Cultural Responsiveness

Culturally responsive pedagogy is described as “teaching to and through [students’] personal and cultural strengths, their intellectual capabilities, and their prior accomplishments” (Gay, 2010, as cited in Savage et al. 2011). For me, this describes the importance of ‘knowing your students’ and the relationship between students and teachers.

Elaborating on how this looks in the classroom for Māori learners, as described in the evaluative report (Savage et al, 2011) on the Ministry’s Te Kotahitanga programme being implemented in secondary schools, I see many links to ‘best practice’ pedagogies and ‘modern learning practices’ that are already in use, or being actively promoted – at least within my community of practice of primary school teachers. The examples of collaborative group work; student-led learning and inquiry; shared goal-setting; formative assessment with feedback/feedforward, and reflection are all reasonably commonplace (or expected to be and in my experience) in the modern primary school classroom. These practices are those of effective teachers and are valid for all students. Personally, I think the critical element is relationships and how we build connections with the students and their families in order for them to feel valued. This includes them feeling that both their tangible (language, arts, music) and intangible cultures (beliefs, values) are esteemed and that they have something worthwhile to share (funds of knowledge).

This connection has been described to me as ‘āhuru mōwai’ (‘feeling at home, at school’) – the idea that students and whānau feel as comfortable at school as they do in their own homes / communities and has been suggested as a reason why Māori learners are more successful in Kura Kaupapa than their counterparts in English-medium settings. Āhuru mōwai struck a particular chord with me as, when this idea was put to me, I had young children in an early childhood centre and I remembered that my choice of centre was based on that ‘felt homely’ feeling I got from the teachers and environment when I visited. I immediately reflected on what we were doing for our students to ‘generate’ this type of response. Interestingly (this was at my previous school that has a high % of diverse cultures), I could identify a particular group of students that this was probably true for – our Asian (predominantly Chinese and Korean) students and their families were very ‘at home’ at our school. I could attribute this to the very proactive teacher who held the ESOL portfolio and was also the liaison for these families. As well as teaching the students, this teacher supported these families settle in to the community, facilitated parent groups, held regular meetings to help them understand our school system, organized cultural events…and much more. To summarise – she developed relationships with all these families. This made me think – although I couldn’t work at that scale, I certainly reconsidered how I was building relationships with the students in my class. Yes, we certainly covered ‘culture’ at a school level with plenty of experiences and opportunities to celebrate our diversity, but I wanted to make sure I was also getting it right at a personal level too.

What am I doing now?...

I have timetabled ‘community sharing time’ each week, so we get to learn what is important to and about each other; I include a cultural aspect to the start of year unit; as well as students sharing, parents have also been in to share aspects of their culture; I have run a ‘Be the Teacher’ unit where all students had the opportunity to teach about a personal interest or talent, and in Discovery sessions (yes, still have them in year 4!), several students have led a workshop in an area of interest. Although these are small ideas (and there are others), I firmly believe they have made a significant difference to how well I know my learners – and this helps me to be more responsive to them individually.

As a school, we are also looking at how we can improve our engagement with whānau. I recently attended a workshop on this run by Dr Catherine Savage and John Leonard (ex-principal, Freeville School). Their workshop was based on effective communication with whānau and highlighted that the critical part of the process was around making connections – whakawhanaungatanga. Their method is based around the familiar pattern of pōwhiri – with the focus being on the greeting and relationship building first, before the ‘business’ of the meeting is discussed. The advice is that the more time spent on ‘whakawhanaungatanga’, the more successful the meeting is likely to be. We plan to share this learning to the staff as PLD, and we are also planning to use it as a framework for our parent meetings going forward e.g. we’re about to launch our ‘Curriculum over Coffee’ sessions for parents following this format.

I think the primary school setting lends itself easily to culturally responsive pedagogy – as teachers, we need to be making a concerted effort to build connections with our learners and their families.

References:

Savage, C., Hindle, R., Meyer, L., Hynds, A., Penetito, W. & Sleeter, C. (2011). Culturally responsive pedagogies in the classroom: indigenous student experiences across the curriculum .Asia-Pacific Journal of Teacher Education, 39(3), 183–198