This project is designed to create an engaging way to share the authentic voices of whānau from Auckland Airport’s neighbourhood. Family conversations about housing experiences and the desire for homes that support learning and well-being will be facilitated by community partners alongside researchers. The conversations will be about home, housing experiences and aspirations and will likely be multigenerational, with children, parents, and grandparents (all whānau in the home) included. These will be like “kitchen-table” conversations, a safe space for families to talk about things that matter deeply to them. Based on transcribed conversations with families, composite scripts will be developed to protect families’ identities while enabling widespread distribution within the media of the video-recorded “plays” or enactments. The sense-making approach for analysing the interactive family conversations is core to the project’s integrity. Re-presenting the findings by actors in a “performance” will make the stories visible and impact policy.

In this community-strengthening project, the school is the hub. We will begin this project with the Papatoetoe suburb as the hub, working with and out from the school to the community.

A critical period of educational innovation (1962-1989) transformed early literacy teaching and learning in Aotearoa New Zealand with global reverberations. The coherent infrastructure of philosophy, policy, resources and pedagogy was collaboratively designed through the serendipitous interplay of architects (e.g., teachers, reading advisors, Department of Education staff, principals, publishers, teacher educators) with varied expertise. The intentional and sustained dialogue across sectors led to crafting a robust, dynamic structure built to flex with changing ecologies. Findings from this historical narrative study will reflect the strength and vitality of systemic co-design processes, which provide a blueprint for future educational environment.