The Hui Rangahau Graham Nuthall Research Symposium and the Annual Lecture Series is the Faculty of Education’s flagship event, celebrating the life and legacy of Professor Graham Nuthall, one of Aotearoa New Zealand’s most influential classroom researchers. This annual event showcases our research, inspires new research, supports classroom practice, and ensures that education in Aotearoa remains grounded in deep, evidence-based education.
Event details
Date: Tuesday 20 October 2026
Time: 4pm–6pm
Location: Central Lecture Theatres, Ilam Campus, University of Canterbury
Livestream: The Graham Nuthall Lecture will be livestreamed from 5pm for those unable to attend in person
Registration: Free to attend
The symposium includes refreshments, pop-up research presentations, doctoral research posters, and the Graham Nuthall Lecture, offering an opportunity to connect with current education research and the people behind it.
2026 Graham Nuthall Lecture
Dr Hana O’Regan | Kāi Tahu, Pākehā | ONZM and Associate Professor Frauke Meyer
Despite various initiatives aimed at addressing racism and bias within the Aotearoa New Zealand education system, intergenerational prejudice against Māori learners remains endemic, resulting in persistent inequitable outcomes. In this Graham Nuthall Lecture, Dr Hana O’Regan examines how enduring structures of coloniality continue to shape educational experiences in Aotearoa New Zealand, influencing teacher bias, classroom interactions, and outcomes for Māori learners. Their presentation foregrounds the need for educators to critically engage with their own biases and the systems that create and sustain these in order to create more equitable and culturally sustaining practice.
Dr Hana O’Regan and AP Frauke Meyer will present on the Hāpaitia te Ngākau Aroha - Elevate Empathy project, an anti-bias training for teachers designed to act as a "circuit-breaker". The training introduces teachers to coloniality, research on teacher expectations, and high teacher expectation practices. It further utilises a Virtual Reality (VR) scenario to immerse educators in the perspective of a Māori student over the course of a school day. By enabling teachers to “walk in the shoes” of a Māori student, the scenario makes visible the often subtle, cumulative effects of bias in everyday interactions. The VR scenario aims to foster perspective-taking and increase empathy. The training aims to challenge deficit thinking and support shifts in teacher awareness and practice. By weaving together critical scholarship and immersive technological innovation, The Hāpaitia te Ngākau Aroha - Elevate Empathy project team hope to demonstrate how confronting coloniality alongside engaging in perspective-taking can open new pathways toward more just and culturally responsive teaching.
Further information and registration details will be shared soon.
Pop-up Research Presentations and Networking
The Graham Nuthall Lecture
Watch the lecture here
This year’s Graham Nuthall Lecture explored how high-quality assessment can drive real improvements in student learning. Since 1999, UC’s Centre for Assessment and Monitoring (CAM) has provided New Zealand primary and secondary schools with evidence-based assessments and surveys grounded in world-leading educational research. CAM’s tools offer schools robust statistical data and comprehensive online feedback, enabling better decision-making, planning, goal setting, and reporting at the student, subject, and school level.
In this lecture, Professor John Everatt (Director of CAM) introduced CAM’s approach to educational assessment and shared how it supports schools to improve outcomes. He was joined by Darran Roberts, a teacher at Southland Boys’ High School, who brought the data to life with practical classroom examples of CAM assessments in action. Together, they explored how schools can use assessment results not only to monitor progress but also to guide teaching and shape the future of education in Aotearoa.
The session concluded with a Q&A, giving attendees the chance to engage directly with the presenters.
Creating space for Pasifika learners’ linguistic and cultural resources at school. Watch the full lecture here
Presenter: Dr Rae Si'ilata, University of Auckland
Dr Rae Si'ilata's research is focused on linguistically and culturally sustaining teaching practices for Pasifika learners in schooling, on effective professional learning for teachers of Pasifika, and other linguistically diverse groups, and on the development of reciprocal home school partnerships. "It’s been a real privilege to work with school leaders and teachers in a number of Ministry of Education projects, supporting them to create schools that build on, and utilise the linguistic and cultural resources of their communities."
The evolving passage of culturally responsive pedagogies: Restlessness, resoluteness, and reason
Presenter: Professor Angus Macfarlane, University of Canterbury
Abstract:
The transcendental pathway of cultural responsiveness in education emerges out of deliberations from early thinkers’ restlessness. These early thinkers pushed back on the cultural dominance of some and championed the assertion that education should be a liberating force, and empower the oppressed as central actors in their autonomy. Later, almost like a second wave, other scholars followed with a focus on culturally relevant and culturally responsive teaching, and more recently developed a vision for culturally sustaining pedagogy, an approach that takes into account the many ways learners’ identity and culture evolve. Around the same time as this second wave, Māori and bicultural educators in Aotearoa had forsaken restlessness for resoluteness. They sought to initiate both processes and outcomes in which researchers, service users, and educational practitioners collectively engage in a negotiated process of making culture count in early childhood centres, kura, and schools. This presentation will revisit the terrain marked out by these early and recent icons, but will not dwell there. The presentation will reposition the emphasis, like Graham Nuthall did, toward reason – that is, that teachers have to transform transfers of knowledge into a real act of knowing. To do this, teachers must reason that connecting to the culture of the learners, is paramount. The thrust of the presentation will turn to the culturally-grounded research which have contributed to the creation of compelling frameworks and models that offer teachers confidence and confidence in their everyday professional practice alongside Māori learners.
About Professor Macfarlane:
Angus Hikairo Macfarlane (Ngāti Whakāue) is a Professor of Māori Research at the University of Canterbury (UC) in Christchurch. He is also the Director of the UC Māori Research Laboratory (Te Rū Rangahau) and Co-Director of the UC Child Wellbeing Institute. His research focuses on exploring Indigenous and sociocultural imperatives that influence education and psychology, his most proximal disciplines. Avid about Indigenous advancement, he has pioneered several theoretical frameworks associated with culturally-responsive approaches for professionals working across the research communities. Professor Macfarlane’s prolific publication portfolio and exemplary teaching abilities have earned him national and international standing in his field of scholarship including the recent 2019 election to the prestigious Fellowship of the Royal Society of New Zealand Te Apārangi.
Cultivating a Growth Mindset: How ‘talk’ grows intelligence
Presenter: Professor Robyn M. Gillies, University of Queensland
Did you know “intelligence can grow”. We have traditionally thought of intelligence as a fixed body of knowledge but a number of research strands emanating from studies on Exploratory Talk (Mercer & Littleton, 2007), Accountable Talk (Resnick et al., 2010), and Philosophy for Children (Topping & Trickey, 2014) demonstrate that intelligence is more fluid than we thought – it is learnable.
Intelligence grows when students have opportunities to work in learning spaces where teachers actively teach students how to engage critically and constructively with others’ ideas, challenge perspectives, and discuss alternative propositions.
Robyn M. Gillies’s research focuses on the social and cognitive aspects of learning through social interaction. She has spent over twenty years researching how students can be encouraged to engage in class and learn. Her research spans both primary and secondary schools and has focused on inquiry learning in science and mathematics, teacher and peermediated learning, student-centred learning, including cooperative learning, and classroom discourses and processes related to learning outcomes. Her recommendations on how teachers can translate research into practice have been widely profiled in the international literature and on the website of the Smithsonian Science Education Center in Washington, DC.
Moving beyond 'covering' the curriculum: Using sTc to engage all learners in science/STEM education
Professor Alberto Rodriguez is the Mary Endres Chair in Elementary Education and Professor of Cross-Cultural Science Education in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction at Purdue University. His research focuses on how teachers can make their pedagogy and curriculum more culturally and socially relevant to all students, as well as how teachers can better integrate science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) across the curriculum.
The dance of agency: student engagement in assessment for learning
Bronwen Cowie is the director of the Wilf Malcolm Institute of Educational Research, University of Waikato. She has just completed the Curriculum Exploratory Studies projects which were joint WMIER/NZCER projects. She is a co-director of the Science Learning Hub, which is a MSI initiative to make New Zealand science accessible to New Zealand teachers via a multimedia web-based resource. Bronwen’s research interests are in assessment for learning, classroom interaction, student voice, the role of ICTs in teachers’ professional lives, and curriculum development and implementation.
Literacy, place and pedagogies of possibility: Teach young people in a changing world
Barbara Comber is a research professor in the Faculty of Education at the Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane. She has undertaken a number of research projects concerned with literacy development, educational policy, teachers' work, socioeconomic disadvantage and culturally diverse communities. She has co-edited eight books and published numerous articles and chapters for teachers and teacher educators in critical literacy, place-based pedagogies, teacher research and social justice.
National Standards and the Damage Done
Sharpening the Focus
Professor Carr is an advisor on education to many governments and her work has been translated into Danish, Italian and Japanese. Most importantly, her research, done in collaboration with teachers, aims the lens on children's learning. She says "in this lecture I plan to weave together cross-country running, pottery and stories as I talk about sharpening our educational focus to include learners' perspectives - as Graham Nuthall has always invited us to do".
Can schools prepare you for anything?
Professor Claxton is Co-Director of the Centre for Real-World Learning, and Professor of the Learning Sciences, at the University of Winchester. He is best known for his Learning Power work, a programme that helps young people become better real-life learners. Professor Claxton has published extensively, he regularly presents internationally and has advised the Ministry of Education here in New Zealand.
Cathy Solomon intends to expand on her research into beliefs about maths by analysing how children position themselves or are positioned by others as being good at or not good at maths, and what effect this may have on their engagement with the subject. This will be done by exploring video data collected in two Year 5/6 maths classrooms. Cathy hopes this analysis will add to the conversation about improving all children’s access to and success with, or at least, greater enjoyment of maths.
The world of school mathematics is a strange and contradictory place. A conflict exists between believing that all children have the right to learn maths and believing that only certain sorts of people are capable of learning maths. In many New Zealand classrooms, children are measured and sorted into maths groups or classes that offer them unequal maths experiences. It is not only teachers and education systems that position certain children as more capable of engaging in the world of maths than others, but the children themselves and the broader community through prevailing assessment discourses relating to ethnicity and gender.
Fiona (Fi) McAlevey is exploring young children's perspectives of work, using an ethnographic approach in an early childhood setting. She is undertaking this research as part of an EdD through the University of Otago, while teaching at the Open Polytechnic.
"In early childhood education 'work' is often seen as something different from 'play'. I look forward to sharing ideas and knowledge about how children see work, and hope this can contribute something practical to us as teachers. I also welcome this as a wonderful opportunity to promote some inter-institutional collaboration."
Dr Wayne Duncan is being given the opportunity to extend his research in the social nature of learning and teaching within classroom environments, specifically the role of empathy. He will work with academic staff from Canterbury University to explore empathy within senior NCEA classes. He plans to use a similar research methodology to that he used within his own thesis where he used a combination of one on one and focus group interviews to explore student and teacher experiences and understandings of empathy within their classes.
The research will cover all of 2013 with repeated interviews allowing research participants to develop their understandings over time. "I am excited to be able to work with staff from Canterbury University over distance as I value the collaborative nature of research projects."
Graeme W. Ferguson is examining the influence of peer cultures on the learning dispositions of a group of primary school boys. He is doing this PhD project while teaching part time at University of Canterbury. Graeme's twenty years' experience as a primary school teacher and sixteen years in teacher education have informed several publications including "You'll be a boy if you play rugby: Sport and the construction of Gender" (Dunmore 2004).
"I hope my work will contribute useful knowledge to the New Zealand debates about the achievement of boys in schools, raise teachers' awareness of gender issues in education and, in particular, challenge us to reflect on the dominant ideas about masculinity which may not be particularly helpful in enabling boys and young men to adapt to the changing social and economic circumstances of a globalised 21st century New Zealand."
