Week 31 - Indigenous Knowledge and Cultural Responsiveness in my Practice.

Week 31  – Indigenous Knowledge and Cultural Responsiveness in my Practice

Activity 7:

For this reflective Blog, I will be examining my understanding of Indigenous Knowledge and Cultural Responsiveness. I will also relate my understanding of the topic of how it is catered for within our school practices. I will also reflect on how Identity will help to raise student achievement in our Indigenous students? I will be using the Rolfe et al.'s (2001) reflective model to guide me in my reflective blog.

What?

I am a migrant to NZ. I come from a country where we as “non-white people," was subjected to decades of apartheid and oppression. Our schooling set and the educational curriculum was structured so that we were divorced of any true identity. Our educational system was very rigid and it was designed to stop us from celebrating our heritage and cultural diversity.

Moving to New Zealand 15 years ago, I have taught in 2 intermediate schools to date. The ethnic composition In both these schools had a very high percentage of Maori and Pacifika students. My first experience at teaching in New Zealand was an eye-opener and a foreign experience to see how policies and expectations are implemented to cater for the educational upliftment and acceleration of our Indigenous students.

At my current school, we have 3 school expectations, which is explicitly taught to our students:

1.     Respect for Others

2.     Care for the environment

3.     Pride in ourselves

The respect for our cultural diversity, heritage, and religious tolerance is part of our daily teaching practice at our school.

So, What?

Although we are a school with a high percentage of Maori and Pacifika students, we also have a healthy Indian and Asian population of students. To me personally, I somehow feel that the focus is so heavily in favor of improving Maori and Pacific student achievement, that we tend to forget about the needs of our minority ethnicities. Most of the programmes we have in place to improve student achievement are strongly focused on benefiting Maori and Pacifika students. The landscape of New Zealand is changing rapidly and there is so much diversity and I think we need policies in place to reflect and support this diversity and identity.

There is no doubt that our indigenous learners, at my school, are well supported. We have many programmes in place to recognize specific target students and implement an accelerated programme to raise learning achievements. The learning progression is tracked, analyzed and presented to our Board of Trustee. The Board, with guidance from our senior management team, provides additional funding to support these initiatives.

At the Hui and Fono evening, Maori and Pacifika Whanau are invited to talk about their children's learning. This is a yearly event with a specific focus on sharing achievement data and linking this with the Learning Vision of our school. For 2018, the focus was on the Area of Identity.

·      How does identity relate to success?

·      How is identity reflected in our school?

·      What does identity look like?

·      What does identity mean to you?

As a school, we believe that Identity is a very important concept for our students to understand. Identity provides our students with a sense of purpose and this allows them to reflect on where they come from and where they want to be in the future.

What next?

One of the visions of our school is to teach through collaboration and engagement with all Stakeholders, that being the teacher, student, and whanau. Bishop (2009) speaks about the key to making a difference and achieving success with Maori students is agentic teachers, which supports the vision of our school in teaching through collaboration. I believe that although we have all these programmes and interventions to support and uplift the achievement success of our Maori and Pacifika students, the achievement data, when analyzed, says that we need to do more.

In our recent Hui and Fono evening, the turn out of our whanau was very poor. Why is this happening? Why is our whanau not showing a greater level of support and involvement in the learning of their children? These are concerning questions, that we as a school need to address. Strategies around the marketing and promotion of these evenings need to be revisited and openly discussed so that changes could be implemented. With these changes, we are hoping that there will be greater interest and participation in these events.

The upliftment and cultural responsiveness of our Maori and Pacifika students is the responsibility of both the school and whanau. There is no doubt that has a school we try our very best to celebrate our diversity. Cultural concerts, open evenings to celebrate the learning of all our students and cultural dress-up days are important events that showcase our diversity and it helps to develop respect and tolerance. The school is then viewed as an inclusive institution that values our diversity.

Reference:

·       Bishop, R., Berryman, M., Cavanagh, T. & Teddy, L. (2009).Te Kotahitanga: Addressing educational disparities facing Māori students in New Zealand. Teaching and Teacher Education, 25(5),734–742.

·       The Ministry of Education. (2014). Beyond the Classroom: Homeschool
Partnerships. Retrieved from
http://elearning.tki.org.nz/Beyond-the-classroom/Engaging-

·       Pakuranga Intermediate School – Principals report – Hui and Fono Review 2018.