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

A Broader Professional Context

Teaching is my ‘second career’, my first being a successful decade in the financial services industry. I qualified in mid-2010 in the midst of the bedding in of the new curriculum (2007) and the introduction of National Standards (2011). (On a side note, it was the publication of the NZ Curriculum (2007) that attracted me to teaching – I saw it as an exciting and relevant document, and I still do). Since that point, change has been continuous – in ideas of best practice, pedagogies, environments, technologies and much more.

The literature and media seemingly agree that this rate of change is going to continue increasing, and our challenge as educators is to manage it as best we can.

The NMC Horizon Report (Johnson et al., 2015) discusses 6 key trends in education over the next 5 years. The 2 major long-term trends highlighted are ‘Rethinking How Schools Work’ (innovative learning practices, flexible models and schedules) and ‘Deeper Learning Approaches’ (problem and challenge-based learning, inquiry approaches to foster ‘active learning’).

I believe that our curriculum in New Zealand, in particular the vision, the values and the key competencies, allows us to respond to these trends, however, it is not happening consistently across schools. In fact, ERO identified in their Evaluation at a Glance report of priority learners in 2012 that “considerable work needs to happen before primary and secondary teachers and leaders understand the permissive nature and intent of The New Zealand Curriculum, and implement responsive curricula in their schools”.

The NMC Horizon Report describes the ‘Deeper Learning Approaches’ as those that have “rich content delivered in ways that allow students to learn and then apply their learning”. As well as content, skills for collaboration, problem solving and communication are essential. These link to Michael Fullan’s ‘New Pedagogies for Deep Learning’ and the ‘Deep Learning Competencies’ (The 6 Cs of 21st Century Education) – Creativity, Communication, Citizenship, Critical Thinking, Character, Collaboration.

I see clear connections between these ideas and our NZ Curriculum. And I think many schools probably already have versions of these embedded within their own school vision statements and values. However, I think one of our biggest challenges with the curriculum’s effective implementation, and the realisation of its vision, is the seemingly conflicting purpose of National Standards. Assessing ‘competencies’ as well as, or instead of, a set of skills, doesn’t seem to be accounted for in current assessment schedules (at least in my experience). We ‘talk’ about our values and key competencies in schools, but do we demonstrate their importance through our assessment and reporting practices? Or do we focus on our National Standards results? I worry that this will only worsen as accountability increases.

This is very pertinent to me currently, as we are looking at our values as a school and how they align with the ‘6 Cs’ – and the conversation keeps coming back to how we are going to promote these, and assess these, to underscore their importance for future-focused learners. Watch this space!

In some respects, perhaps our NZ Curriculum document can be seen as ahead of its time, as it also promotes inquiry-based learning as an effective pedagogy. This is discussed as one of the innovative learning approaches in the trend of ‘Rethinking How Schools Work’. This trend is around the idea that inquiry and project-based learning, seen as promoting integration and providing authentic learning experiences, require flexibility around timetabling and space. They also call for the creative use of technology and resources (teachers?!).

I’m currently working in a large ‘modern learning environment’ where we, as teachers, and the students are still developing ‘what works for us’. I can personally see a number of benefits as well as challenges with these practices and environments –

Local wonderings...

Benefits –

·       Supports socially-constructed learning

·      Encourages use of technology / alternative learning approaches

·      Promotes self-regulation - offers options for personalised learning, differentiation

Challenges –

·       Parents can find new spaces confusing / confronting

·      Students are not learning how to be independent (co-dependence)

·      Needs to be a change of pedagogy to use spaces successfully

National wonderings...

·      Teacher education - what training is being offered around teaching in these new spaces / using modern learning practices?

·      Financing technology / ‘new spaces’ & furniture etc. – who’s paying, what are we not getting instead?

International wonderings...

·      Cultural expectations of schooling

·      International testing results - PISA / OECD etc. - are these changes to our practices impacting results (is what is being assessed changing in line with these ‘desirable’ competencies that we are now teaching)?

As I reflect back on these key trends, I'm fascinated to think how they might actually look, in practice, in 5 years time!

References

Department of Education and Early Childhood Development. (n.d.). New Pedagogies for Deep Learning. Victoria. Australia.

Education Review Office. (2012). Evaluation at a Glance: Priority Learners in New Zealand Schools - Education Review Office. 

Johnson, L., Adams Becker, S., Estrada, V., and Freeman, A. (2015). NMC Horizon Report: 2015 K-12 Edition. Austin, Texas: The New Media Consortium.

Ministry of Education. (2007). The New Zealand Curriculum: for English-medium teaching and learning in years 1-13. Wellington, New Zealand: Author.