Exploring Stories To Understand The Journey: A Kaupapa Māori and Structural Narrative Inquiry Into a Tauira Māori's Experiences at University
Storytelling, deeply embedded in Māori traditional oral and cultural practices, has long been a means for Māori to convey their values, worldviews, and lived experiences. This study explored the stories of a young wahine tauira Māori’s about her experiences at Te Herenga Waka/Victoria University of Wellington in Aotearoa, New Zealand. Situated within a broader Kaupapa Māori project, "Telling It Like It Is: Māori Student Voices in Tertiary Education," which seeks to explore how tauira Māori experience tertiary education, this research used a structural narrative approach to examine how one wahine tauira Māori narrated her university journey.
By employing a structural narrative analysis within a Kaupapa Māori framework, this study focused on centring one wahine tauira Māori’s perspective to understand how her Māori identity and worldview both shaped her academic experiences and her way of retelling them.
Initial data collection in the wider Kaupapa Māori project involved open-ended interviews with six tauira Māori, allowing them to articulate their lived experiences of university in their own words.
By applying a plot typology of significant events and turning points to structure her stories into a coherent narrative, this analysis revealed how her overarching narrative structure of her lived experiences through university follows aspects of the framework of a hero’s journey structure. It also explored three dimensions that are consistent throughout her journey: independence and interdependence, resistance, and whānau and community. By exploring these narratives, the aim was to demonstrate how her journey was interconnected and how these experiences were not isolated events but were continuously influenced by her Māori worldview and Māori identity.
The study highlights the value of structural narrative analysis in providing deeper insights into tauira Māori’s experiences. This approach not only reveals the challenges and strengths they face but also illustrates how these elements influence and shape their academic journeys. Thus, it provides a culturally nuanced approach to understanding the lived experiences of tauira Māori.
