Some days remind you why you do this work. Day two of our ITE Technology gathering in Rotorua was one of them.
We’d spent the first day of our hui deep in conversation about what curriculum change means for the way we prepare student teachers. Useful, necessary work, but the kind that can leave you a little abstracted, floating somewhere above the classroom. Day two brought us firmly back to ground. We were going to see, with our own eyes, what future-focused, place-based practice actually looks like when someone has already built it.
DNA: A bank, reimagined
Our first stop was Digital Natives Academy, where we were met by Marcus for a tour of the site. The building tells its own story — a former bank, its old bones repurposed and gently loved into something entirely new. Nothing about it feels institutional anymore. There are comfy nooks to curl up in, plants and trees threaded through the space, shelves stacked with LEGO, Star Wars, and Japanese manga. Down in the computer labs, every workstation was genuinely, visibly different because each rangatahi who’d used it had shaped it around whatever they were into. Walking through, you could read the interests of the young people who’d passed through simply by looking at the workstations.
DNA has been running since 2014, working with rangatahi of all ages, based right there in Rotorua. When they’re working with rangatahi aged 15 and up who are exiting school, their first job is getting these young people back through a door, into a routine, feeling safe enough to try again. The foundation courses build from there: socialisation, CV skills, setting up a RealMe account, file management, basic operating system skills — building a digital literacy that so much else depends on. And they do it in genuinely creative ways; Dungeons & Dragons sessions doubling as a vehicle for connection and confidence was a brilliant example of literacy and numeracy that is fun!
They’re now preparing to go back into schools, running one-hour sessions with late-primary and intermediate-aged tamariki — we’re looking forward to hearing more about this!
We ended up talking for far longer than we’d planned. The conversation drifted, as good conversations do, into bigger questions about the future for our rangatahi.
We left thinking about our own responsibility here: as ITE lecturers, we’re often the bridge between initiatives like this and the student teachers and schools we work with. If we don’t know these places exist, we can’t point our people towards them — and that feels like a gap worth closing.
Lunch on the way
We stopped for lunch at Third Place Café, conveniently on the road to our afternoon destination — good food, good value, and a chance to sit with everything we’d just seen and heard before the next stop.
An afternoon at Te Rangihakahaka
From DNA, we travelled to Te Rangihakahaka, where we were welcomed by Renee Gillies, Pou Matangirua / Principal. Whaea Renee talked us through the kura’s remarkable PLD programme, developed with the support of the Royal Society and in partnership with four Ngāti Whakaue kura — a genuinely impressive model of what culturally grounded, collaborative professional learning can look like when it’s built from the ground up rather than handed down.
After a rich discussion and plenty of questions, Whaea Renee took us on a tour of the site. It’s hard to capture in a few lines just how much is happening at Te Rangihakahaka. We were fortunate enough to meet a ringa whao working on-site, who paused to explain the process behind the waka maumahara and several pou he and his uncle were carving. We wandered past hydroponic systems and māra kai, and then, almost incongruously and completely wonderfully, found ourselves in a fully equipped computer lab. Mātauranga Māori and place-based knowledge leading to excellence in NZC Technology and Science and TMoA Hangarau and Pūtaiao.
We left reluctantly. It’s the kind of place that makes you want to stay another hour, ask another question, see one more space.
Why this matters for us
Two very different places, one thread running through both: when learning is grounded in place, in relationship, and in the identities of the people it’s designed for, it works. That’s not a new idea, but seeing it lived out makes it real in a way that a policy document never quite can.
As ITE lecturers preparing the next generation of kaiako, days like this are gold. They give us stories, contacts, and concrete examples to bring back into our own teaching… and a renewed sense of who else is out there doing the work alongside us.
If you’d like to be part of these conversations, our ITE Technology group meets virtually bi-monthly, with occasional face-to-face hui. Email [email protected] to join.
