Couples Work in Cultural Context: Te Ao Mori and Poststucturalist Practices Informing Counselor Training in Aotearoa New Zealand

This article outlines key themes that appear in the teaching of poststructuralist ideas and practices for couples counseling within the Postgraduate Diploma in Counseling Program at Unitec Institute of Technology in Auckland, New Zealand, and it explores the congruence of this pedagogical approach with Maori (indigenous) understandings of relationality, collaboration, and partnership. The diploma program's curriculum includes narrative therapy and relational language-making. Themes explored in this article include: understanding (heterosexual) couple relationships as contextualized entities, deconstructing dominant discourses of coupledom, and the positioning of counselors/teachers as nonexpert. Taking each theme in turn, the authors, one of them Maori and two Pkeh (European), articulate points of alignment with Maori cultural concepts and practices.