Raranga Matihiko | Weaving Digital Futures

Empowering learners & teachers to think, challenge & create using authentic integrated experiences.

Through a museum and gallery based partnership, Raranga Matihiko delivers innovative digital technologies to those with limited digital learning opportunities, while increasing access to national and local exhibitions and collections. The programme increases equity by reducing disparity.

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HundrED 2022

Overview

HundrED has selected this innovation to

HundrED 2022

Web presence

2018

Established

13K

Children

1

Countries

Target group

Teachers

Updated

October 2024

Raranga Matihiko is a partnership between students, teachers, family and museum educators to learn together through engaging digital technologies, rich experiences and equity of access to learning.

About the innovation

Why did you create this innovation?

The Raranga Matihiko programme was created to support equity in education, access to rich digital technology learning and equity in access to experiences. The project is led by the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa in collaboration with its partners. Current partners are Waitangi Treaty Grounds and Auckland Art Gallery.

What does your innovation look like in practice?

In Raranga Matihiko the pedagogy supports students, teachers and family to all be learners. Teachers are supported to build their confidence and knowledge in digital technologies and to integrate this learning throughout the curriculum. Family gain knowledge of digital technologies, the rich museum collections and how to support their children. Museum & Gallery educators facilitate, at the museum or gallery, teacher only learning days and teacher and learner learning days with whānau in support. The learning of the teachers and the family means learning opportunities for learners are maximised long after the actual programme is completed. Students are from 5-14 years of age. Each group spends two days at their location museum, with transport provided at no cost.
No single programme is identical. Each class has a bespoke programme plan designed for their learners based on their interests.

How has it been spreading?

The programme builds capability within communities and is transferrable across topics and foci as well as scalable across the country/world. It has delivered over 200,000 learning hours to students.

“Raranga Matihiko is a highly effective and responsive learning system. Its success is the result of positive museum-school relationships built over time; collaboration between museums and museum facilitators; quality programme design that integrates digital technologies with local curriculum, taonga, and histories; expert co-facilitation that models Treaty partnership and caters for both Māori and English-medium settings; and proactive removal of equity barriers to school and student participation.” - Dr Melanie Riwai-Couch, Evaluation Associates, Nov. 2020

If I want to try it, what should I do?

The success of this programme has been co-designing each programme with the community; access to taonga/collection items and museum experiences, excellent facilitators and the focus on equity of experience and learning. We are always happy to talk about how the programme works and what we believe has made it successful.

Impact & scalability

HundrED Academy Reviews

I can imagine that educational practices like Raranga Matihiko can be valuable to any other contexts. Digital skills and personalized learning are getting more and more important while conventional school education has limits in providing them.

Raranga Matihiko offers a great combination of digital technology and learning at museum to the students who may not have an easy access to them easily. The programmes are connected to real life learning as well as digital skills.

- Academy member

Academy review results

Impact

Scalability

Exceptional

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Moderate

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Media

Google Image Result

RARANGA MATIHIKO | WEAVING DIGITAL FUTURES

Evaluation Reports

Ākonga (students), kaiako (teachers) and whānau (family) learning together. Ako is learning. Throughout the three years of the programme, the value of ākonga, kaiako and whānau learning together has been evident. Very rarely do kaiako have the opportunity to undertake their professional learning alongside their ākonga. Together, the class returned to school with shared knowledge and understandings, and professional learning was more likely to be implemented immediately. Ākonga become proficient with the digital technologies and kaiako have a stronger understanding of the revised technology learning area and a deeper understanding of the pedagogy of teaching with digital technologies. The richness of the museum taonga adds an authentic context to the programme. Whanau learning as part of the process, has seen many different outcomes. They learn with the class and take the learning back to their wider family to share. An example of this was in Northland, where whānau used digital tools to capture digital stories from kaumatua. After participating in the Hawke's Bay programme, whānau from different kura are working together to apply for iwi funding to develop an app that will be designed by them and their tamariki. When learning alongside their ākonga and kaiako, whānau have an understanding of how their ākonga are learning in the classroom, and kaiako have opportunities to understand more about whānau aspirations for their tamariki. The ākonga see the people they generally spend the most time with – whānau and kaiako – interacting across two days. During 2021, we will be exploring more about the impact of this three-way learning partnership.

Bringing the curriculum to life

Students make a splash in their local community

Weaving digital futures

Annual Reports

Raranga Matihiko TV

Raranga Matihiko Pilot Programme

9M marae project

Implementation steps

Provide rich and engaging experiences

We provide a range of rich experiences to support learning and to give our learners access to a range of experiences that they might not have had yet.

Raranga Matihiko is funded to support digital technology learning however we have designed the programme to provide access to a range of experiences and learning options. This enables students, teachers and family to learn together through an integrated approach that incorporates digital technology, project based learning and museum experiences. This approach often affords many new experiences for our learners including travelling to their local city, exploring their museum, making connections to place and new vocational pathways. When designing a programme of learning, how can you include a range of experiences.

Teacher professional learning alongside student learning

When learning how to use and integrate digital technologies into a class programme, we have designed it so teachers and students learn together. Before we start working with a class, we have a teacher only day that introduces the revised technology learning area that focuses on digital technologies. We also work with teachers to co-design a learning programme for their class that integrates digital technologies with the class inquiry or project for the term. This ensures that learning new content is not an additional extra that needs to be incorporated into the day rather it is built into the programme plan. With the students being part of the two-day programme, then along with their own learning, teachers have a class of experts so the knowledge is shared.

We have also developed a range of teacher professional learning resources which teachers can use as needed. These include paper resources, videos and webinars. Our resource collection can be accessed at: rarangamatihiko.com

Building Community partnerships

The Raranga Matihiko programme builds partnerships between museums and schools; doing so in meaningful ways to support the class curriculum. The museums have become a place for teacher professional learning through:

•modelling good teaching practices through co-facilitation. This provides teachers with the opportunity to observe their students respond to other teachers' along with different facilitation strategies.

•drawing on specialist expertise. Museums and other local community groups have specific expertise on hand that can help support teachers

•building a network of teachers through teacher only days

•helping teachers with curriculum integration, weaving digital technologies, literacy, numeracy and other subject areas together.

Future iterations of Raranga Matihiko intend to widen the community organisations involved in order to provide seamless community learning programmes and support for schools.

Learning Hours

One of the changes that we made in the first year was to report the number of learning hours. We did this to reflect the depth and richness of the programme. While 3,841 students across four regions is impressive, without context or knowledge of the programme, people might assume that students only received 1-2hours of faciltiation and support. Counting learning hours in addition to student numbers provided a more accurate reflection of the learning and programme.

In 2018, we worked with 3,841 students which equated to over 43,456 learning hours. We also report the number of teachers and whānau/family that we work with which for 2018 included over 200 teachers and more than 321 whānau.

In 2019, the programme worked with 6,821 students and over 70,000 student learning hours. We also worked with over 250 teachers and more than 740 whānau/family.

Evaluation

Researching for effectiveness is crucial for any programme whether it be internal reflection evaluation or external evaluation. Annual case studies from each site along with an overall programme evaluation helps shape the design of the programme.

The external evaluation reports, including overall evaluation, and museum case-studies, can be viewed here:Raranga Matihiko Evaluation