Activity 13: Indigenous Knowledge and Culturally Responsive Pedagogy

Create a blog post where you share your own views on your indigenous knowledge and culturally responsive pedagogy you have implemented appropriate to your student community.

Culture is not exclusive to race and/or ethnicity. It also refers to the unique features of a community - its demographic makeup, including location, gender, language, local history and economics. Societies are becoming more culturally diverse as people become more mobile through relocation or being dislocated from their social groups as a result of war, employment, natural or environmental disasters.

Auckland is one of the most multicultural cities in the world, part of the reason why I love living and teaching in this city! With over 200 ethnic groups living in Auckland, all teachers must ensure that their pedagogy is culturally responsive.

The role of education in New Zealand is to nurture and support every child to achieve educational success. Doing so will have positive flow on effects in our society and benefits for our economy in the long term.

Unfortunately, not all students are achieving the success that they are capable of as their needs are not being catered for. This lack of success not only impacts on the students themselves, but also their families, wider communities and New Zealand.

We must know our learners - who they are and how they learn best.

We know Māori students do much better when education reflects and values their identity, language and culture. There are 2 key factors that need to exist in order for Maori students to achieve their full academic potential:

Figure 1: Critical Factors to improving Maori students achievement (Ministry of Education, 2013)

Teachers are the key to making the difference in academic success. We need to be able to:

• have access to professional development and the time to undertake it
• actively engage with indigenous (Maori) students and their whanau,
• seek out resources and support
• care for Maori students as Maori
• care for the performance of our Maori students and have high (and realistic) expectations for them
• consider classroom management and pedagogy
• have interactions with Maori that allows for feedback/feedforward and co-constructed learning
• use different strategies effectively (eg: tuakana-teina, a combination of oral and visual presentation, integrating curriculum areas with the arts...)
• be responsive to our students needs and use evidence to inform our teaching
• and weave together a learning context that is appropriate for Maori, so that their level of engagement is increased and attendance is improved.

Much of this pedagogy can also be applied to other cultural groups. If teachers are doing this, they are being culturally responsive, and as a result, are helping to set Maori (and students from other cultural backgrounds) up for academic success.

My personal belief is that if you are not culturally responsive, then you are doing your students, and the profession, a disservice.

References:

     ED Talks (2009) A culturally responsive pedagogy of relations, [Video]. Retrieved from http://www.edtalks.org/video/culturally-responsive-pedagogy-relations 

     Ministry of Education. (2013). Ka Hikitia Accelerating Success 2013-2017. Wellington: New Zealand. Retrieved from http://www.education.govt.nz/assets/Documents/Ministry/Strategies-and-policies/Ka-Hikitia/KaHikitiaAcceleratingSuccessEnglish.pdf 

    Tapaleao, V. (2014) Auckland now more diverse than London. The New Zealand Herald.  Retrieved from http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=11213317