What does safety look and feel like to you?
Dan | Whakatū
Dan George, Tumuaki (Principal) of Victory Primary School, describes how he builds a sense of belonging at school for both children and staff.
“We are a kura that’s made up of about 40 different cultures at the moment. So for us, cultural safety is a big one.
It’s a big one for everyone, because everyone wants to feel that sense of belonging, that sense of safety within these walls. They want to see themselves and their culture valued and visible within this space. What I work really hard on here is to establish an environment and a culture of trust where we have – even though we’re different – we have that shared tikanga, where the way that we work is shared among all of the different people that are here.
So I guess it’s just giving everybody a chance to see themselves within this space, to see their cultures represented within this space. And that allows us to sort of build those cross-cultural relationships based on trust.
We’ve got this concept of pūmanawatanga that we use as part of what we call, ‘educultural wheels’. So it’s a concept that was created by the late Angus Macfarlane. An amazing man, who was a real treasure, a real koha (gift) to education. He talks about pūmanawatanga being the tone and the pulse and the morale of an organisation. And that’s fed into by a whole heap of values, that sit around the outside of that. But pūmanawatanga is something that you see and something that you feel.
A couple of years ago, we went on a big waka trip out in Abel Tasman. So we’re all in this waka together. He waka eke noa. We’re all paddling together. Pūmanawatanga is something that you feel when everyone is paddling in unison. If you’ve got one person that’s out of sync, you can feel it instantly. So that concept of pūmanawatanga is when everything is just moving forward. You’ve got momentum, and that’s the same within an organisation.
So, you know when things are going well with the children, with the staff, with the people, because you’ll be able to feel it. You don’t feel that hoe (paddle) that is in the water that’s creating friction. So it’s that feeling of everyone moving forward together.”
