SARAFINA TIPENE

Barriers to learning te reo according to some of her 11,000 followers:

Resourcing

Not having enough time outside of mahi, kids, school, to sit down at learn te reo

Available materials 

Whakamā or fear/embarrassment

Trying and making a mistake

Making a fool of yourself

How important was learning te reo to them on a daily basis: just over 30% said it wasn’t something that was super important to them. Only 10% said it was very important to them.

Argues that social media is a good platform and resource to use to teach/learn te reo as it is easily accessible, and anyone with internet access can access instagram. That is also where all the rangatahi are at the moment. 

On average Generation-Z spends about 4 hours and 15 minutes on their phone. 3 of those hours are spent on social media platforms. This is how they are engaging and interacting with one another. We need to think of ways to have them engage on those platforms but in te reo Māori.

Her idea is to decolonise the social media space and offer more te reo Māori options, where young rangatahi are engaging with one another. 

She created filters in te reo Māori. Received amazing feedback and people were loving them. It was a good way to promote the language because instagram is a massive platform. It is a good way to normalise te reo Māori in your everyday life and integrate it in the way you’re socialising online. In my posts, you can save them and revisit them later when you’re catching the bus/train home. You can share these posts as well. Stories are really good to do ‘a kupu a day.’ 

Engagement tools she created were:

Filters

Posts

Reels (can be little skits of saying phrases)

Stories (24 hours)

Question feature you can do on your stories: 

Fun way to be exposed to a bit of te reo. For Sarafina, as a young wahine herself, has seen first hand the benefits of capitalising on these online platforms and features to be able to revitalise te reo Māori on an online space. Using the digital future to connect to the past. She urges us to be creative in how we are teaching te reo Māori and to use other platforms such as zoom, tiktok.

“Language is how you can access into the culture, and access into our Māori communities, and really start to understand the culture and those really old concepts and meanings of the language” (Sarafina Tipene, personal communication, Tuesday 5 October 2021).

Even Rachael Ka’ai-Mahuta who after meeting an Aucklander whose teenage passion for K-Pop sparked an interest in Korean language and culture in general, and led them to learning Korean as a second language, made her reflect on what lessons could be learnt for the revitalisation of te reo Māori. Specifically, given the importance of teenagers in those revitalisation efforts, what can we learn from the way the so-called “Korean Wave” is subverting the English language as the language of popular culture? 

“Strategically resourcing the production of Māori language content for pop culture needs to be a priority in any plan to capture the adolescent age group” (Rachel Ka’ai-Mahuta: https://theconversation.com/making-te-reo-maori-cool-what-language-revitalisation-could-learn-from-the-korean-wave-145833) 
See this website for statistics about the different way te reo Māori is learned by our rangatahi: https://www.stats.govt.nz/news/more-than-1-in-6-maori-people-speak-te-reo-maori