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.

The southern, Weather Coast of Guadalcanal, Solomon Islands, is a challenging place to run a school. The region's local name, Tasi Mauri, means ‘rough sea’, but staff and students deal with more than large ocean swells. Along most of the 145 km of coastline high rain-forested mountains rise steeply from a narrow strip of beach (Allen, 2013, pp 105–9). Rainfall can reach up to 8,000 mm a year, especially when the trade winds blow from the southeast between January and September, causing landslides and floods (Kastom Gaden Association, 2005, p 10). Cyclone season runs from January to April, and the area is prone to earthquakes. Food gardens are at risk of being washed away, and periodic food shortages leave people reliant on wild vegetables, sago palm and coconut. Transport to, from and around the Weather Coast is notoriously difficult because there are no safe places for large boats to harbour, and travel by small boats can be perilous. There were no functioning roads or airstrips when I visited in 2015. Mobile phone reception was negligible for the few individuals able to charge their phones with small solar panels.

Then there is the severity of the Weather Coast's experience of the civil conflict, which Solomon Islanders call ‘the Tension’ (1998–2003). People from the Weather Coast make up a sizeable chunk of Guadalcanal's rural Indigenous population were an a significant proportion of the Guadalcanal militancy that fought on the northern side of the island on the outskirts of the capital, Honiara. As the conflict wore on it devolved into increasingly localised conflict, on the Weather Coast and elsewhere, characterised by cycles of payback violence and revenge (Kabutaulaka, 2002b, p 28). In fact, people on the Weather Coast distinguish between the Tension itself and a Weather Coast Tension. The latter saw communities divided by fighting between factions of former militant leaders as villagers suffered cruelly in the crossfire (Allen, 2013, pp 51–3). When the fighting eventually ended and people had the chance to rebuild their lives, they found themselves in circumstances familiar to people in post-civil conflict contexts the world over: surrounded by ‘intimate enemies’ (Theidon, 2013).

I became an interpretivist as I wrote this book, which is a confession I often imagine would disappoint the authors of some of the resources I drew on to design my research methodology (see Hatch, 2002, p 12). To say that I am an interpretivist is to make a claim about the assumptions I make about the nature of the social world we all inhabit. Specifically, I think that each individual sees the world in their own unique way, informed by their own personal experiences and history (Hatch, 2002, p 15; Schwartz-Shea and Yanow, 2012; Bevir and Blakely, 2018). In my view, social reality is the manifestation of the meanings of the people who created it (Bevir and Blakely, 2018, p 19). It follows that understanding social reality requires interpreting the meanings behind the actions of historical actors rather than the discovery of natural laws. Thus in this book I am interested fundamentally in the ‘culturally derived and historically situated’ (Crotty, 2009, p 67) meaning that Bougainvilleans and Solomon Islanders attribute to their post-conflict schooling experiences.

To say that I became an interpretivist is to say that I once made different assumptions about social reality, assumptions which were much closer to positivism. That shift leaves open the possibility of a logical misalignment between my theoretical claims about transitional justice and schooling in Bougainville and Solomon Islands and the project design, methods and analysis of the data. As I read years ago, I am risking the production of research ‘that flies in the face of theoretical integrity’ (Hatch, 2002, p 12). My reply is that for most of the ten years it took to write this book I was a student. To have settled on propositions about the social world before I embarked on the research would dismiss several years of my own learning. Doing that would not give due credit to the Solomon Islanders and Bougainvilleans whose views, insights and lessons have shaped how I see the world and the contribution I hope this book makes.

I would add that from within interpretivist research the acknowledgement that I am one of the historical actors involved in producing the research demands ongoing interrogation of how my background and assumptions have influenced the many decisions I made as I designed, conducted and wrote it.

This volume of the Bristol Studies in Comparative and International Education focuses upon the Southwestern Pacific contexts of Bougainville (an Autonomous Region of Papua New Guinea) and the independent nation of Solomon Islands. Little in-depth and comparative material on this region is available in the international literature so we are pleased to support this original, challenging and timely work by David Oakeshott from the Department of Pacific Affairs at The Australian National University. This thoroughly researched and well-informed study documents how both societies have recently experienced a period of protracted conflict from which they are now pursuing reconstruction, reconciliation and recovery. The doctoral research upon which the book draws explores the ‘interrelationships between education, conflict and peace’ through multi-site ethnographic research in five secondary schools, informed by critical engagement with the contemporary international literature on transitional justice.

Readers worldwide, and from Oceania in particular, will find much of methodological, theoretical and substantive interest in this scholarly work that makes significant contributions to the critique and advancement of current approaches and strategies for education for transitional justice. As the author argues with some conviction:

This openness to learning from the cultures, research participants and ‘lived experience’ of the Southwestern Pacific is a distinctive strength that runs throughout the volume and one that fits the rationale for our Bristol University Press series so well with its focus upon ‘social, environmental and epistemic justice’. Helpful concepts that generate insightful analyses, with potential for others engaged in the processes of transitional justice beyond the Pacific, include ‘ethnographic refusal’, the ‘anthropology of silence’ and, as in the title for the book, ‘enemy friends’. This is an interdisciplinary book that is ‘interpretivist’ in nature, comparative in spirit, convincingly argued and inspired by a combination of critical reflexivity and locally generated insights.

Bougainvilleans and Solomon Islanders have convinced me that the combination of place-based justice, the everyday and cultural production are useful tools for transitional justice. Together, these concepts have helped me understand what justice looks like to the people concerned, how it is enacted in the habits and routines of daily life, and to appreciate the meanings attached to those seemingly banal practices. In the introduction to this book I wrote about travelling to a graduation ceremony at Weather Coast Primary School and how differently my friend Dominic and I interpreted the celebration; whereas I had paid attention to the laughter and happiness, he focused on what he thought had been missing since the Tension.

The conceptual tools have helped me make sense of what we saw. For a start I can see the significance to people of coming together for graduation feasts. Indeed, sometimes even disentangling practices can be a success simply because coming together recognises the relationship between the parties (White and Watson Gegeo, 1990, p 10). At the schools, the assembly of different people and the resources they used to prepare feasts were acknowledgements of existing relationships, and the school and the education of their children were the reasons for communities to gather. Similarly, when I returned to Tenaru from Avuavu Provincial Secondary School close to the end of the school year, I simply lost track of the farewell parties going on around me: seemingly every team or club held one as the school wound down. In fact, in Bougainville even the staff and students of Mabiri High School in 2015, the year before my arrival, held a graduation feast in spite of the fact that the school had completely fractured into camps that supported one of two conflicting individuals. The conflict had seemingly prevented the school from functioning. By the time I arrived the incident had been resolved administratively; the Marist Brothers order had removed one of the men and the faction that supported him. But teachers and students were near unanimous in the view that reconciliation must happen, and the Catholic Education Office had been mediating.

Before I arrived in Solomon Islands in 2015 the national government, through its Ministry of Education and Human Resources Development (MEHRD) and Ministry of National Unity, Reconciliation and Peace (MNURP), had directed schools in Honiara to implement flag raising and lowering ceremonies each morning and afternoon (SIBC, 2014; 2015; Alu, 2015). In doing so MNURP was implementing (with help from the Solomon Islands Scouts Association and United Nations Development Programme) part of the first objective of its peace building policy: to ‘improve conflict prevention and management capacities’ (MNURP, nd, p 22). Raising the national flag and singing the anthem was one of the indicators of national pride and citizenship, the policy said. Over the course of second semester that year, MNURP conducted training sessions in the technique of flag raising and distributed 100 flags to schools in Honiara, Guadalcanal and Malaita. The national narrative that the state wanted young people to adopt was one of ‘unity in diversity’ (Hicks, 2022, p 122). That narrative also had a home in official state policy, specifically in the first learning outcome (culture promotion) of the Solomon Islands National Curriculum Statement for the entire school curriculum (MEHRD, 2012, p 23). Unity in diversity had even made it into the Grade 7 social studies textbook, which spelled out the characteristics that Solomon Islanders shared and walked students through activities intended to contrast those ways of life to those of Europeans (SICDD, 2012, p 40).

There is no real surprise to the state's effort to instil national pride around a unifying national narrative. These narratives are how states try to transmit values and ideas that bind people together, sometimes to the exclusion of others within the territory, but always in a way that legitimises the existence of the state (S. Foster and Crawford, 2006, pp 5–7). Indeed schooling might be the only time some citizens ever read a book about society and politics (their textbooks), which, moreover, students typically read as authoritative and factual accounts (Ide, Kirchheimer and Bentrovato, 2018, p 288). For a post-conflict state committed to peace, an inclusive national narrative that brought formerly warring sides together would be a chance for it to demonstrate that it had expunged the biases it might once have held.

This chapter is set within the activities the boarding schools used to draw explicit attention to cultural difference among students. This is a remarkable context from the point of view of international comparative literature, which shows strong links between schooling and the outbreak and recurrence of conflict (Smith, 2010; King, 2014; Bellino and Williams, 2017, p 3). Group identities, like those I discuss here, often appear to be threats to peace because protagonists on both sides consider their identities fundamentally antagonistic and their differences insurmountable, making the conflicts between them intractable (Tint, 2010; E. Cole and Murphy, 2011, p 338). Nor is there much evidence in the comparative literature to suggest that schooling can cut through those divisions to promote peace (Harber, 2019). As a teacher of an integrated classroom in Bosnia-Herzegovina told Briony Jones (2012, p 145), the teacher's classroom was ‘a bomb of hatred which is about to explode.’

Even from a Bougainville and Solomon Islands centric perspective drawing attention to difference entailed some risk. As I show, it forced students into dialogue about three topics of frequent debate, controversy and even conflict in wider society. The first of these topics is wantokism. Wantok literally means ‘one talk’ and thus to call somebody a wantok is to recognise a measure of solidarity and obligation to them based on common language. One's wantoks are context dependent; wantok can refer to a person's immediate kin when they are in a village, to people of the same language or island when in multicultural urban areas, or other nationals as people travel abroad (Brigg, 2009, p 153). People thus use wantokism to build society and social support in unfamiliar surroundings (Schram, 2015, p 6). As I will describe, when that support revolves around island, region or province of origin it can lead to the reification of others around stereotypes of other groups (see Schram, 2015, pp 16–7). In these contexts wantokism has become the source of accusations of favouritism and corruption. On the other hand, however, wantokism is also a contemporary social institution with traces of the willingness and enthusiasm of people to create relationships and social obligations to each other through ordinary practices of sharing and exchange (Schram, 2015, p 4; see Chapter 2).

In this chapter I ask to what extent the boarding schools had the power to shape thought and action and, relatedly, what capacity individuals had to subvert that power. There are several ways to look at this question, but generally they revolve around how school orients individuals towards the formal sector and the life it promises (Hicks, McDougall and Oakeshott, 2021). Pacific Islanders who went to school during the colonial era or the early independence period have written that their schooling left them alienated from life in and knowledge from home (Educational Policy Review Committee, 1973; Bugotu, 1975; Watson-Gegeo and Gegeo, 1992; Sanga and Niroa, 2004, 15). Other observers have described how foreigners, in designing the education systems of Papua New Guinea (PNG) and Solomon Islands, first directed formal schooling towards Christianisation and then subsequently to formal employment for an elite few (Laracy, 1976, pp 144–57; Fife, 1995; 2001; Demerath, 2000; Maebuta, 2008). The focus on elite education in turn connected schooling to the emergence of class distinctions between that ‘educated elite’ and their ‘grassroots’ kin in the village (Bugotu, 1975, p 79; Fife, 1995; Gooberman-Hill, 1999; Cox, 2018, pp 151–3). Still more research concerns the implementation (and critique) of education policy reform and its compliance with international agreements and priorities surrounding quality, access and management (see Le Fanu, 2013; Thaman, 2015; Eldridge et al, 2018; Tracey et al, 2021), which are believed to contribute to economic growth (Tolley and Coxon, 2015).

One prominent means to investigate the power formal schooling exerts has been to simultaneously take inspiration and depart from Foucault's early work (Foucault, 1977; see de Certeau, 1984). In PNG, evidence from Adam Reed (2006) and Alice Street (2012), who wrote about Bomana prison and Madang's public hospital, respectively, have demonstrated persuasively the challenges of a straightforward application of Foucault's analytical concepts in Melanesia (see also Hirsch, 2014). Thus, analysing the way schools act as disciplinary technologies on students and teachers is only half the task, The ‘everyday’ as de Certeau defined it then becomes a useful guide because it was aimed at elucidating the tactics individuals use to subvert the institutions trying to discipline thought and action.