Several years ago, sparked by this story shared by Pā Jack, our place-based project was born.
Each Summer certain young people were permitted to visit the coast for a couple of months to gather and prepare masses of fish, shellfish and textiles for Winter consumption. Rere Raumati were the fortunate few who had merited their inclusion to the annual "working holiday". It was a reward and also a social-political contact point for neighbouring iwi to meet and connect. Important skills were honed, often skills that were not needed back home. Young people got to operate more independently. (high trust model). Landlocked peoples could travel to the coast and coastal peoples could travel inland.
Rangiotu Road (aka State Highway 56) from Te Marae ō Hine (The Square) to Himatangi Beach is built upon the foundations of the old Ara Raumati.
We could envisage the rich place-based learning that could stem from the exploration of our local history and associated knowledge of the people, places and resources utilising the pathway (Ara Raumati) as the basis for the areas we focused on. We decided to design a project to enable the collection, storage and sharing of the rich learning attained by our ākonga as they travel the pathway - ‘Te Ara Raumati’.
Part of our big picture plan is to create a MinecraftEdu World in which our ākonga collaboratively recreate our rohe, past and present, utilising their acquired knowledge.
Alongside this resource would sit a fly-over digital recording of Te Ara Raumati, also sharing the information gathered along our journey.