New animal ethics resources include Māori knowledge

These open-access digital resources are available on the Science Learning Hub – Pokapū Akoranga Pūtaiao: Māori knowledge of animals; Māori concepts for animal ethics. A Māori medium e-version is also available to download.

The resources are written by Professor Georgina Tuari Stewart, a Pūtaiao education expert from AUT, and Dr Sally Birdsall, a primary science teacher educator and academic from University of Auckland. Sally has been involved in ANZCCART for many years, and in 2021 had the idea of wanting to see Māori knowledge included in animal ethics resources, so invited Georgina to collaborate on a small research project.

Today’s release sees the flowering of this important project into an extensive suite of educational resources, which are designed to support science teachers in including Māori knowledge in their classroom programmes and to uphold the principle of ‘mana ōrite’ or equal mana for Mātauranga Māori.

Georgina explains the process they followed:

“We began by writing two research articles in the Anthrozoös journal; from those we developed two resources, one for Year 7 – 10 on Animals, and the other for Year 11+ on Animal Ethics. We also wrote a set of six profiles based on interviews with Māori scientists and other experts who work with animals.”

Māori worldviews see all animals as related to humans through shared whakapapa, hence being ethically significant in their own right, and worthy of respect from humans. In this way, the Māori concepts provide a logical basis for the Three Rs (replace, reduce, refine) of animal ethics in practice.

Sally and Georgina announced the launch of the resources today, as the first keynote co-speakers at the ANZCCART 2024 conference in Christchurch, 10 – 12 September.

In addition to the digital resources for English medium science classrooms, an e-version in te reo Māori is also freely available for download in pdfs. Further planned activities include two webinars for teachers in the coming weeks, to be recorded and made available on the website.

Dr Cathy Buntting, Director of the Science Learning Hub, says:

“These resources are going to be incredibly useful to teachers. They include a range of student activities as well as video interviews with three rangahau Māori (Māori researchers) and explore the multiple different values that come into play when working with animals.”

The resources were developed with funding support from the Ministry for Primary Industries’ Sustainable Food and Fibre Futures fund.

Links to the resources:

• Māori knowledge of animals;
• Māori concepts for animal ethics

Links from the ANZCCART website: https://www.anzccart.org.nz/pages/schools

For further information

Please contact ANZCCART (NZ): anzccart@royalsociety.org.nz