Week 31 - Cultural Responsiveness.

Week 31 - Cultural Responsiveness.

This weeks mission is to demonstrate my critical understanding of indigenous knowledge and cultural responsiveness. Then, I will critically evaluate how my practice or school’s practice has been informed by indigenous knowledge and culturally responsive pedagogy in a couple of areas. I will be using a reflective model from Rolfe et al. (2001).

Step 1 - What? What is my understanding of indigenous knowledge and cultural responsiveness and the two areas that I want to focus on for discussion?

I found that Gay (2010) defines culturally responsive pedagogy as teaching to and through students’ personal and cultural strengths, their intellectual capabilities, and their prior accomplishments. This is achieved through close interactions among ethnic identity, cultural background, and student achievement.

I found that these ideas were similar to the teacher development initiative Te Kotahitanga that captured key Māori whanau narratives. These narratives identified classroom caring and learning relationships being at the centre of educational achievement for Māori. Therefore the success of this initiative success was based around teachers actively rejecting explicit deficit theorising to instead assume agency (Savage, et. al., 2011).

The two areas of practice that I would like to discuss in terms of being culturally responsive are planning and assessment and school-wide activities.

Step 2 - So What? What does culturally responsive practice look like?

Russell Bishop in his Tedtalk (2012) outlines 6 key principles for being a culturally responsive teacher:

• Caring for Maori students as Maori on a daily basis.
• Caring for their performance and having high expectations.
• Manage classrooms, and the pedagogy promotes the following element.
• Interactions with Maori that provide academic feedback and feedforward and negotiated co-construction of learning. Learners amongst learners is the prevailing phenomenon. 
• Effectively use a range of strategies. 
• Use evidence of student performance to guide teaching and students also know this and are involved.

It is all about being relationship centered (caring and learning relationships). A culturally responsive pedagogy is based on relations.

Dr Ann Milne, CORE Education (2017), provides a culturally sustaining pedagogy continuum that I will use to reflect on the two areas of planning and assessment and school-wide activities. The continuum starts with having no awareness or paying lip-service to cultural aspects, through to the middle where we might make token attempts or limited changes. At the optimal end of the scale we would be aiming for taking action to normalise ‘being authentically Maori’.



In terms of our school-wide activities I think our school has taken a very proactive approach as a relationship centered school, our school culture is very supportive and encouraging of teachers to be culturally responsive. Our timetable is essentially optional (apart from having to take an English and Math Module each semester), so there is a lot of agency for our learners and we have a strong Learning Advisory programme that helps to build supportive relationships between our teachers and students. We also integrate curriculum, are very aware of using Universal Design for Learning strategies and often co-construct learning. We also have a great relationship with our local IWI and this has influenced many school wide activities and decisions ranging from how our cobble stones have been laid to the naming of our learning communities and spaces.

In terms of how we as teachers at this school personally plan and assess learning I think I like many teachers have room for improvement and I would put myself more in the middle of the continuum, I think primarily due to my lack of a deep understanding of Māori culture as this has not really been part of my worldview growing up with parents who are from Switzerland. Despite being very openminded and growing up in NZ I still have much to learn due to having a very european upbringing.

Therefore, despite our school environment being setup to be culturally responsive I feel like I often personally drop the ball. My knowledge and confidence with Māori Language and Kaupapa is not great, we have these beautiful Māori names, however, I’m often not confident with using them and I lack a real authentic understanding of the terms and concepts. I know I have more to learn in this area. What am I really doing to improve in this aspect of my practice? This course is a good step in the right direction in developing my self-awareness of this issue.

Step 3 - Now What? What can we do to move up the continuum?

I think I do personally need to focus on this area more and I could do this by formally reflecting and setting myself some practical goals based on some of the key Effective Teacher Profile Elements identified in the Te Kotahitanga initiative. I could start by using more Te Reo Māori and exploring relevant Māori culture within my classes rather than shy away because I lack confidence. I realise I default to a very European worldview and to move up the continue I must take more explicit action to develop a deeper understanding of Kaupapa Māori. Being a student centered school maybe I could also ramp up and expand the ways in which I am trying to connect and learn with Māori students in my classes in order to gain a better understanding of being Māori. I could simply start by spending more quality time getting to know my Māori students to gain a better understanding of this world view, the strengths and treasure this uniqueness, therefore, actively working together to reject Māori deficit theorising.

References

CORE Education.(2017, 17 October). Dr Ann Milne, Colouring in the white spaces: Reclaiming cultural identity in whitestream schools.[video file]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5cTvi5qxqp4&feature=em-subs_digest

Edtalks.(2012). A culturally responsive pedagogy of relations. Retrieved from https://vimeo.com/49992994

Gay, G. (2010). Culturally responsive teaching (2nd ed.). New York: Teachers College Press.

Rolfe et al. (2001). Reflective Model. Retrieved from https://my.cumbria.ac.uk/media/MyCumbria/Documents/ReflectiveModelRolfe.pdf

Savage,C, Hindleb, R., Meyerc,L., Hyndsa,A., Penetitob, W. & Sleeterd, C.(2011) Culturally responsive pedagogies in the classroom: indigenous student experiences across the curriculum .Asia-Pacific Journal of Teacher Education, 39(3), 183–198: (Available to download from Unitec Library)