RESEARCH, INNOVATION AND ENTREPRENEURSHIP AT THE UNIVERSITY OF WAIKATO
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“We’re part of it. Te reo is at the core of the
reclamation of our language, our culture, our
rights. Without language, it is so much more
challenging to have a culture.”
MrMurphy uses the usual words to describe
good teaching – enthusiasm, passion, belief –
but says that “ultimately,
teaching
intellectually
rocks their socks off”.
“In a single day you
can achieve so much.”
While Mr Murphy would
be happier not being in the
limelight, he recognises
the importance of the
award and says it’s not just
for him.
“There are excellent
Māori teachers all over
the place who won’t go for
this sort of thing unless
they are pushed. There
are people who have been
doing this for 50 years
and they are awesome.
People like Wharehuia Milroy, Timoti Karetu,
Huirangi Waikerepuru and many others. I can
jump around and make cool games and great
resources whereas they can just sit in a chair and
speak and every student will hang off their every
word. This is as much an acknowledgement of
them.”
The Ako Aotearoa Tertiary Teaching
Awards aim to recognise and encourage
excellence in tertiary education, at a
national level.
They provide an opportunity for teachers
to further their careers and share good practice
in teaching. Up to 12 Sustained Excellence
Awards of $20,000 each are awarded annually.
EXCELLENTTEACHER: Enoka Murphy
receives his teaching award from
tertiary education minister
Steven Joyce.
Waikato hosts Integrated Data Infrastructure hub
RESEARCHERS will be able to access more
official data than they can click a mouse at
when the first university-based Integrated Data
Infrastructure (IDI) hub in New Zealand opens
at the University ofWaikato.
The hub is being hosted by the National
Institute of Demographic and Economic
Analysis (NIDEA) and
will provide access – by
approved researchers –
to a staggering range
of data on education,
tax,
families
and
households, sentencing
and charges, health and
safety, migration and
movements, student
loans and allowances,
and benefits, with
plans to expand these
information pools in
the future.
The benefits of
hosting the hub include increased international
research collaborations, higher quality research
and a stronger connection with government,
with the research used to inform
government policy.
NIDEA research associate Dr Bill Cochrane
says many research questions cannot be
answered using aggregated data and require
access to the actual responses of individual
participants in surveys. “Previously, official
data of this kind could only be accessed
by approved researchers in Statistics New
Zealand’s secure data labs, in Auckland,
Wellington or Christchurch,” he says. “The new
lab will allow researchers to access this data
on-site, facilitating their
research and promoting
participation in leading
edge quantitative social
science research.”
The hub is the first
of its kind to be hosted
at a university. Waikato
Management
School
economist Professor Les
Oxley says the hub is an
exciting development,
“the equivalent of
the invention of the
spreadsheet” in terms of
data integration.
“This sort of access to data will ensure
the university is more a part of the policy-
making process than ever before. It will help
the government get deeper into the economic
and social issues in New Zealand, and help
find solutions.”
IT SHOULD really be no surprise that Enoka
Murphy received one of the highest awards
available for tertiary teaching.
At the Ako Aotearoa Tertiary Teaching
Awards in Wellington in July, the te reo
Māori and tikanga lecturer from the
University of Waikato’s
School of Māori &
Pacific
Development
received a Sustained
Excellence award for
teaching in a kaupapa
Māori context.
The award comes
just a year after he picked
up a faculty Teaching
Excellence Award fromthe
university and four years
after being the recipient of
a prestigious Ngarimu VC
and 28 (Māori) Battalion
Memorial Scholarship.
Mr Murphy, (Ngāti
Manawa, Ngāti Ruapani,
Mātaatua, Tainui, Te
Arawa) says winning
awards is not what he’s about “but you get
pushed into these things. “The loyal thing to
do is to say yes”.
Mr Murphy’s life has been about education
since the beginning. His parents were teachers
and “I’ve been teaching since I was 15 or 16. I
finished School C and started teaching.”
He’s taught in kohanga reo, kura kaupapa
Māori and at tertiary level, along with being
involved in theatre, kapa haka and speech
competitions. His entry to the awards was the
first to be completed entirely in te reo.
Teaching te reo, he says, is not like teaching
any other subject. “It’s not just getting up in the
morning and going to work.
Award recognises lifetime
immersed in education
SCREEN and Media Professor Daniel Fleming
uses the work of film director, screenwriter and
artist Vincent Ward in his lectures, and now he
can tell his students about what it’s like to work
for the man whose films include
Vigil,Map of the
Human Heart
and
Rain of the Children
. Professor
Fleming took five months’ unpaid leave from
the University of Waikato this year to work at
Vincent Ward Films. “When Vincent proposed I
come and work for him as a concept developer,
it was an opportunity too good to pass up,”
says Professor Fleming.
“My reasons were two-fold. I wanted to
firmly cross that line between academia and
the creative side of filmmaking and I knew it
would be hugely beneficial for our students
if I could bring this practical experience to
their learning.” His first few weeks involved
reading short stories and novels, judging their
potential to transform into film or TV drama and
pitching the ideas to MrWard.
“If Vincent thought they would fly, he’d
then pitch them to potential collaborators in
LA, Sydney or Berlin. One concept survived
the process and is currently in development
with Vincent’s company as an eight-part TV
drama series.” Its working title is
Himmler
and
the series dramatises transformational moments
in the life of Holocaust architect Heinrich
Himmler as seen through the eyes of Himmler’s
young daughter Gudrun. “We want to find a
way of understanding the psychology of evil at
the intimate human level where it reveals itself
in moments of everyday life,” says Professor
Fleming, “and we want to look at those events
without focusing on Hitler.”
Meanwhile, Professor Fleming has seen
his book
Making the Transformational Moment
in Film
translated into Chinese. The book uses
Vincent Ward’s work as a thread to develop an
argument about the cinematic image, and the
book is dedicated to Vincent’s mother, a Jewish
refugee from Nazi Germany.
“Interestingly Vincent went on to
explore some of my ideas in his art and video
installation work, culminating in his exhibition
of ‘cinematic vignettes’ in a cathedral in
Shanghai for the ninth Shanghai Biennale. That’s
what generated interest in my book and the
subsequent translation and republication,” says
Professor Fleming.
The artist and the academic
FASTER DATA: Professors Jacques
Poot, Les Oxley and Robert Hannah
supporting the IDI Hub.
