Activity 7: Indigenous knowledge and cultural responsiveness in my practice:
What?:
Reading the definitions of cultural responsiveness from Gay (2001) Bishop (2012) and Milne (2017) I have come to the understanding that to be culturally responsive teachers need to use and integrate the experiences, cultural contexts and perspectives from their students into the curriculum and classroom. Teachers needs toachievement and challenge the "deficit thinking" about students achievement and raise their expectations for students and have the belief that they have the skills and knowledge to help EVERY child achieve. Teachers need to embrace students cultural identity in all curriculum learning activities, rather than just in Maori Language week or in Te Reo sessions once a week.
The two areas that I am going to focus on for discussion are:
- communication methods,
- planning and assessment,
So What?
Evaluate your practice or your school practice in light of one of the frameworks:
I have chosen the Action Continuum: from Anne Milne.
They asked for a facebook page which has now been created. We offered school wifi guest passes for whānau that did not have data to access the facebook page and to use seesaw to find out what learning the students are doing in class. We have set up a freecall 0508 number for the school so whānau with no credit can still communicate with the school. We make an effort to take away any barriers to communication for whānau. We use bulk texting to let whānau know about events in the school. We also held our prizegiving to the local marae in 2017.
Planning and Assessment: As a school I believe in this are we are still working in the purple area. We do have some teachers and teacher aids who are still holding deficit views of non-white learners. We have begun to challenge these people and we ran a staff meeting last year on Culture: Big C and little C: During this meeting deficit assumptions were made about our non-white learners from a few staff meetings and these were challenged but it showed us that those beliefs were held by some staff.
We are critiquing the assessments we are using in our school eg. Our trying to find cultural relevant mathematical tasks and looking for AsTtle writing tasks that all of our children have experienced but we are still working within whitestream thinking and expectations. We do plan an authentic curriculum (so this is in the Purple area) eg. This years theme is Identity. We know that Identity and Whakapaupa is so important. All our classes have started the year learning their Pepeha, and we have woven Ifdentity into all our inquiry topics this year.
Our challenge to move us further along the framework is to further examine our assessment tasks and ensure that these more culturally responsive.
Now what?
What can we do to improve our cultural responsiveness:
Communication: Continue to talk to whānau and remove barriers for good communication. We had our first prizegiving at the local marae last year and I would like to continue that relationships with local marae and iwi. Attend the poukai and continue to develop those relationships so that we can have authentic communication with whānau.
Planning and Assessment
This is an area that we need to continue to develop. We need to ensure that all of the inquiries that we plan are culturally responsive. We need to invite whanau into our planning days for our curriculum and take our planning out to the marae and our local iwi to find out what they can add to planning for our tamariki. Have we planned tuakana/teina inquiries? Do we have authentic collaborative and co-operative activities? We have created two collaborative spaces in our school. Te Waahi and Whare Manaaki. So we need to see how to ensure collaborative learning in our single cell classrooms.
We also need to look at our assessment tasks and ensure that these are culturally responsive. Do we have oral presentations as tasks rather than just written all of the time?.
How can we plan collaborative/peer assessment tasks?
References:
Edtalks.(2012, September 23). A culturally responsive pedagogy of relations. [video file].Retrieved from https://vimeo.com/49992994
Gay,G. (2002). Preparing for culturally responsive teaching. Journal of Teacher Education, 53(2),106-116.
Milne, A.(2017).Coloring in the white spaces: reclaiming cultural identity in whitestream schools. New York: Peter Lang Publishing, Inc.
Tina, you would not believe it but after reading your blog I realised we both chose teaching and assessment as an area that we need to develop and work on in our school! I even used the Asstle writing assessment as an example of an area that creates a deficit for our students!! So I'm guessing we are on the right track and it will be an area that we can look into for the benefit of our students who are quite capable of achieving well if they are given the opportunity to use their rich experiences within authentic real contexts. We need to colour some white spaces in our assessments but also in our teaching planning and practice. These will make good discussion starters as we plan for Term Three.
ReplyDeleteKia ora, Tina
ReplyDeleteWhen I was reading your post, I was particularly interested in communication. Reading your post reminded me of all of the ways that we have been building relationships with whanau (which is awesome) and I started thinking about another What Next? To this point our communication has been somewhat one-sided (our side) and we have often discussed how to increase whanau engagement and their feeling of being involved in the school. Communication is the key - so, maybe we need to think about how we move our hui etc out in to the community e.g. the marae, rugby league club. We had such a great turn out at our prize-giving at the marae, it may now be time to organise hui in a place that our whanau know and feel safe/comfortable, so that they are more willing to share their hopes and goals for their tamariki and for the iwi.