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RESEARCH, INNOVATION AND ENTREPRENEURSHIP AT THE UNIVERSITY OF WAIKATO
Pre-schoolers
playing out
earthquakes
AN international team of researchers has been
studying how pre-schoolers have dealt with
the Canterbury earthquakes.
Dr Amanda Bateman from the University of
Waikato’s Faculty of Education had only been in
New Zealand a short time when the first earthquake
struck. “I couldn’t believe what people went through
and I wondered what I could do to help. Having been
an early childhood teacher myself, I wondered how
teachers could teach in the chaos and how children
would respond.”
She called in specialist colleagues: Professor
Susan Danby, a children’s conversation analyst at
Queensland’s University of Technology, and Dr Justine
Howard, a play specialist from Swansea University,
Wales and she found New Brighton Community
Preschool willing to participate in the research.
Remarkably, when the school’s manager Paula
Robinson put the call out for families to participate
in Dr Bateman’s research, there was a 100 per cent
response. Ms Robinson says she and her staff had
quickly decided that after the first earthquake they
would ‘embrace’ it, talk about it and support play
around it.
“We were about three months without running
water and used portaloos for four months. Several play
areas were unusable, but from a learning perspective
there were lots of things we could do, and from each
experience, we would try to frame it in the positive.
The children became earthquake explorers.”
Dr Bateman went to New Brighton and recorded
conversations with and between the children and
found them keen to talk.
“The children had written about experiences in
their Learning Story books and they used their books
as prompts to tell their stories.
EARTHQUAKE
EXPLORERS:
“They became road
workers and builders
and set about fixing
things. Broken and
fixing were much
used words.”
DR AMANDA BATEMAN
“One day I was there and there was no running
water – I think a vehicle had fallen through an
unstable road and cracked a pipe. Instead of closing
the preschool down, teachers used the event to go and
look at the damage and to talk about it.”
When the streets flooded they monitored the
progress of the water going back on in different streets
and houses and learned about tides. “Talking about
what they saw also got them talking about what was
happening to their own homes and families,” says Dr
Bateman. “It reinforced the importance for people, no
matter how young, to talk about traumatic incidents.
“During the analysis of the videoed interactions
it became noticeable to us that the teachers and
children were using pivotal utterances, words or
sentences which shifted the conversation from the
immediate environment to reflections on actual
earthquake events.”
After listening to their conversations, Dr Bateman
also watched the children at play. “In their hi-vis
jackets and with their cones and tools they became
road workers and builders and set about fixing things.
Broken and fixing were much-used words.”
Ms Robinson says a lot of the play was led by the
children as they “lived and breathed” the quakes and
their aftermath. “It was important to acknowledge
what they had been through, that it was real and that
good things could come out of it. Many children
saw more of their parents because they couldn’t go to
work or they visited their grandparents, for example.”
For Dr Bateman, the most prominent finding from
the research revealed how the teachers used everyday
earthquake-related incidents as opportunities for
teaching and learning, giving children the chance to
discuss traumatic events from their own perspective so
that they could make sense of their situation.
Dr Bateman and her colleagues’ research will be
published in the
Australian Journal of Communication
in an issue that focuses on disaster talk.
abateman@waikato.ac.nz
WE all know climate change is likely to lead to
a warmer New Zealand but what impact will
it have on things such as land use, biodiversity,
the economy and the population?
Those are among the questions Waikato
University Management School economist
Dr Michael Cameron will help answer
through his role in a four-year, $7.2 million
project which aims to update climate change
predictions and improve understanding of the
impact of the changes.
Dr Cameron says the project could lead
to a more informed development of policies
in the areas of the environment, resource
management, water quality and the economy.
The project, Climate Change: Impacts
and Implications for New Zealand, is being
led by NIWA and Landcare Research and Dr
Cameron will be working with others from
AgResearch, Victoria University, Bodeker
Scientific, Motu Economic and Public Policy
Research, Plant & Food and Scion. The
University of Waikato will receive more than
$150,000 for its role in the project.
Dr Cameron, who is also a research fellow
in the National Institute of Demographic
and Economic Analysis (NIDEA), is mainly
involved in providing demographic and
economic expertise to the project.
He says that in the initial stage of the
project, data from the Intergovernmental
DR MICHAEL CAMERON: Climate change
will affect population movement.
The study focus
The climate change project has been divided
into five sections:
» Updating and improving projections
of climate trends and variability across
New Zealand out to 2100 based on the
latest global projections.
» Identifying likely impacts, environmental
pressure points, implications and
potential policy and management
implications for five important
environments: alpine and high-elevation
native forest ecosystems; high-country
and hill-country environments and land
use; lowland environments and land use;
coastal and estuarine ecosystems; and
the ocean food chain.
» Identifying interactions between climate
change and other key drivers, and their
cumulative impacts across New Zealand,
by linking results from climate,
biophysical, economic, demographic,
land-use change and stakeholder models.
That will include work on freshwater
supply, quality and use.
» Enhancing the capacity to generate,
translate, share and apply climate
change knowledge with stakeholders.
» Providing information to support
coordinated, evidence-based decision-
making and policy development.
Changes likely from climate change study
Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) will be
“down-scaled” to fit New Zealand’s small size
before researchers look at the potential for
changes in areas such as land use, biodiversity,
the economy and population.
“With population, three things happen,”
he says. “People are born, they move around
and they die.”
He says birth rates “probably” won’t change
markedly due to climate change while mortality
rates “may” be affected. “People moving, that’s
where its main impact will be. We will see
population movement in the country. The west
will probably get wetter and the east will get
drier and that will have an impact.”
However, he says predictions of
environmental refugees flooding New Zealand
have been blown out of proportion. “Most
people will adapt rather than move across
borders. We are a long way from anywhere so
the impacts of that are likely to be small.”
Dr Cameron is looking forward to
working with colleagues from across the
country on the project. He says it is being
driven by diverse end-user and stakeholder
groups who will be looking for answers to
specific questions so its outcomes “could make
some meaningful changes to policy”.
The climate change project’s co-leaders
Dr Andrew Tait from NIWA and Dr Daniel
Rutledge from Landcare Research say it’s an
exciting project that will, for the first time
in New Zealand, examine potential climate
change impacts on New Zealand’s economy,
environment and society in an integrated and
co-ordinated fashion.
“We have assembled what we feel is
a ‘New Zealand best’ research team. The
project also includes a strong partnership
with stakeholders and iwi who will participate
interactively throughout the entire project.
This includes both participating directly in
research and helping translate, apply and use
the knowledge effectively to help ‘climate
proof ’ New Zealand.”
macam@waikato.ac.nz