Oceania: Aotearoa/New Zealand “Teaching IR Theory in Aotearoa New Zealand: Relational and Place-based Pedagogical Shifts”

My fourteen-year journey as an educator of International Relations (IR) theory in Aotearoa New Zealand is ongoing. As a settler educator living on Indigenous land, part of my journey has been learning to situate my teaching in relation to place and context. In this chapter, I share some of the changes I have made to my teaching to make it more responsive to the land on which I teach and to my diverse student body. I focus on three innovations: invitation and framing, community building, and assessment. First, I integrate mātauranga Māori (indigenous Māori knowledge) into my teaching philosophy and practice, inviting students into a community of learning by framing our learning in terms of ako (the idea that we all learn from and teach one another) and whanaungatanga (the sense of belonging we build from being together). Second, students are placed in small groups that become their learning communities, moving away from a Western, individualist approach and allowing for relational learning. Third, students have the option of submitting creative projects to express their learning, allowing them to more explicitly bring their own identities and cultures into dialogue with the themes we explore in the course. These practices give students space to situate their own lives, histories, and experiences in relation to global politics. I contend that asking questions about who and where we teach and letting this inform how we teach is just as important as interrogating what we teach. In asking these questions, we come to better understand who we are as educators and co-learners, who our students are, and how we are all situated both in relation to the land on which we live, teach and learn and in relation to global structures that shape our past, present and future.