Navigating the digital va-vā: Centring Moana/Pacific values in online tertiary settings during COVID-19

Core Moana/Pacific cultural values and practices are usually considered as unimportant, irrelevant or ineffectual in academic practice or tertiary teaching and learning spaces. While Moana/Pacific ways of knowing and being have flourished for thousands of years, in recent times they have been constantly dismissed and devalued by mainstream or dominant cultures. Nonetheless, those educators who hold Moana/Pacific values as central to their lives, have long recognised the need to illuminate these Moana/Pacific values in their practice so as to counter the neoliberal values of most tertiary institutions in Aotearoa New Zealand. The complete and abrupt shift to working, teaching and learning online, caused by the COVID19 pandemic, has meant many educators are scrambling to connect and engage their students. In addition to, and compounded by this sudden pedagogical shift, inequities in education have never been more overt. Before this forced change, it was possible for educators to assume, often without major repercussions, that within the neoliberal institutional setting their preferred mode of delivery was sufficient to engage students effectively without prompting or monitoring. Since COVID-19, that system has been forced to adapt quickly and oftentimes ineffectually. Fa’avae (2019) argued that “disrupting ingrained thinking is possible when using Tongan or Moana people concepts that allow for deconstructing, re-focusing, and rethinking that is centred on Indigenous views of the world” (p. 6). In this article we provide personal accounts of how deconstructing, re-focusing, and rethinking teaching and learning to centre Moana/Pacific values helped us adjust to the impact of the pandemic on our personal lives and work, as well as enhance student connection and engagement.