title: "Everything has shaped you": Contributors to young Māori university students' ability to flourish

authors: Major, Darcie Ngahuia

subjects: Maori

abstract: There are many disparities when considering the health and wellbeing of Māori in Aotearoa today, and the education sector is no different, with Māori less likely to leave school with level 2 certificate or higher compared with non-Māori.  In response to the deficit orientated research on Māori and education, my thesis explores those factors contributing to young Māori tertiary students flourishing. My research includes five students from the University of Waikato who were between the ages of 17-24 years. A multi-method qualitative approach was utilised while engaging a Kaupapa Māori research framework. Participants were found to have a range of interconnected factors which contribute to their ability to flourish both inside and outside of the university.  Of particular importance to my participants was relational connectedness or whanaungatanga within and outside of the tertiary environment, landscapes which offered multiple forms of care, and notions of both collective and individual motivation. Some of the challenges experienced by my participants included a sense of socio-cultural isolation, the minimal inclusion of Māori worldviews and perspectives within the general curriculum, and the personal stress of responding to negative stereotypes of Maori as generally unproductive members of society. Flourishing for my participants is therefore multi-layered, and recognises the interconnected nature of health and wellbeing.

text: "Everything has shaped you": Contributors to young Māori university students' ability to flourish There are many disparities when considering the health and wellbeing of Māori in Aotearoa today, and the education sector is no different, with Māori less likely to leave school with level 2 certificate or higher compared with non-Māori.  In response to the deficit orientated research on Māori and education, my thesis explores those factors contributing to young Māori tertiary students flourishing. My research includes five students from the University of Waikato who were between the ages of 17-24 years. A multi-method qualitative approach was utilised while engaging a Kaupapa Māori research framework. Participants were found to have a range of interconnected factors which contribute to their ability to flourish both inside and outside of the university.  Of particular importance to my participants was relational connectedness or whanaungatanga within and outside of the tertiary environment, landscapes which offered multiple forms of care, and notions of both collective and individual motivation. Some of the challenges experienced by my participants included a sense of socio-cultural isolation, the minimal inclusion of Māori worldviews and perspectives within the general curriculum, and the personal stress of responding to negative stereotypes of Maori as generally unproductive members of society. Flourishing for my participants is therefore multi-layered, and recognises the interconnected nature of health and wellbeing.

year: 2017

title: The Treaty of Waitangi and Asian Immigrants in Aotearoa: A Reflective Journey

authors: Omura, Saburo

subjects: Te Tiriti o Waitangi

abstract: The Treaty of Waitangi was signed in 1840 between the British Crown and Māori, the indigenous people of New Zealand being represented at the signing by chiefs from various tribes. The Treaty promised to ensure legitimate control on European settlers, while guaranteeing Māori their sovereignty, undisturbed possession of natural and cultural resources, and citizenship. However, these commitments were reneged upon and were largely discarded over the next century, including devastating confiscations of land and other natural resources, undignified treatment of Māori culture and language, and the loss of indigenous sovereignty following large-scale European migration to Aotearoa/New Zealand in the late 19th century. 
The New Zealand government maintained a ‘white’ New Zealand immigration policy until the late 1980s. An orientation towards white British in New Zealand was so deeply entrenched that the idea of monocultural assimilation remained the norm and went unchallenged until the 1960s. A reflection of this is in the fact that even today the Treaty of Waitangi is not formally recognised in the country’s immigration policies. 
Since the 1990s, there has been a major upsurge in the number of Asian migrants arriving in Aotearoa/New Zealand, so that today people of Chinese, Indian, and similar origin constitute about 11% of the national total population. 
However, settlement support programmes and academic research relating to them have focused on superficial coping and adaptation issues. Integration of these migrants has been frequently discussed but without specific cultural references. Māori culture and the Treaty have never been an integral part of the research scope in the study of acculturation of such migrants in Aotearoa/New Zealand. Government. Politicians, and academics have consequently isolated migrants from indigenous issues, because indigenous people were regarded as irrelevant in this field. 
Nevertheless, some ethnic community groups and individuals have taken initiatives to learn about the Treaty in recent times. I interviewed 17 key informants and conducted six focus groups, with seven people on average participating in each session. Employing a free-association approach in these interviews enabled me to explore significant psychological changes after my informants had learned about the Treaty. 
As a result, many of the participants went through a process of redefining their identity in a new country, rather than just adjusting to or coping with a different environment. Essentially, learning about the Treaty facilitated psychological integration after migrating to New Zealand. 
The future implications of such findings, especially the significant effect of repositioning Māori culture and history in cross-cultural research in New Zealand, is also discussed in this thesis.

text: The Treaty of Waitangi and Asian Immigrants in Aotearoa: A Reflective Journey The Treaty of Waitangi was signed in 1840 between the British Crown and Māori, the indigenous people of New Zealand being represented at the signing by chiefs from various tribes. The Treaty promised to ensure legitimate control on European settlers, while guaranteeing Māori their sovereignty, undisturbed possession of natural and cultural resources, and citizenship. However, these commitments were reneged upon and were largely discarded over the next century, including devastating confiscations of land and other natural resources, undignified treatment of Māori culture and language, and the loss of indigenous sovereignty following large-scale European migration to Aotearoa/New Zealand in the late 19th century. 
The New Zealand government maintained a ‘white’ New Zealand immigration policy until the late 1980s. An orientation towards white British in New Zealand was so deeply entrenched that the idea of monocultural assimilation remained the norm and went unchallenged until the 1960s. A reflection of this is in the fact that even today the Treaty of Waitangi is not formally recognised in the country’s immigration policies. 
Since the 1990s, there has been a major upsurge in the number of Asian migrants arriving in Aotearoa/New Zealand, so that today people of Chinese, Indian, and similar origin constitute about 11% of the national total population. 
However, settlement support programmes and academic research relating to them have focused on superficial coping and adaptation issues. Integration of these migrants has been frequently discussed but without specific cultural references. Māori culture and the Treaty have never been an integral part of the research scope in the study of acculturation of such migrants in Aotearoa/New Zealand. Government. Politicians, and academics have consequently isolated migrants from indigenous issues, because indigenous people were regarded as irrelevant in this field. 
Nevertheless, some ethnic community groups and individuals have taken initiatives to learn about the Treaty in recent times. I interviewed 17 key informants and conducted six focus groups, with seven people on average participating in each session. Employing a free-association approach in these interviews enabled me to explore significant psychological changes after my informants had learned about the Treaty. 
As a result, many of the participants went through a process of redefining their identity in a new country, rather than just adjusting to or coping with a different environment. Essentially, learning about the Treaty facilitated psychological integration after migrating to New Zealand. 
The future implications of such findings, especially the significant effect of repositioning Māori culture and history in cross-cultural research in New Zealand, is also discussed in this thesis.

year: 2014

title: Learning Through Utility Optimization in Regression Tasks

authors: Branco, Paula

subjects: Science & Technology

abstract: Accounting for misclassification costs is important in many practical applications of machine learning, and cost-sensitive techniques for classification have been studied extensively. Utility-based learning provides a generalization of purely cost-based approaches that considers both costs and benefits, enabling application to domains with complex cost-benefit settings. However, there is little work on utility- or cost-based learning for regression. In this paper, we formally define the problem of utility-based regression and propose a strategy for maximizing the utility of regression models. We verify our findings in a large set of experiments that show the advantage of our proposal in a diverse set of domains, learning algorithms and cost/benefit settings.

text: Learning Through Utility Optimization in Regression Tasks Accounting for misclassification costs is important in many practical applications of machine learning, and cost-sensitive techniques for classification have been studied extensively. Utility-based learning provides a generalization of purely cost-based approaches that considers both costs and benefits, enabling application to domains with complex cost-benefit settings. However, there is little work on utility- or cost-based learning for regression. In this paper, we formally define the problem of utility-based regression and propose a strategy for maximizing the utility of regression models. We verify our findings in a large set of experiments that show the advantage of our proposal in a diverse set of domains, learning algorithms and cost/benefit settings.

year: 2017