Tēnā koe, Mālō e lelei, my name is Jasmine Kaulamatoa (Hall). I am a Tongan/Pālangi researcher, a daughter of the Moana, born in Aotearoa and raised by my parents and grandparents. My kāinga hail from the villages of Niutoua, Tongatapu, home to the Ha’amonga Trilithon, and Ta’anea in the beautiful Vava’u island group, and beyond.

I am currently a Postdoctoral Fellow in the School of Education at Te Herenga Waka Victoria University of Wellington, supervised by Dr. Ali Glasgow and Dr. Robin Averill. I come from the School of Mathematics and Statistics, where I was an Assistant Lecturer with a focus on improving engagement and achievement for Māori and Pacific students. I have recently completed my PhD in pure mathematics under the supervision of Geoff Whittle. Though this research is in pure maths, it is motivated by problems in a range of non-mathematical areas, with the original inspiration for my work being problems in image recognition and wanting to understand connections between mathematics and art. So, why the move to education? Though I am not a qualified teacher, teaching has always been a passion of mine, one which was passed on to me by my grandparents who were both teachers in Niutoua. Before tutoring and lecturing maths, I was a music teacher for many years. It is my own negative experiences in learning mathematics which ignited my passion for maths communication, particularly for Pacific learners. Despite the deep understanding of mathematics which runs in the blood of all Pacific peoples, we are severely underrepresented in maths and more widely in STEM. Working with my kāinga to bridge this equity gap is the motivation for all that I do.

On a personal level, I understand the disconnect that many Pacific students (and many students in general) feel between themselves and mathematics. Growing up, my passions lay firmly in the arts – in the ways of communicating and storytelling that spoke most naturally to me. Like many Pacific peoples, I was disengaged with mathematics and the ways in which it was presented to me in school. I came to university to study music, but was fortunate to try a paper in discrete mathematics, which opened my eyes to the beauty of maths, allowing me to experience first-hand its storytelling, which I learned to be equally as captivating and meaningful as the other artforms I held close. I feel so fortunate to have had the opportunity to see that at its essence, mathematics is an artform. This is something I try to share with as many people as I can. Over the years, I have been involved in numerous outreach programmes in the community and in schools, which have focussed on sharing the power and beauty of maths in engaging and relevant ways. More recently in 2019, I was grateful to be awarded the Bevan Werry Speaker Position by the New Zealand Association of Maths Teachers, which allowed me to expand my outreach to schools across the motu.

My current research focusses on creating and trialling a maths outreach programme for Pacific learners, created from a Pacific lens. It will be a holistic approach to mathematics, in which I hope to collaborate with Pacific peoples from a variety of disciplines to create a programme that speaks to our Pacific brothers and sisters, a programme in which they see themselves as part of mathematics. I hope that this work will contribute to the much needed de-colonization and re-indigenisation of the communication of mathematics. I will also continue my research in pure maths, alongside more general research in the Pacific space.