The Criticality of Pacific Education – The Search for a Transformative Disciplinary Space

This paper is a collective talatalanoa by early to senior career education researchers and scholars seeking to make sense of Pacific education and its trajectory as a critical and transformative sphere within the broader context of education and education research within Aotearoa New Zealand (Aotearoa NZ). The critical stance towards the education of diverse Pacific communities is well established in Aotearoa NZ and reflects ongoing settler‐colonial negotiations within postcolonial schooling contexts. Our collaborative and ongoing conversational narratives through talatalanoa captures the potentiality of a Pacific Indigenous modality or form of communicative expression and articulation. The impact of engaging a critical discipline provides visibility and disruption, enabling the deconstruction and re‐calibration of understanding centred in Indigenous Pacific concepts and frameworks enabling shifts to occur that are agentic and transformative within initial teacher education (ITE), classroom pedagogy and policymaking and implementation in Aotearoa NZ. As Moana scholars in Aotearoa NZ, we argue for Pacific education as critical transformative disciplinary work through the lens of transindigeneity and offer implications for practice, research and policy.