Yesterday, I went with my family to farewell my parents who are travelling back to Samoa as we look forward to visiting Samoa again, at the end of next month before school starts.One of the things that I think is becoming more important for us as Samoans is teaching our future generations of diaspora Samoans living away from the homeland, concepts and values of the faaSamoa as well as how to speak the language.
As a result, I've purposed to attend beginner classes at PEC Pacific Education Centre at MIT, Manukau Institute of Technology, at level 1 NCEA, National Certificate of Educational Achievement units and work through the different modules with our our eldest to learn the language in a formal setting i.e. learning sentence structures and grammar etc.
Being brought up in the 80s as a teen, the educational philosophy at this time was to assimilate all cultures into Western thought with speaking English as the priority, the current education philosophy is now about being at least bilingual and even more important multi-lingual to be able to understand more than one view.
In my experience, this has been very interesting as an indigenous researcher and creative. It means that various perspective can bring about a better understanding of some of our universal values of: love, grief, loyalty, happiness etc. and to teach our children in reinforcing that our indigenous cultural values are important that there are more ways of understanding this world than only the ideas that they learnt at school...
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