Wikipedia and the Aotearoa New Zealand History Curriculum | #Wikimania2023
Channel: Wikimedia Foundation
Date: 2023-11-23

For the last two years staff at Tāmaki Paenga Hira Auckland War Memorial Museum have been investigating how Wikipedia could be used as a learning resource in secondary schools for the new compulsory Aotearoa NZ Histories Curriculum. This session will present the results of two projects undertaken with WMF funding projects towards this broad goal.

The first project sought to understand teachers attitudes towards the use of Wikipedia in secondary school classrooms in Aotearoa New Zealand. The second project is currently underway enhancing local Auckland suburb Wikipedia pages for use as educational resources for teaching the new curriculum.

This year for the first time a compulsory national history curriculum rolls out across schools in Aotearoa New Zealand for students in primary and secondary schools (years 1-10, ages 5-15). For the last couple of years staff at Tāmaki Paenga Hira Auckland War Memorial Museum have been thinking about how to reach this new large, diverse, audience of secondary students and their teachers in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland with online resources suitable for the new curriculum.

As the curriculum has a focus on applying broad historical themes and methods to local contexts, we came up with a project enhancing local Wikipedia suburb pages, editing them so they had detailed and up to date histories which covered Māori settlement, colonization and 20th century developments, richly illustrated with images from local GLAM institutions and references to further reading. This would enable Wikipedia to be used as a starting point for the teaching of the new curriculum, while also enabling GLAM organisations such as ours to engage with the curriculum at scale.

However, we wanted to test whether this idea would be suitable, and in doing so more generally investigate what teachers in New Zealand thought about Wikipedia and how they used it in the classroom. In 2021 we received WMF Research funding for this work and completed it in 2022.  

We then applied for Alliance Funding last year for a follow-up project that has two components. The first part is editing and enhancing suburb pages over the course of this year. The second part involves a cohort of students joining the Museum's summer studentship programme as Wikipedia Interns from Nov 2023-Feb 2024. 

In this presentation we will report back on the findings of the research project, sharing the results of our surveys and interviews with teachers and also provide a work-in-progress report on the current project, what is working well and any roadblocks we are facing.  

While our projects are both focused on the New Zealand context, there are learnings relevant to other contexts, particularly around modern educators perceptions of Wikipedia and the use of Wikipedia as a learning resource in the classroom. Our work  also point towards some ways that GLAM organisations can take an active approach towards engaging with Wikipedia by running projects which sit at the intersection of GLAM-Wiki and Education-Wiki activities.

https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:Project/Wikipedia_and_the_Aotearoa_New_Zealand_History_Curriculum

https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:Programs/Wikimedia_Alliances_Fund/Understanding_our_past:using_Wikipedia_as_a_tool_to_support_local_history_in_T%C4%81maki_Makaurau

Presenter: James Taylor

Presentation slide : https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Wikipedia_%26_the_Aotearoa_NZ_Histories_Curriculum_-_Wikimania_2023.pdf