'It's complicated': Reflections on teaching citizenship in Aotearoa-New Zealand

The recently redesigned Massey University BA aims to produce responsible, world-conscious graduates who are active citizens, and who demonstrate a critical understanding of the peoples and cultures of 21st-century Aotearoa-New Zealand and the influences that have shaped them. The suite of compulsory core courses that emerged from this redesign process were developed before the university expressed a commitment to becoming led by the principles of Te Tiriti o Waitangi, the Maori language version of an 1840 treaty with the British Crown. While they were not explicitly designed with decolonisation in mind these courses do ask questions and provoke reflection. We hope that they will contribute to decolonisation through the production of a cohort of graduates who have reflected on the multiple factors shaping their own identity, including the impact of colonialism in Aotearoa-New Zealand. These graduates will be adept at situating themselves in relation to global issues and will have begun to think about questions regarding agency and possibilities for decolonising actions as citizens of Aotearoa-New Zealand. These courses often unsettle indigenous and settler relationships, and challenge student thinking about the rights and responsibilities they have at home and in the wider world. In this chapter we reflect on the process of developing and teaching this course as a group of primarily settler (Pakeha) academics in conversation with Maori colleagues, and on our own learning through teaching. To do this we draw from scholarly literature on citizenship, our experiences teaching these courses, and from research undertaken on the teaching of global citizenship in the core to interrogate our roles and responsibilities as academics in relation to decolonisation.