Previous research has shown that a disproportionate number of Māori and Pasifika youth feel disenfranchised, disconnected, and misunderstood in school. Engagement with whānau is an issue of strategic importance in education in Aotearoa New Zealand. The project seeks to establish how sharing lived-experience stories among children, whānau, and teachers create openings for understanding that transform the relational praxis of learning and teaching. We will co-design with teachers in three schools (Year 1) and three affiliated kindergartens (Year 2) ways to engage in everyday being-listening-telling of storied conversations. Storied conversations between triads of child, parent/ whānau, and teacher will be ignited by sharing artifacts, blogs, and multimodal story sharing at an event. Through the listening and sharing of stories, however, we naturally enter one another’s worlds and find new ways to connect, which expands and deepens relational pathways that are essential for learning and teaching. The strategic value of this lies in the strong potential for plural understandings that lead to increasing equitable engagement and opportunities for learning in primary schools and kindergartens with high proportions of Māori, Pasifika, and immigrant children.

Children naturally carry their valued family culture through these varied means of expression into school. Their stories enrich and add texture to school and centre knowledge.The project aims to place relationships at the heart of pedagogy in storied conversations that intersect with the people, places, and histories most dear to the participants. Teachers and educational leaders are important co-researchers of this project, as they bring in new perspectives and enrich knowledge of transforming relationships between learning and teaching. Meanwhile, the study has the potential to deepen teacher knowledge about the children they are teaching and their families, which in turn, empowers them to draw on the children’s linguistic, social, cultural, cognitive, artistic, emotional, and spiritual resources in their teaching and connection-making. When teachers attend to the lived experience stories of children and whānau that draw on the histories of their families and communities, they learn that children’s lives in school are not separate from their worlds outside of school. Rather than the unidirectional trend of schools to teach children and inform whānau, storied conversations reveal the knowledge and aspirations of children and whānau that shape the ethos of schools. The practice value of this study is for educators to value the knowledge of learners and their whānau that they cannot imagine not using it in their teaching.