Teaching Mana Wāhine in Art History: He Whakaaro noa iho/Some Thoughts

Abstract

Art history courses have the capacity and responsibility to engage students with materials, ideas, frameworks, and people to help them understand the multi-vocal and diverse world in which we all now live. The days of the ‘ sage on the stage ’ style of lecturing was never inspiring, instead reinforcing a generations-old power dynamic. This created silence and passivity on the part of students, and often reflected the world outside the classroom, where the perspectives of Indigenous women were often belittled and sidelined. Many art history curricula have been interrogated over the past twenty years, as part of a wider questioning of the canon — and the discipline. Globally, many teachers have pivoted their pedagogy towards a more nuanced and, frankly, more interesting way of teaching, quite apart from the material which they cover in their courses. At the University of Auckland, the discipline of art history has offered a diverse range of courses for many years, due in no small part to the broad range of lecturers. We are (remarkably in 2022) the only art history department that has one full-time permanent M (cid:1) aori teacher and one Pasifika. This has shaped the offerings to encompass M (cid:1) aori and Pacific material, from stage one through to Honours and PhD supervisions. Due to our modest number of FTEs (four), we only offer one course on gender specifically, though gender is an important aspect of other courses, from the Renaissance through to contempor-ary practice. This short article focuses on four key aspects of a stage two and three course, ‘ Gender, Ethnicity and Visual Culture ’ . The goal here is to shed light on how the course is shaped, in an effort to encourage other teachers to broaden not only their content but also, and equally important, the way in which the material is pre-sented. Teaching from a te ao M (cid:1) aori (M (cid:1) aori worldview) perspective