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Applied Practice in Context Week 4

Indigenous Knowledge and Cultural Responsiveness in my Practice






I personally am in the advanced years of my teacher practice. I know as a new teacher exposed to cultures that I had little or no knowledge of, and a pedagogy of the time that did not define collaborative or cooperative teaching, I was part of the sense of “blame” that was generated around historical colonialism was a societal concept that had been around for thousands of years. However, there was transition happening, family moves saw me interacting in different communities to the background of my early years. A large extended family who embraced inter cultural marriages,but had a lack of knowledge of their backgrounds saw a search for links in the family tree, a journey offshore to trace my own cultural history and the impact individuals decisions had on that history. Going to places where I could sense an incredibly strong sense of belonging and understanding of self, opened my receptiveness to those same feelings in those I came back to work with. I had the catalyst to move from deficit to problem solving thinking, to have the PLD to grow the capacity to be culturally responsive.
Culturally we have, in NZ created a pattern of students who were then ill-prepared for and unable to engage in classrooms where they did not have a sense of belonging and teachers not readied to respond to the diversity of these students.

We had to let our students regain their cultural identity, research showed that what was paramount was  the level and type of engagement occurring between student and teacher. Mahuika, Berryman and Bishop (ERO, 2012) relate to students as ‘partners in learning’ and making learning transparent – knowing and understanding the ‘why’ and ‘what’ gives good reason to ‘do’.  Part of this process is to enable students into becoming life-long connected learners by embedding essential skills-sets as identified in the New Zealand Curriculum document into our classroom programme and curriculum: the Values, Key Competencies and the Principles.
As Bishop,Berryman and Weymouth describe in “Te Kotahitanga”  A teacher who cares, nurtures and supports their students and is highly engaging, is bound to capture the aspirations of a student who believes their teacher is interested in them and their well-being, teachers who have agency, who understand themselves to be able to weave together all those things necessary in classrooms to create a context, a learning context where young Maori people can bring themselves to the learning conversation.”  The student’s own experiences, cultural understandings and where students can make sense of the world is part of the process of a learning conversation and this is the same for non-Maori students.  All students need to have an active part in their learning.





As a new school we are working hard to  improving the competency of our teaching practice, our pedagogy and how we support student learning. We have worked with the community to establish a vision , mission statement and core values that has been culturally responsive to the community. Our working party provide feedback on decisions and offer feed forward. Our vision is visible on walls, windows and within the playground, our identity is embedded on buildings and pathways.Our buildings are named to respond to our community consultation..



By looking at our assessment data we moved the curriculum to learning academies for senior students, where we were then better able to ensure that our curriculum was responsive and rich, plus appropriate to the needs of our community. We still are developing our student-centred learning and practice. Our core values of MANA are being embedded. Staff cultural PLD is supported by our Cultural Leader.
We are on a rich journey.MANA.PNG
















References:

Bishop, R. (2012).  A culturally responsive pedagogy of relations [video file].  Edtalks. Retrieved from https://vimeo.com/49992994



Savage, C., Hindleb, R., Meyerc, L., Hyndsa, A., Penetitob, W & Sleeterd, C. (2001).  Culturally responsive pedagogies in the classroom:  indigenous student experiences across the curriculum. Asia-Pacific Journal of Teacher Education, 39(3), 183-190



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