If art imitates life, then Shelley Hoani’s PhD is surely a work of art. Shelley’s PhD looked at Māori post-graduate students’ beliefs about success and as she undertook her research, her own hardships, resilience and triumphs often mirrored that of her participants.
Shelley (Te Arawa, Tainui) wanted her research to privilege the voices of Māori single parents because education is often the vehicle that leads to transformation for an entire whānau.
“For myself I know that gaining an education was never about gaining anything just for myself. Success meant attaining post-graduate credentials so I could get a better job to earn enough money to support my children. Once I did that, I could leave a violent marriage and start to curate a new home and life for my whānau that was safe and healthy.”
While the circumstances for becoming single parents were all different, Shelley’s participants reported that higher education was about gaining a sense of rangatiratanga over the destiny and wellbeing of their whānau.
For many participants, they were stepping into the unknown. “One dad was a tradie and he never thought higher education was for him. Upon becoming a single dad, he had to look at other options to support his children and education became the waka that helped him transform his whānau.”
Shelley says a common experience for all participants was dealing with a profound sense of loss and loneliness on that path. “You are putting yourself into financial debt, holding down full-time jobs, as well as raising children. Single parents often have no one to be a backstop if things go wrong. There is massive pressure on single parents that other people don’t understand.”
Shelley knows only too well how things can go wrong. It took her 10 long years to get her PhD. During the process, Shelley was diagnosed with breast cancer, then after her final radiation treatment, Shelley’s mother had a stroke, and her teenage daughter went into deep depression due to the whānau stress.
“I had a meeting with my supervisor to see how I could get through to the finish line, and she asked me, ‘while you are mothering everyone else, who is mothering you?’ I knew then, I just needed to stop my study for a while and re-gather myself.”
Shelley believes educational institutions can play a bigger part to improve support for single parents. She witnessed the inflexibility of institutions first-hand when a fellow PhD student, determined to continue her studies despite significant personal hardships attended a noho with her children – only to be asked to leave because the rules didn’t allow children to stay. “A lot of our educational facilities cater to a certain type of a student, and single parents often fall outside of their parameters. You know things are not working when you see that kind of thing happening.”
She says many Māori single parents do not complete their post-graduate degrees because the pressures are too great. Not all her participants graduated; however, studying had still been enlightening and transformational. “Study enabled them to figure out what’s important for them and their whānau. It is hard because there are so many voices telling you that you are a failure. That is where the notion of rangatiratanga came from – standing in our mana as Māori single parents and having the right to determine what success might look like for us and our whānau.”
“My participants redefined success on their own terms. They made new friends, developed intellectually and emotionally, and gained a new sense of purpose.” Several also experienced a sense of belonging in academia for the first time in their lives. More importantly, education became a vehicle for whānau transformation – the most significant and meaningful success factor of all.