Lesson 1 — What Do We Owe Each Other?
Move: claim → steel-man → challenge → revision.
Learner evidence: an initial civic position, a fair statement of the strongest opposing case, and a revision receipt.
This route is the Civics Deliberation Seminar
Choose this route when the evidence you want is argument, critique and civic judgement. Learners work from common cases, name criteria before conclusions, represent opposing claims fairly, and revise decisions after challenge.
Other teaching approach: Systems Design Lab →At a glance
Best for
Years 9–10 Social Sciences; three 60-minute periods; classes ready to practise disagreement without treating consensus as the goal.
Evidence
Three seminar receipts: a steel-manned obligation judgement, a criteria-first legitimacy ranking, and a scarcity decision that names who carries the cost.
Ngā Whāinga Ako | Learning intentions
- make civic judgements using criteria that are visible before the conclusion;
- state the strongest case against a preferred position before rejecting it;
- distinguish a fair process from an outcome we personally prefer;
- identify who benefits, who loses, and which future or absent voices a decision leaves out;
- know when a claim about Te Tiriti, iwi, hapū or Māori governance requires primary or local authority rather than a generic classroom definition.
Primary three-lesson sequence
Lesson 2 — Who Decides, and By What Right?
Move: criteria first → apply consistently → adversarial defence → ranked judgement.
Learner evidence: a decision-rule matrix plus a legitimacy ranking that acknowledges its strongest weakness.
Lesson 3 — Who Bears the Cost?
Move: allocate scarcity → expose disadvantage → hear an absent stakeholder → defend or revise.
Learner evidence: a distribution judgement that names who loses and what new evidence would overturn it.
Seminar protocol | The invariant across all three lessons
- Name the criterion before the verdict. “Fair”, “best” and “democratic” are not evidence by themselves.
- Make the other side recognisable. A learner cannot claim to have answered an argument they have weakened first.
- Find the person outside the easy majority. Ask whose agency, access, authority or future is easiest to ignore.
- Permit revision. Changing a position for a named reason is stronger evidence than defending the first answer at all costs.
Te Ao Māori, Te Tiriti and cultural authority
This Seminar does not teach a universal “Māori governance model”. Iwi and hapū governance is diverse and specific to people, place and history. Any local example needs a named source and appropriate authority.
Te Tiriti is not a decorative value card. Learners use the Māori and English texts as primary sources and identify when a public-authority judgement in Aotearoa requires further Treaty analysis. Lesson 3 keeps the Whanganui relationship specific to Whanganui rather than converting it into a generic doctrine of resource management.
Waitangi Tribunal — Māori and English texts of Te Tiriti o Waitangi / Treaty of Waitangi
Hononga Marautanga | Curriculum
Human rights as protections of dignity, freedom, and equality. Protected through, for example: the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act 1990; the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR); the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP).
Te Mātaiaho (2025) · Social Sciences · Phase 4 · Civics and Society · mandatory statement 51251. Lesson 1 directly examines protections and obligations; Lessons 2–3 then test how decision procedures and resource allocation can uphold or weaken dignity, freedom and equality.
Optional continuation — not the Seminar spine
If you want learners to move from deliberating civic principles into a longer build-and-test design project, continue to the separate six-lesson guided society-design inquiry. That route uses design teams, system maps, a dossier and council pitch. It is an extension after this Seminar, not the primary lesson sequence on this page.
If you want a different approach from the start, use the Systems Design Lab, where learners model dependencies, stress-test mechanisms, quantify resource flows and revise a system from consequences.
Aromatawai | What counts as strong Seminar evidence
- Reason before position: the criterion is visible and applied consistently.
- Opposition before rebuttal: the learner can state a strong counter-case accurately.
- Distribution before “fairness”: winners, losers and absent stakeholders are named.
- Revision before performance: a change of mind with a reason counts as success, not weakness.
Source spine
- Elections NZ — What is New Zealand’s system of government?
- New Zealand Parliament — What does an MP do?
- Waitangi Tribunal — Māori and English texts of Te Tiriti o Waitangi / Treaty of Waitangi
- Te Awa Tupua (Whanganui River Claims Settlement) Act 2017 is the named primary legal source for the Whanganui-specific provenance boundary in Lesson 3.