Tauranga Primary School
Region: Bay of Plenty/Waiariki
Art form: Multi-Disciplinary
Project name: Tauranga Primary School Pūrākau
Creative name: Natalie Ward
Project information: As part of developing our local curriculum, we wish to build on the cultural narrative of our school by creating a pūrākau (story, legend) for our kura. The pūrākau will tell the history of our school and weave in significant historical events relevant to the school site, the local area, and the marae that we affiliate to (Huria Marae). Our creative has a well-established understanding of our school and some of the important taonga that we hold dear. Her role will be to work with the senior students (Years 5 and 6) to lead an inquiry into local history, legends, and waiata. This project will be in three phases: 1. Research, 2. Writing and artwork, 3. Graphic design.
This first inquiry unit will be called Tūrangawaewae - Our Place to Stand. It will involve extensive research, interviewing past students and staff, and interviewing local iwi representatives to gain a rich and broad understanding of the history for our kura and local area. With this information, we will work on the second phase, which will be to weave our research into a pūrākau for our school, which will be turned into a book. Every class will do the artwork for a page in the book, and every student and staff member will make an artistic contribution to the final copy. Once we have completed the pūrākau and artwork, we will move onto the third phase, working with a second creative, who will help shape the text and artwork into a format that we can print as a hard cover book.
This creative project and resulting pūrākau will be a key resource for our kura to teach the Aotearoa NZ Histories Curriculum. The book will be used every year to teach our students the pūrākau for our school. We anticipate that by Year 6, all students will know all the stories and local history for our area through their exposure and learning from our pūrākau. There will be many ways we can utilise this taonga as an ongoing teaching and learning resource for our students and school community.
Project starting: March 2022
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