About Me
Professor Elizabeth Rata is a curriculum expert and sociologist of education at the University of Auckland. She is a member of the Ministerial Curriculum Advisory Group and the Ministerial Charter Schools’ Establishment Board. She is also the Co-Chair of the Inter-University Academic Freedom Council which provides support and advice to academics from all New Zealand universities. Her most recent publication about the curriculum is as co-author, along with other leading curriculum experts, of the book ‘Developing Curriculum for Deep Thinking:The Knowledge Turn (2025). It is free to download at https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-031-74661-1.
Professor Rata’s curriculum expertise builds on an earlier career as an English teacher and head of English departments in four schools in disadvantaged areas and as a foundational member of kura kaupapa Māori. Her academic curriculum work includes her directorship of the Knowledge in Education Research Unit (KERU), her leadership of the Knowledge-Rich School Project, her development of the Curriculum Design Coherence Model (CDC Model), and numerous publications including the editorship of the 40 chapter international ‘Research Handbook on Curriculum and Education’.
Her research includes the study of race, ethnicity and education, specifically the effects of racial categorisation on educational policy and the curriculum with her original theory of neotribal capitalism providing the foundation for an extensive and ongoing research programme into racial politics. Neotribal capitalism is about elite emergence and the ways in which traditionalist ideology and re-tribalist politics are used, with New Zealand as the example, to privatise public resources and acquire non-democratic political power.
