What happens when you take a roopu of rangatahi, expose them to research on identity, politics and leadership, housing, media and Māori health and ask them to come up with a way to kōrero about politics? Turns out that you get some amazing whakaaro on things that matter to rangatahi, and views on what it means to ‘be political’.
The TUI team had set out to look at the pre-election messages that were coming from politicians and the media in Aotearoa, and to investigate how they were talking about or targeting Māori and issues of importance to Māori. The media scan undertaken by the Whakauae Winter Students on the election project showed – unsurprisingly - that messages coming out through the media sensationalised, diminished and largely mis-represented Māori, with the obvious effect of dividing Aotearoa across battle lines. Rangatahi engagement in this space is often invisible, or marginalised, and the idea around how to even begin to talk about politics was the starting point for Āroa, the card game that was developed by the Winter Students.
Āroa has been designed to take players on a journey from Te Kore, the place of ‘darkness’ or exploration, to Te Pō, where the ‘restless movements of light’ begin to offer glimmers; through to Te Ao Mārama, the place of knowledge and enlightenment.
Comprised of a series of pātai, about the self, values and our place in Te Ao Māori, the game seeks to engage interactive kōrero and exploration by the players, who articulate and maybe debate their views. The game ends with a reveal of your own personal ‘Atua’ type, where players get to find out what their political character or approach is, as revealed by their series of answers.
The card game idea has now been developed into a first prototype, with a limited print run of 50 games, which have been disseminated across Aotearoa to test, with the aim of refining and iterating the next version during 2024. The development of the Āroa idea, from research to dissemination output has provided a great opportunity to test how the translation component of TUI can be expressed through new, innovative, rangatahi mindsets. The hope for the next part of the Āroa journey is to achieve uptake of this way of provoking whānau engagement in things that matter to rangatahi Māori.
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