A tale of tartan: Diffractive storytelling in response to educational policy for Pākehā educators in Aotearoa New Zealand

Abstract

This piece demonstrates a creative practice that invites educators from diverse backgrounds to consider the memories, stories, and cultural histories alive within them. How we carry and know our own stories influences how we can critically and reflexively enact or challenge policies of cultural responsivity in education. Given that the political landscapes in education get remade over and over, the threads of our personal histories remain vital to remember, so they, too, do not move into the realm of forgetting. To connect, in an ongoing way, to our unique heritages and stories is to challenge current policy proposals that intend to privatise historical and cultural education, risking fragmentation and dissociation. This piece uses a diffractive storytelling approach through critical autoethnography to consider how material artefacts are imbued with histories and stories. This article traces my memories as a Pākehā (immigrant of European origin) educator in Aotearoa, New Zealand, from Scotland, through the artefact of a tartan quilt. I demonstrate how educators may use creative practices to remember and trace the threads of their stories through their material artefacts, elucidating the lenses from which they teach so they may equip students with the tools to navigate political influences within their own stories.