Peace education is broadly considered an act of learning that leads to transforming violence. Peace Education can be separated by form and audience to focus on aspects of, for example, Human Rights, Education for Sustainability, International Education, Education for Conflict Resolution and Development Education (Harris and Morrison, 2013), but also targeted educational intervention including Democratic Education (Dewey, 1916), Non-violence Education (Rosenberg, 2003), Multicultural/Citizenship Education (Banks, 2007), Global Education (Hicks, 2003), Moral Education (Carmody and Carmody, 1988; Noddings, 2002), Environmental Education (Carson, 1962), Critical Peace Education (Bajaj, 2008a; Brantmeier, 2011; Kincheloe), and Yogic Peace Education (Standish and Joyce, 2018). As each form of violence requires a unique form of intervention, peace education as a field seeks to be both diverse and responsive.

Harris (2004) and Harris and Morrison (2013) consider peace education as a form of peacebuilding—an organized “peacelearning” intervention that enhances the possibility for personal and social transformation. For Harris, and Harris and Morrison, peace education is a personal activity leading to non-violent social change and environmental sustainability. Reardon (1988) defines peace education as tools and content that work toward the creation of comprehensive peace—peace in person and society while Freire considers peace education to be about perceiving personal and social reality to act on and transform such realities via “critical consciousness” (Freire, 2003). Whereas, Harris, and Harris and Morrison consider the “work” of peace education to be individually transformative—where individuals are each equally enabled and empowered through the theories, philosophies and practices of peace education—Reardon and Freire consider social transformation (not personal transformation) to be the ultimate goal, one that leads us toward gains of universal equality.

However, Western concepts of universalism and equality are challenged by particularisms that recognize distinction as key. For example, Trifonas and Wright (2013) problematize notions of “equity” through an appreciation of “difference” to engage with ideological biases and discriminations amongst different communities—particularly in Western education. Where the “work” of peace education is individual for Harris and Harris and Morrison and societal for Reardon and Freire, Trifonas, and Wright alert us to the role of peace and education in institutions and consider the role of peace education to be a pedagogical praxis that must engage with negative history, troubled pasts, difficult information, and problematic cultural narratives.

The platform of understanding evident in Harris and Harris and Morrison's consideration of peace education and that considered by Reardon, Freire, and Trifonas and Wright reveals a tension of “intention” where the focus of peace education is formerly the actualization of individuals who can then work toward interpersonal and social transformation vs. the creation of an externally focused ethics of equanimity that identifies schools and education systems as onto-epistemological constructs of subjectivity. Simply put, using peace education without first deconstructing the underlying assumptions present in notions of learning and learning spaces means leaving unexamined the challenges individuals have working toward peace (non-violence) in already culturally violent spaces. In exploring the possibility of a “bicultural peace pedagogy,” this tension must be abundantly appreciated. This article offers an appreciation of decolonization in education, positing a bicultural pedagogy as peace pedagogy.

In Māori—the predominant indigenous language in Aotearoa/New Zealand, Te Rangahau Māori means undertaking research that increases understanding of mātauranga Māori, and Ngā Whakahaerenga Pai seeks to produce and develop learning and teaching environments to engage with mātauranga Māori. Indigenous Māori and non-Indigenous Pākehā comprise the two groups—the bicultures—of Aotearoa/New Zealand. Fashioning a platform of understanding regarding bicultural culture and education from a non-Indigenous (Pākehā) perspective is a trial facing Indigenous-Settler Indigenization worldwide. To do so from an Undigenous vantage point, is more challenging still. Undigenous refers to being both non-Indigenous but also non-native born: “a double outsider, not native…and not Aboriginal either;” as global migration reconstitutes so-called “settler” descendants, the cultural norms of education will need to check their tethers (Standish, 2019. p. 126).

In bicultural initiatives, the expectation (explicit or otherwise) is that the curriculum will be indigenized. The reality for many with “double outsider” status is that there seems to be little direction on exactly what this means, or how this can/should/must be done. Though I share with many of my colleagues a desire to contribute to decolonial education initiatives, I also feel that many of us feel we are on our own.

My decolonization began in 2016 when I started to read in earnest literature regarding Canada's decolonizing education movement. There is a unique and gruesome connectivity of education in the Native Genocide of Indigenous peoples in Canada, an official component of the Indian ACT actioned in residential schools. Children were taken from their homes, and many did not ever return. Those who endured faced daily aggression, violence and terror. The ability of the Canadian government to acknowledge this heinous history (the last Indian Residential school was closed in 1996) and commit to decolonizing the Canadian education system (systems which are provincial, not federal) is a reverie of conceptual instability, and inconsistent implementation.

As a Canadian academic working in Aotearoa/New Zealand, I asked myself “How can I be an instrument of this important change without first understanding this?” Sadly, there is no handbook for decolonization for the non-Indigenous nor guide to Indigenization (two distinct initiatives, with different agency and audiences). As no journey into decolonization in Aotearoa/New Zealand could ensue without understanding the past, I sought information to explain what biculturalism means.

Although policy, biculturalism did not immediately gain significant ingress. James Ritchie compiled a guide for Pākehā to understand and behave appropriately in Aotearoa/New Zealand titled “Becoming Bicultural.” He proclaimed (almost 30 years ago),

For Ritchie, the drive for biculturalism was not about simply recognizing and then arguing about an ancient treaty but the need to forward bicultural identity, which means “Māori assertiveness and Pākehā acceptance;” for a cultural change from the dominant “white” settler society to one that fully embraces Indigenous validity and therefore cultural expression and ideology (1992, p. 202). In terms of how this affects education, Ritchie opined that a parallel education system divided by race/ethnicity was unlikely and that as the reality was that “most children and young people will continue to receive their education in the general system… [the general system] must become more and more Māori” (p. 202).

The bicultural initiative was a result of the deliberate institutionalization of Aotearoa/New Zealand's two ethnic groups in education and a recognition of social and racial experiences of disadvantage resulting from the widespread ethnic supremacy of Pākehā (Belich, 2001; Lourie, 2016).

Bicultural education in the general education system is an initiative that has unpredictable and variant levels of implementation, advocacy, internalization and integration through Aotearoa/New Zealand, but for the purposes of this review it simply means that in colonial spaces that absented Indigenous peoples and erased points of view and practices already present in this Aotearoa/New Zealand, biculturalism is both an understanding of first principles of the country (based as it was on the Titriti o Waitangi/Treaty of Waitangi), but also the recognition that as schools are major sites of secondary socialization that impart values and ideals, cultural constructs and notions of both knowledge and responsibility to the young, the Western education model that characterizes Aotearoa/New Zealand could not remain monocultural, racist, dominatory, and discriminatory against Māori (Bronfenbrenner, 1979). While Bishop (2012) analysis of the implementation of the Te Kotahitanga Effective Teaching Profile in Aotearoa/New Zealand showed “participation, engagement, retention, and achievement of Māori students in Te Kotahitanga schools are improving compared to a comparison group of schools,” mainstream education, in non-Te Kotahitanga schools was still needed (p. 42). As bicultural education aims to recognize and elevate the social, economic and cultural relevance of being Māori in education, it needs to be a practice of non-Indigenous knowledge workers, too.

The original goal of biculturalism was the inclusion of a Maori culture that had been marginalized and maligned in Pākehā culture. Although the scope of this article does not permit me the space of a detailed history of biculturalism or bicultural education in Aotearoa/New Zealand, including Māori medium learning and or assessment, evaluation or critique of the success or failure of bicultural education initiatives, I would like to present a rationale for seeking to identify the potential of a “bicultural peace pedagogy.” Sami scholar Rauna Kuokkanen made a halcyon cry for the academy to “take responsibility” and indigenize. In her article in the Journal of Curriculum Theorizing from 2010, Kuokkanen intoned,

Using the concept of responsibility to alter and therefore forward this reality toward the inclusion of Indigenous epistemes, Kuokkanen calls for the academy of higher learning to:

While the inclusion or exclusion of Indigenous epistemes of knowledge is beyond the scope of this article, I would like to mention that there seems to be another disconnect between signaling support for Indigeneity and implementing it. Other scholars recognize “Peace education and human rights education are not commonly used approaches in Indigenous education” (Huaman, 2011, p. 244), and while there are studies that seek to understand how peace education can be implemented in Indigenous culture (Makoni and Higgs, 2016) and how Indigenous notions of peace can factor in post-conflict development (Rahman et al., 2023) a technique for non-indigenous educators to bridge Indigenous values with Western Peace Education values, has yet to be explored. Indigenous education inherently embodies many of the principles of peace education. This is why, in my view, there needs to be an identifiable and operational roadmap for Pākehā to do more than understand worldview, epistemology and learning styles; a bicultural pedagogy is needed. The red flags of a potential bicultural “peace” pedagogy are shared by other Western-centric peace educations that “assume democracy, capitalism, individual human rights, and international law alone to be the universal foundations of a just world peace” (Kester et al., 2019, p. 10). At its base, a bicultural “peace” pedagogy would need to do more than seek to replace current Western-centric worldviews; it will need to “honor the treaty…[and] recognize the special status of Māori” and seek to articulate Indigenous pedagogy to peace pedagogy (Standish, 2019, p. 126); because a bicultural peace pedagogy would need to be both an instrument of decolonization and conflict transformation.

From my vantage point, this aim remains uninvestigated, and I hope to contribute a deeper view of this puzzle in this paper. My goal in this endeavor is to grow my own potential to share mātauranga Māori and share this bicultural peace pedagogy “methodology” with others. Along those lines, the proceeding examination will seek to respond to Ritchie's call in 1992 and elevate and amplify five aspects of Ritchie's “credo” relevant to peace pedagogy: manaakitanga-in all things lead with care for others; putahi, a unity of all things; manatangata- all persons deserve respect; manawairua-spirit pervades and must be respected; whakakitenga-there is more to know, do not imagine you fully understand (1992).

Biculturalism is defined in Aotearoa/New Zealand in relation to the 1840 Titriti o Waitangi/Treaty of Waitangi that formally recognized two cultural groups: the Indigenous Māori and settlers, the non-Indigenous, Pākehā (Ritchie, 1992). In North America, biculturalism can be interpreted as an awareness of non-white (previously termed “minority” culture) or Indigenous epistemes in the dominant colonial culture but also the “concept of navigating across worlds” (Darder, 1991; Schwartz and Ungerb, 2010, p. 26). Though considered both neutral (banal) and diverse (yet equal) in anthropological literature, culture can also be examined in relation to conflict (Giroux, 1981). Much more than a shared symbolic landscape of understanding, in multicultural spaces, culture must also be appreciated as a form of truth, a form of hegemony, and a form of power with the potential to subjugate and violently marginalize. Peace education, a field concerned with imparting skills, attitudes and knowledge that leads to non-violence and human flourishing, is an educational approach to the transformation of conflict that emerges from recognizing how we “learn” to be violent (Harris, 2004). But how would such an approach, designed to counter the violence of mainstream colonial education—violence against the self, others and society—align with initiatives that seek to decolonize the academy and unseat dominant settler/colonial institutional epistemes? This article seeks to begin to unravel that potential by considering a hypothetical constellation of Decolonizing Education, Indigenous Pedagogy and Peace Pedagogy in the context of Māoridom. In this report, I propose to offer key values (see Figure 1) of mātauranga Māori including wairuatanga, manaakitanga, kotahitanga, whanaungatanga, and rangatiratanga and upon this foundation, I will propose a complementary conjunction with Indigenous pedagogy and then peace pedagogy (Ritchie, 1992; Kanu, 2011; Harris, 1990).

My goal is to form a constellation of meaningful associations that seek to bridge cultural/pedagogical practice. The core of a bicultural peace pedagogy centers Indigeneity, this paper will introduce Ritchie's five Māori values to then conjunct them outward. In this proposal, Western peace pedagogy forms the fringe or margins of the pursuit of bicultural peace pedagogy and utilizes Kanu's 14 facets of Indigenous pedagogy as the interspace (Kanu, 2011).

Colonization is “the imposition by a foreign power the direct rule over another people,” and decolonization is a process whereby places and peoples act to politically and culturally remove dominatory structures and mindsets derived from invader cultures (Betts, 2012, p. 1). Colonies were created to supply (largely) European powers with resources and labor fueling great wealth. In places where the colony became an outpost of the empire, such as Aotearoa/New Zealand, the form of invasion and occupation is described as “settler-colonization,” a form of colonization where the colonizer not only did not ever leave but where the settler culture displaced and sought to eradicate existing Indigenous culture (Jackson, 2019). Various social, political, economic, and cultural structures were imposed on Indigenous cultural groups that formally institutionalized settler culture—one such structure is schooling. While the scope of this paper does not permit a detailed exploration of global colonial education and its violent imposition upon Indigenous peoples, the trajectory of decolonizing education is pertinent to this article's aim of presenting an de-colonial construct regarding education. As Smith conveys, decolonization “is about centring our [Indigenous] concerns and world views...” (2012, p. 41), so decolonizing education is about centring Indigeneity in the learning space.

This article has offered an appreciation of decolonization in education, positing a bicultural pedagogy as peace pedagogy. It offered conceptualizations of Indigenous pedagogy and peace pedagogy to evaluate the potential of bicultural peace pedagogy as a decolonizing education. Though “fitting pieces” appears opportune, an obstacle of orientation must be appreciated to comprehend compatibility (or lack of it) based on culture. The roots of Western and Indigenous culture do not align; that is a definite challenge, which means that Indigenous pedagogy and peace pedagogy as a construct of Western peace education also do not align. Earlier in this paper it was mentioned that “as all education systems are” “cultural artifacts in order to change education, we need to change culture.” As the root of violence in colonial education is Western culture, Western culture in education may need to change.

Dr. Katerina Standish is Associate Professor of Global and International Studies and Vice Provost Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies at the University of Northern British Columbia, Canada. Formally at the University of Otago, in Aotearoa/New Zealand, she is the author/editor of Perspectives on Justice, Indigeneity, Gender, and Security in Human Rights Research, Suicide Through a Peacebuilding Lens, The Palgrave Handbook of Positive Peace and Cultural Violence in the Classroom.