Purpose: Wellness of whānau, hapū, and iwi through holistic care.
Key Features: Spiritual, mental, physical, and family health treated together. Rongoā (traditional medicine) alongside modern healthcare.
Purpose: Community decision-making and conflict resolution.
Key Features: Consensus-based decisions, elder wisdom, collective responsibility for outcomes.
Purpose: Sustainable guardianship of natural resources.
Key Features: Seven-generation thinking, spiritual connection to nature, sustainable harvesting practices.
Purpose: Connect people to each other, land, and knowledge.
Key Features: Tracks relationships, inheritance rights, cultural knowledge, and responsibilities.
Purpose: Community consultation and collective decision-making.
Key Features: Everyone has voice, consensus seeking, shared responsibility for implementation.
Students will engage with this resource to apply systems thinking to real-world civic and community challenges — analysing feedback loops, leverage points, and emergent properties within social, environmental, and governance systems in Aotearoa New Zealand.
Scaffold support: Provide systems mapping templates and sentence starters for entry-level access. Offer extension tasks asking students to identify a second-order effect or design an intervention at a leverage point within their chosen system.
ELL / ESOL: Pre-teach systems thinking vocabulary (feedback loop, leverage point, emergence, interdependence) using visual diagrams. Allow students to annotate systems maps in their home language first.
Inclusion: Use visual, spatial, and collaborative formats wherever possible — systems maps are inherently accessible for diverse learners. Neurodiverse learners benefit from structured inquiry steps and chunked analysis tasks. Ensure group roles are clearly defined.
Mātauranga Māori lens: Systems thinking has deep resonance with Te Ao Māori. Whakapapa is a relational map of systems — tracing connections between people, place, and time. Kaitiakitanga frames our responsibility within systems. Mauri provides a measure of system health. These indigenous concepts enrich Western systems thinking frameworks.
Prior knowledge: Students should have completed foundational systems thinking lessons (phases 1–2) before engaging with phase 3 inquiry tasks. No specialist prior knowledge required for standalone resources.