Research process

To find out what we students were interested in Whanau Ra had a big hui. We were put into mix groups of tuakana and teina and we wrote down what concerns us in the community and what solutions to these could be. From this our school decided our kaupapa topic would be "What's in a Name?"

We were to research and find out the meaning behind the street names in Moerewa. We asked our parents and our Nans and Papas. We searched the internet and asked people in our community. We found that there wasn't that much information out there! BUT while we were looking for the history of our street names we wondered about some other things.

Here are some of the questions we asked.

Why is my street name Ranfurly and I don't know anything about it?
Why can’t we change Sir William Hale Rd back to Wiki's Road?
Why can't we have a say in changing our street name?
Why can't we have Māori street names?
Can we have street names that relate to our community?
Why can't we have the proper names?
Why can't we change Snowden Ave to Whanau Street?

After asking all of our questions we decided to:

• Look at how street names are made
• Look at places around Moerewa that are special to us
• Look at ways our stories can be told
• Look at how we can share our stories with our whanau
• Look at creating ways to preserve the information we did find out about our street names
• Look at whether we could change our street names

Even though we thought about changing some of the street names we critically analysed the impact this may have on the history and the people in our community.

We talked about how names have meaning. We read stories about our town. We wrote about places in Moerewa that were special to us and why. We searched online for the history of Moerewa. We asked our parents again. We asked our Nans and Papas again.

Now we are able to share what we found.