The TENZ 2015 welcome address was presented by Alister Jones, senior Deputy Vice Chancellor at Waikato University. With his ongoing interest in curriculum, teaching, learning and assessment and as chairperson of the TENZ Trust Board, Alister was the appropriate person to open the conference.

In his short address he went back to the original formation of TENZ and gave some brief comments on its evolving development up to the present day. He started in 1995, “when it was very difficult to predict what Technology education would look like 20 years into the future”. 1995 was the first year of facilitator training for Technology – and he commented on the high number of people from that programme who were attending this conference. “Those were certainly exciting times,” he reflected.

 “We had a blank piece of paper and strong political support.” But, as always, initial enthusiasm for a subject wanes – the key thing needed was a strong political organisation – and that was how TENZ developed.

Since those heady early days there has been a shift of political focus. There has been a much greater focus on literacy and numeracy and national, and international, testing. That change in emphasis has happened around the world. He mentioned the rise of STEM in the school curriculum – particularly in USA and UK. But disappointingly Technology has been excluded from the core curriculum - and he pointed to the fact that it was a very small ‘T’ in STEM with the situation that, “sometimes you’re very hard-pressed to find it in a school.”

“So, in many ways the innovation we thought about and the original opportunities for an inclusive, forward looking curriculum have, in some ways, been lost,” he said. “And the innovation in student education that we were looking for in those early years has been undermined. In universities, the science and engineering departments haven’t helped.”

“In the National Science and Technology work as a National Science Challenge, there is very little recognition of ‘Technology’ or evidence of joined up thinking between government departments and even less between the Ministry of Education and the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment. In that space Science has dominated, but most of the policy work is from 20 or 30 years ago – so we haven’t really moved forward.”

He said that in many ways the current methods to engage the public have been naive, retrospective and simplistic with the type of events that hark back to the early days.

“They lack scale and have ignored the lessons of the past,” he said. “One of the things that TENZ has the opportunity to do in its conferences, like this, is to not forget the lessons of the past but to bring those to the fore … and pose questions like: ‘What have we learned in the last 20 years?’; and ‘How do we bring Technology to be a vibrant and exciting subject?’”

He concluded that was fantastic to see that Technology is where it is today because of an organisation like TENZ, and the foundation that was set nearly 20 years ago .

In welcoming those attending and introducing David Barlex, the first Keynote speaker, he said that TENZ was “an organisation that brought industry, government, research and teaching together – over 20 years ago.”

“And it’s great to go through the programme that you’ve got today and see that that vision is still being realised. The keynotes represent an exciting mix – from curriculum, research and innovation –and it is my real pleasure to open this conference.”

Note: Alistair was unable to come to the TENZ awards dinner at Hobbiton on the Monday and he was presented with an Outstanding Award in Technology education at morning tea at the conference on the Tuesday. The award recognised Alister’s long-standing commitment to the establishment of Technology in the New Zealand Curriculum.