by Val Diggle

Created on: November 22, 2009

It is one of the privileges of living in here in NZ to be exposed on a daily basis to Maori culture, within this bi-cultural nation. Through the generosity of Maori colleagues, I have learnt a little about how important a knowledge of ancestry is to their culture, how, for example, no individual Maori will ever take any personal credit for any achievement, when speaking in a public forum, but will instead transfer the honour to their parents, grandparents and all their relations from previous generations, as far back as they can remember. Genealogy (whakapapa) is sacred knowledge, and many Maori elders are able to recite the history of their own tribes as far back as thirteen generations, to name the canoe that their earliest ancestors traveled by to Aotearoa New Zealand.

This sense of a living connection with, and respect for, the past, sometimes described as walking backwards into the future, is not always present amongst students who are required to study distant cultures and time periods. Information systems, which students in the developed world typically access, have had a flattening effect on historical knowledge. To the average high-school student, the Industrial Revolution, the war in Vietnam and the plays of Shakespeare are held in a kind of permanent, virtual, suspension. While they can download chunks of information about anything and everything at the click of a mouse, they typically lack the skill or knowledge to discriminate meaningfully between events.

In the 21st century, the web of interconnections between ideas about events is more important than the time sequence that the events themselves occurred inside. In order to foster a sense of connection between students and any event removed from them by time and distance, teachers in the developed world have a clear advantage, the opportunity to uncover unprecedented amounts of information about any topic, from any time and place, by merely moving a finger across a keyboard. The vital ingredient, which will transform this raw data into something that sings, that is alive as the genealogy recited by a Maori elder, is narrative.

When information about distant times or places is related in the form of a narrative that has its own "genealogy", connecting ultimately with student, it is immediately more meaningful. Some physical objects can do this, objects that have survived like a baton in a relay race, handed down generation to generation. If you cannot persuade a museum to lend you an artefact

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