Pedagogy › Theorists › Mere Berryman

Aotearoa New Zealand · Ngāti Awa

Mere Berryman

Contemporary · Kaupapa Māori Education · Culturally Responsive Pedagogy

One of Aotearoa’s foremost Māori educational researchers. Berryman’s work centres on the relationship between culture, identity, and educational success for Māori students. Her contributions to the Te Kotahitanga programme and the Starpath Project changed what systematic, high-expectation culturally-responsive schooling looks like in practice at scale across New Zealand.

Kaupapa Māori Te Kotahitanga Whanaungatanga Cultural Identity Responsive Teaching
Whakataukitī · Proverb
He aha te mea nui o te ao? He tangata, he tangata, he tangata.
What is the most important thing in the world? It is people, it is people, it is people.
“What Māori students tell us is that they want teachers who care about them enough to set high expectations — teachers who are willing to change what they do to ensure student success, not teachers who expect students to change to suit them.” — Mere Berryman, paraphrasing student voice research

🧑‍🎓 Biography & Scholarly Context

Associate Professor Mere Berryman (Ngāti Awa) is one of Aotearoa’s most influential education researchers. Based at the University of Waikato’s Te Kotahi Research Institute, her research career has focused on understanding and improving the educational experiences and outcomes of Māori students — both in mainstream and Māori-medium settings.

Her early career involved working directly in schools alongside Russell Bishop on the Te Kotahitanga project — one of the largest and most sustained evidence-based programmes to improve Māori student achievement in mainstream New Zealand secondary schools. The programme’s core insight was radical: rather than asking Māori students to “fix” their relationship to schooling, it asked teachers to fix their pedagogical relationships with Māori students.

Berryman has also collaborated on international research, examining how indigenous and minority communities in Canada, the United States, and Aotearoa approach culturally responsive and sustaining education. Her theoretical grounding combines Kaupapa Māori principles with contemporary educational research on culturally responsive pedagogy. She is a strong voice for the centrality of student and whānau voice in school reform.

🌳 Core Kaupapa Māori Principles Berryman Applies

Principle
Whanaungatanga
Relationships & Belonging
Learning happens in and through relationships. Teachers who build genuine, warm, respectful relationships with Māori students transform their educational trajectories.
Principle
Manaakitanga
Care & Dignity
Schools that uphold the mana (dignity) of every student, and treat Māori culture as an asset rather than a deficit, create conditions for genuine learning.
Principle
Ako
Reciprocal Learning
Ako positions both teacher and student as learners. Teachers in Te Kotahitanga are asked to genuinely learn from Māori students about what works for them.
Principle
Tūrangawaewae
A Place to Stand
Māori students need spaces where they can stand with confidence in their cultural identity. Identity is not an obstacle to academic achievement — it is its foundation.
Concept
Te Kaitakitanga
Teacher as Guardian
Teachers in this framework see themselves as caretakers of Māori students’ potential, with professional and moral obligations to create the conditions for their success.
Method
Whānau Voice
Community Partnership
Berryman’s research consistently centres the voices of students, whānau and communities — not just administrators or teachers — in defining what successful education looks like.

✨ Te Kotahitanga: The Programme that Changed New Zealand Schools

Programme

Te Kotahitanga (2000–2015)

Te Kotahitanga began as a research project listening to Māori students’ own explanations of their educational experiences. Students consistently described the biggest obstacle to their achievement as their relationships with teachers — specifically, teachers with low expectations, who did not know them as Māori people, and who managed their behaviour rather than engaged their intellects.

Based on these narratives, Bishop and Berryman developed a professional development programme built around sustained coaching and observation cycles in which teachers learned to implement an “Effective Teaching Profile” — one characterised by high expectations, genuine caring, shared control of learning, and explicit use of Māori cultural contexts. Over its lifespan, the programme worked with over 400 schools and significantly improved Māori student engagement and achievement outcomes.

A key feature: the programme refused to position Māori students as the problem. The locus of change was explicitly and entirely with teachers and schools. This was both theoretically grounded (in Kaupapa Māori and Critical Race Theory) and practically significant: it changed the professional development conversation from “how do we fix these students?” to “how do we change our teaching?”

🏫 Classroom Implications for Aotearoa Teachers

📚 Academic References

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