This is the inside story of an indigenous education success story. Te Kotahitanga is a theory-based program that has made a positive difference to the educational experience and achievement of M ori students in mainstream schools in New Zealand. It is essential reading for anyone interested in reforming mainstream schools so that quality education and equity is available for all students, especially those who have been historically marginalised.

What is school reform? What makes it sustainable? Who needs to be involved? How is scaling up achieved? This book is about the need for educational reforms that have built into them, from the outset, those elements that will see them sustained in the original sites and spread to others. Using New Zealand's Te Kotahitanga Project as a model the authors branch out from the project itself to seek to uncover how an educational reform can become both extendable and sustainable. Their model can be applied to a variety of levels within education: classroom, school and system wide. It has seven elements that should be present in the reform initiative from the outset. These elements include establishing goals and a vision for reducing disparities; embedding a new pedagogy to depth in order to change the core of educational practice; developing new institutions and organisational structures to support in-class initiatives; developing leadership that is responsive, proactive and distributed; spreading the reform to include all teachers, parents, community members and external agencies; developing and using appropriate measures of performance as evidence for modifying core classroom and school practices; creating opportunities for all involved to take ownership of the reform in such a way that the original objectives of the reform are protected and sustained.

This book draws together many previously published articles and book chapters produced by the author over the past 20 years of work in the field of indigenous education. However, rather than just being a compilation of a series of papers, this book is a record of the development of an indigenous approach towards large-scale, theory-based education reform that is now being implemented, in two different forms, in almost half of the secondary schools in New Zealand. Fundamental to this theorising is the understanding, identified by Paulo Freire over forty years ago, that answers to the conditions oppressed peoples find themselves in is not to be found in the language or understandings of the oppressors. Rather, it is to be found in those of the oppressed. This realisation has been confirmed by the examples in this book. The first is seen where it is identified how researching in Maori contexts needs to be conducted dialogically within the world view and understandings of Maori people. Secondly, dialogue in its widest sense is crucial for developing a means whereby Maori students are able to participate successfully in education. The book details how researching the impact of colonization on his mother's Maori family enabled the author to develop a means of researching within indigenous, Maori contexts. It then details how the lessons learnt here appealed as being a means by which the marginalization of Maori students in mainstream, public school classrooms could be re-theorised, and how schools and education systems could be reorganised so as to support indigenous students to be successful learners.