Rose Pere
Dr Rose Te Arikitanga Pere · 1937–2020 · Te Wheke · Māori Holistic Education
The scholar who restored the whānau to the centre of education. In an era when Western schooling measured the individual child in isolation, Pere argued that no part of a person can be healthy while the whole is not — and built a framework that put that conviction into the language of educational practice.
🧑🎓 Biography & Historical Context
Dr Rose Te Arikitanga Pere was born in 1937, of Tūhoe and Te Whānau-ā-Apanui descent, and grew up immersed in the living tradition of Māori knowledge, cosmology, and healing practice. This was not background: it was the epistemological foundation of everything she would later bring to education. She worked as a teacher and educator, and spent a significant part of her career at the University of Waikato, where she became a leading voice in Kaupapa Māori education research at a time when that field was fighting for institutional legitimacy.
Her 1982 working paper Ako: Concepts and Learning in the Māori Tradition was foundational: it articulated, with academic rigour, the sophisticated pedagogical framework that had always been embedded in Māori knowledge transmission — one that Western educational theory was only beginning to reach for. Ako was not just a word for teaching or learning. It named the reciprocal, relational, spiritually grounded process through which knowledge passes between people, across generations, and between the physical and spiritual worlds simultaneously.
Te Wheke, published in 1991, extended this into a comprehensive wellbeing framework: the octopus, with its single collective body and eight reaching tentacles, as the living metaphor for how Māori understand flourishing. She received an honorary doctorate in recognition of her contribution to Māori education. She died in 2020, and her passing was mourned across Aotearoa — not only for what she had built, but for the mana with which she had carried it.
Pere’s significance is not only her frameworks. She was one of the scholars who made it possible to speak about Māori educational philosophy in the language of the academy without diminishing it — who insisted that ancient Māori knowledge was not a historical curiosity but a living epistemology with direct, urgent relevance to how children learn today.
🐙 Te Wheke — The Octopus Model
The octopus — te wheke — is one of the most intelligent creatures in the ocean. It navigates complex environments, responds to change with whole-body sensitivity, and cannot function if any of its parts are damaged. Pere chose this creature deliberately: the wheke is the whole system. The head represents the whānau — the collective from which the individual emerges. The eight tentacles are eight dimensions of wellbeing that must all be healthy for flourishing to be possible. No tentacle is optional. No dimension can be sacrificed for another.
This is the framework’s central claim, and it is a direct challenge to educational models that address cognition alone, or that treat physical, spiritual, and relational dimensions of a student’s life as peripheral to the “real” work of the classroom.
🌿 Aotearoa NZ Resonance
Pere’s framework sits in direct conversation with Mason Durie’s Te Whare Tapa Whā (1984), which names four dimensions of Māori health: taha wairua, taha hinengaro, taha tinana, and taha whānau. The two models are often taught together — Durie’s four-walled house and Pere’s eight-tentacled octopus — because they are complementary readings of the same deep principle: that wellbeing is holistic, relational, and cannot be reduced to any single dimension. Where Durie’s model is often applied in health contexts, Pere’s Te Wheke was developed specifically as an educational framework.
In te Mātaiaho 2025, wellbeing is not a strand alongside learning — it is a condition of it. The revised curriculum’s insistence that ākonga bring their “full selves” to learning, and that kaiako must know their students as people and not just as learners, is a direct institutional acknowledgement of what Pere argued three decades earlier. The framework is not historical context for NZ education — it is current curriculum.
The Kaupapa Māori research tradition that Graham Smith and Linda Tuhiwai Smith formalised in the 1990s sits on the same epistemological ground. Te Kotahitanga (Bishop & Berryman, 2006) demonstrated empirically what Pere argued philosophically: that Māori students achieve when their cultural identity is treated as an asset within the classroom, not a condition to be managed outside it.
🌱 Mauri as a Classroom Audit
Before any lesson audit asks “Are all seven sections present?” — Pere’s framework asks: does this environment have mauri? Does it give life to the people in it, or does it drain them? That question can be asked of a classroom, a school, a curriculum document, a lesson plan, or a teacher’s relationship with a student. It is a more demanding audit than a form checklist — and a more honest one.
The most significant tension in applying Te Wheke in NZ schools is structural: the framework is holistic and collective, but schools still assess the individual child on academic performance metrics, standardised tests, and NCEA credits. A student whose mauri is low, whose whatumanawa is suppressed, and whose whakapapa is invisible in the curriculum can still sit a test and receive a grade — and the grade will say nothing about what is actually happening to them. Te Wheke does not resolve this tension. It names it. Using the framework seriously means being willing to look at what the test cannot see, and to advocate for assessment structures that make the whole child visible.
🏫 Classroom Implications
- Ask the mauri question before you plan Does your classroom give life or take it? This is not poetic. Students — particularly Māori students — read the mauri of a room immediately and accurately. If the honest answer is “drains it,” the lesson plan is secondary.
- Name whatumanawa as a teaching condition Emotional expression is not a distraction from learning — it is a dimension of health without which learning is incomplete. Students whose emotional lives are suppressed in class are not fully present. Build in genuine moments for it: response circles, creative expression, whānau sharing before academic tasks.
- Whakapapa as curriculum, not decoration Hā a Koro Mā, a Kui Mā — the breath of the ancestors — is a teaching condition. Students who know whose they are have a stronger foundation for everything else. A unit on identity is not a pastoral interruption; it is the bedrock on which academic confidence is built.
- Design summative assessment through all eight dimensions A portfolio assessed with Te Wheke in mind looks different from a test. It might include: the student’s strongest academic work (hinengaro); a piece connecting to their whakapapa (Hā a Koro Mā); a reflection on a learning relationship (whānau/whanaungatanga); their own wellbeing check-in (waiora). The portfolio builds over weeks and comes together at the end — a richer, more honest summative than any single test can provide. This is what Pere’s framework makes visible: the continuum of the student’s learning, not just the endpoint.
- Recognise whānau as the unit of wellbeing, not the school What arrives with a student each morning includes everything that has happened in their whānau. Pastoral care that treats the student as a separate unit from their family is working with an incomplete picture. Build whānau relationships, not just student relationships.
- Use the eight dimensions to diagnose, not just describe When a student is disengaged or struggling, move through the eight dimensions as a diagnostic: which tentacle is under strain? Is it physical (tinana — are they hungry, unwell)? Emotional (whatumanawa — is something unexpressed)? Relational (whānau — something happening at home)? The framework is a structured alternative to “unmotivated,” which describes nothing and prescribes nothing.
📚 Academic References
-
Pere, R.T. (1982). Ako: Concepts and Learning in the Māori Tradition.
University of Waikato Working Paper No. 17.
🎓 Google Scholar ↗ -
Pere, R.T. (1991). Te Wheke: A Celebration of Infinite Wisdom. Ao Ako
Global Learning.
🎓 Google Scholar ↗ -
Durie, M. (1994). Whaiora: Māori Health Development. Oxford University
Press. (Companion framework; the four-walled house alongside Pere’s octopus.)
🎓 Google Scholar ↗ -
Smith, G.H. (1997). The Development of Kaupapa Māori: Theory and Praxis.
PhD thesis, University of Auckland. (The theoretical tradition in which Pere’s
work is situated; Māori education as a transformative project.)
🎓 Google Scholar ↗ -
Bishop, R., & Berryman, M. (2006). Culture Speaks: Cultural relationships and
classroom learning. Huia Publishers. (Empirical demonstration of Pe Wheke’s
philosophy: Māori achievement rises when cultural identity is treated as an asset.)
🎓 Google Scholar ↗ -
Barlow, C. (1991). Tikanga Whakaaro: Key Concepts in Māori Culture.
Oxford University Press. (Cultural foundations; definitions of the tikanga concepts
Pere draws on throughout her work.)
🎓 Google Scholar ↗ -
Tuhiwai Smith, L. (1999). Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous
Peoples. Zed Books. (Places Pere’s framework in the broader context of
indigenous knowledge as a legitimate research and educational epistemology.)
🎓 Google Scholar ↗