Pacific educators and leaders are urgently drawing attention to the inescapable need to modify current development and educational initiatives so that they meaningfully reflect Pacific people's notion of development and education. Our colonial legacies, with their western influence, and the more recent onslaught of globalization at the dawn of the new millenium, has left much of the Pacific communities balancing their act of making cultural values and identity economically viable or making their economic aspirations culturally rooted. Village communities do not have to look like urban towns and cities. Some people, however, insist that good applications of western development and education require rural communities patterned after western models. This view reverses the proper order of things.
Rural villages remain a valued fact of life in Pacific communities.
The challenge is to contextualize development and educational initiatives in these rural communities. A better course is to seek a middle ground, one that views modernity a tool for use in serving the socio-economic realities of the village without sacrificing the more durable and essential qualities of rural life and schooling. To grasp and win the challenges of this vision, we as Pacific educators and leaders will have to bring to the forefront initiatives that are first and foremost socially and culturally-rooted but also economically viable. This research hopes to establish the fears, challenges and opportunities of the village women as it relates to her socio-economic realities and critically assess the relevancy of the current school curriculum in the light of these lived realities of the village women. It is intended that the research findings and outcomes should be useful in informing curriculum content, curriculum change and process, the changing role of village schools and the possible infra-structural support needed.