pāpa shares her passion for Te reo Māori.  Her learning has led to leadership which in turn is feeding the sector with new language development opportunities. Sharing her determination and her talent for language teaching and learning, she is leading the way for the communities she works with locally and supporting the development of te reo Māori teaching nationally. Hans Tiakawai in his kōrero discusses the concept of Mana Motuhake from a regional and local perspective.  His leadership and that of the teachers in the school  is enabled through understanding and meeting the needs of the community. A self-determining future focussed approach adds strength and provides a network to support the team in their teaching.  The leadership of a community comes from within the community.  
   

 

Questions to stimulate discussion and/or reflection:

1. How did you see Rangatiratanga me te  Mana Motuhake reflected in Pānia and Han's korero?

2. Look at the Rauhuia Leadership Capability Framework — what aspects of leadership can you see connecting with  Pānia and Han's korero?

3. What implications might their kaupapa | concepts have on your own practice as a leader, what impact might it have on the leadership capability conversations in your unique setting? 

Symposium two: Whanaungatanga me te Aroha

Whanaungatanga me te Aroha  The Leadership Capability Framework identifies that high trust relationships are at the heart of effective leadership and that leadership attends to the conditions and practices that are needed for the building of community to occur. 

Professor Meihana Durie explores the balance of opposites from a personal and professional perspective.   Understanding the need for balance in our lives and that of the children and adults we encounter in our settings daily.  Meihana considers Mauri  (Life force or energy) in many forms and offers ways to consider our well-being over a longer period and from a wider community perspective.  Yvonne Tahere and Janeen Marino share the journey they have been on over the past 25 years with their their kura and the community of Ōtaki.  They discuss what engagement can look like when you plan long term and you consider whanaungatanga|relationships from an  intergenerational perspective.  Understanding that good things really do take time and are worth the effort.  
   

 

Questions to stimulate discussion and/or reflection:

1. How did you see Whanaungatanga me te Aroha reflected in the presentations?

2. Look at the Rauhuia Leadership Capability Framework — what aspects of leadership can you see connecting with  Meihana, Yvonne and Janeen's kōrero?

3. What implications might their  kaupapa | concepts have on your own practice as a leader,   what impact might it have on the leadership capability conversations in your unique setting?  

Symposium three: Ngā Tūmanako me te Ngākaupai

Leaders have a sense of purpose and are hopeful for the future.  Leaders make decisions with their communities and trust them to determine the future. ​ The Leadership Capability Framework identifies that high trust relationships are at the heart of effective leadership. High trust relationships exist when leaders are respected for their deep educational knowledge, their actions and values, and the way they engage respectfully with others with empathy and humility, fostering openness in discussions. Leaders have good emotional intelligence and self-awareness.

Dr Jenny Ritchie's presentation positions the early childhood care and education sector in Aotearoa as one that should be recognised as providing insight and inspiration for the field of educational leadership. Such insights can be drawn from the history of this sector, which, being located outside of the compulsory schooling sector in this country, has emerged in response to a series of identified community needs, led primarily by women, and initially reliant more on community collaboration than government mandate and funding. It outlines how this sector has offered a site of resistance and a counter-narrative to colonialist authoritarian models of leadership inherited from Great Britain through our nation’s 200-year history of colonisation.

Katarina Alexopoulos and Tennessee Eccleston share their journey on where they have been, where they are now, and where they are headed to achieve the best possible outcomes for tamariki and whānau. They will share on their mahi around relationship building during, and post, lockdowns leading to the development and implementation of our localised curriculum and beyond. "Ka mua, ka muri" is a whakatauki that means "walking backwards into the future" 

 

 Questions to stimulate discussion and/or reflection:

  1. How did you see Ngā Tūmanako me te Ngākaupai reflected in the presentations?

  2. Look at the Educational Leadership Capability Framework — what aspects of leadership can you see connecting with Jenny, Katarina and Tennessee's kōrero?

  3. What implications might their kaupapa | concepts have on your practice as a leader, and what impact might it have on the leadership capability conversations in your unique setting? 

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