Indigenous Knowledge and Cultural Responsiveness in my Practice

Indigenous Knowledge and Cultural Responsiveness in my Practice

(Activity 4, Week 28)

‘Education is being about caring that they learn and it is about creating learning relationships so that they are able to learn.’ (Russell Bishop)

Great teachers foster and maintain a safe and inclusive environment for all students.  This means taking the time to get to know the students and their whanau.  This extends beyond what is obvious; embracing their culture, norms, expectations of whanau, beliefs, feelings, opinions and values.  Culture can be visible or invisible and it’s important not make assumptions.  Students respond best when they feel the teacher knows them and is willing to learn from them.  Classrooms and schools need to be responsive to difference in cultures.  This can be done by celebrating events like Diwali and reading stories about other cultures.

How does my school ensure its vision, mission and core values reflect cultural responsiveness?

Our vision is Ready, willing, able to learn together.  We are a community based, semi rural school and this is reflected in our approach to education.  We consider the whole child, and endeavour to provide a rich programme of learning that considers the whole child - physically, emotionally, intellectually.  We ask the children at the beginning of every year what their special interests are and term reflections have an element of student voice planning learning for the following term.  We have an open door policy and actively encourage community participation.  Maori students make up 10% of our school, there are 2% English and the rest are pakeha students.  We have a whanau hui every year and are guided by Taumutu iwi on our curriculum.  We have strong partnerships between the community, school and local marae.  We have parent expertise that we draw on regularly.

How do you plan activities and lessons to support diverse cultural backgrounds and languages?

We embody our school vision of learning together, we know this supports not just Maori students but also our 11% of dyslexic students prefer to learn this way.  This works with our staff as well, we have 3 teams of 2 teachers collaborating together.  We actively teach 21st century skills of collaboration, communication using digital technologies.  We have an active timely system of feedback from teachers and peers and reflect on our ability to act on feedback.  We provide one day school for our gifted students and acceleration programmes as well.  We have an hour of kapa haka from a specialist every week, have whanau hui and hangi annually.  We have a Te Reo coordinator whos job is to upskill the staff’s Te Reo, we have a phrase/word of the week and we are encouraged to use as much Te Reo as we can.  This is based on feedback from Maori students.

REFERENCES

Bishop, R., A Culturally Responsive Pedagogy of Relations. (Edtalks, Mindlab)                    Introduction to Culturally Relevant Pedagogy (Mindlab video)                                                    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.