Can Maori children really be positioned as "deficient" learners for reading English?

Māori are the indigenous people of New Zealand. Since British colonial settlement in the early 1800s, Māori children have been predominantly educated in an English- speaking system dominated by colonial governance. In this institution, Māori children have been constructed as deficient learners, primarily in relation to a colonial curriculum taught in English and an assessment regime developed with monolingual and mono-cultural English children. This article, which critically challenges the deficit discourse, outlines the ways in which Māori and English languages co-exist in a fluid stream across the curriculum in a Christchurch classroom in order to scaffold educational achievement in learning to read English, for Māori children.