Chapter 10 provides an overall summary of the results of the seven ESL teachers’ journey through each of the five stages, or a reflection-on-action summary of the main findings. This is followed by all seven ESL teachers’ reflections on the findings of their individual reflective journey. The chapter also discusses the teachers’ reflective dispositions, including their open-mindedness, wholeheartedness, and responsibility.

Chapter 7 provides details of a fifth year ESL teacher reflecting on her philosophy, principles, theory, practice, and critical reflections beyond practice. The chapter also provides details of her interpretations of her overall reflections, followed by a discussion of the teacher’s experiences during her fifth year of teaching.

Chapter 9 provides details of a tenth year ESL teacher reflecting on her philosophy, principles, theory, practice, and critical reflections beyond practice. The chapter also provides details of her interpretations of her overall reflections, followed by a discussion of the teacher’s experiences during her tenth year of teaching.

Chapter 6 provides details of a fourth year ESL teacher reflecting on her philosophy, principles, theory, practice, and critical reflections beyond practice. The chapter also provides details of her interpretations of her overall reflections, followed by a discussion of the teacher’s experiences during her fourth year of teaching.

Chapter 2 provides details of the teacher participants and how the stories of their lived experiences were shared and how they evolved. It includes details of the reflective practice framework that was used. This is followed by a discussion of the methodology that includes details about the context, the seven participant teachers, and how their story was obtained and analyzed.

Chapter 8 provides details of a seventh year ESL teacher reflecting on her philosophy, principles, theory, practice, and critical reflections beyond practice. The chapter also provides details of her interpretations of her overall reflections, followed by a discussion of the teacher’s experiences during her seventh year of teaching.

One of many gifts Epeli Hau’ofa gave Pacific Studies was his 1994 essay ‘Our Sea of Islands’. He wrote ‘There is a world of difference between viewing the Pacific as “islands in a far sea” and as “a sea of islands” ‘ (p 152). The former was a vision applied to the peoples of the Pacific, including the southwestern Pacific. The latter was a vision of Pacific peoples as intimately connected to each other by seas that were pathways, not barriers. These connections complement, and are enabled by, deep and intense attachments to land and ancestors (Spann, 2018; Diaz, 2019, p 2).

Bougainville and Solomon Islands sit side by side in an archipelago within this sea of islands (see Figure 1.1). Like the southwestern Pacific more generally, they are extraordinarily diverse linguistically and culturally. More than 20 Indigenous languages (Tryon, 2005) are spoken among Bougainville's population of under 400,000 and at least 64 languages (Jourdan, 2013, p 271) are spoken among around 700,000 Solomon Islanders. There is evidence of intimate contact between language groups deep into the past even while cultural practices can vary considerably among speakers of the same language.

New people and ideas have thus been easy to encounter, making it perhaps unsurprising that for the peoples of the region there has been ‘something traditional about novelty’ (Jorgensen, 1994, p 130; cited in Golub, 2014, p 190). Simon Harrison observed that the southwestern Pacific is a region ‘whose peoples have been described as culturally highly acquisitive, actively seeking exotic and novel items of culture as valued and prestigious enhancements of the group or person’ (2007, p 39). The acquisitiveness is visible in exchange relationships and the trans-local systems through which they are enacted (Timmer, 2019, p 128). Cultural knowledge embedded in political and religious life has also been exchanged widely (Harrison, 1993b). Other links through marriage and warfare combined with exchange relations to make hamlets and villages places bursting with the trans-local connections essential to social life (Golub, 2014, pp 188–94; McDougall, 2016). The overwhelming weight of evidence from this region dispels any suggestion that its peoples and cultures have seen themselves as bounded entities with inherently antagonistic relationships towards others (Brigg, 2009).

The peoples of the southwestern Pacific possess sophisticated ways to resolve disputes, and as might be expected in a region whose peoples are open to new ideas and strangers, the parties involved are capable of adapting to new circumstances (Dinnen, 2003, p 28; Jolly, 2003, p 270; McDougall and Kere, 2011; Allen et al, 2013; McDougall, 2015). Such pragmatism revolves around three pillars of the justice system (kastom, churches and the state) although in practice the pillars are difficult to separate as people identify overlapping roles for each pillar (Allen et al, 2013; Larcom, 2013). Each pillar can also traverse multiple scales. Kastom, for example, is hardly limited to relations between kin and family but is a resource when disputes occur across communities and islands (McDougall and Kere, 2011, p 144).

Although dispute resolution requires a reconciliation process that deals with the details of what happened and who did it, other kinds of knowledge about violent pasts can and do circulate in Bougainville and Solomon Islands. For example, central Bougainvilleans commemorate Francis Ona's Unilateral Declaration of Independence for Bougainville every year on 17 May. I witnessed the event in 2016 and spent the next two weeks talking to people about it. I found that most people were willing to let the former Bougainville Revolutionary Army (BRA) commanders that organised the commemoration tell their version of events. Several participants had misgivings about the omissions in the former commanders’ historical narrative. However, those participants either did not attend the event or kept their disquiet to themselves because they understood that the combatants were making progress towards reconciliation. In this way, while public memorialisation practices might have seemed at first to be venues to articulate conflict knowledge, because people made sense of those commemorations with reference to reconciliation processes it is essential to understand these processes in more detail.

The specifics can vary widely across Bougainville and Solomon Islands (Dinnen, 2003), but in the most general terms reconciliations proceed in the following way. After a conflict, representatives of the people involved negotiate with the aim of restoring balance to the relationships between the broader clan groups to which the victims and perpetrators belong. The mediators are community leaders, individuals who share social ties to both parties or, increasingly, trained mediators. They are usually men. In some cases these men might convene a formal meeting to resolve the issue (White and Watson-Gegeo, 1990, pp 30–2). The specific approach can depend on the harm caused (Reddy, 2012, p 138). Chiefs can often deal with minor damage to relationships by organising banal social events that re-establish friendly relations among the parties. By contrast, negotiations over serious cases are deliberately slow to enable the individuals involved to reflect and prepare themselves (Sirivi, 2004, p 176).

Many southwestern Pacific men clearly perceive risks to their own status from the education of women and girls. In this region, as elsewhere (Adely, 2012), girls’ education is entangled with moral, cultural and religious values, prompting questions about whether young women should pursue education to the same extent as young men, if the objectives of their education should be different, and what risks might be associated with their education (Munro, 2018, p 26). Processes of missionisation and colonisation that introduced formal schooling into cultures that already possessed sophisticated ideas about educated persons, and the processes for making them, also introduced new answers to these questions (see, more broadly, McKinley and Smith, 2019; O’Sullivan, 2021). As I describe in this chapter, the new answers opened more opportunities for men than they did for women and continue to do so. Although more women than ever are making it through schooling, many women face a backlash, framed as a re-assertion of ‘tradition’, that is often manifest in violence towards them (Hermkens, 2008; Spark, 2011; Macintyre, 2017, p 8; Hemer, 2018, pp 140–2).

These questions about the education of young women and appropriate roles for women and men certainly played out at the boarding schools. As I showed in Chapter 3, the moral basis of life in the village was an important part of life at school often because teachers and students made conscious decisions to put it there. In the process they found family resemblances among the diversity of their cultural practices. In this chapter I show that these family resemblances ran deep. They can be found in expectations for women, the ongoing presence of male violence, in how teachers define themselves as professionals and in how women seek to achieve influence in school decision-making. The family resemblances were even visible in how teachers experienced emotions like shame. However, despite the resemblances, what constituted appropriate relations between men and women was far from a settled matter, and one arena for the contest over gender roles revolved around what it meant to be a ‘professional’. There were noteworthy differences between teachers and students regarding how professional persons should behave, with young people less inclined to tolerate the excesses of male teachers.