Activity Four - Indigenous Knowledge and Cultural Responsibility
Indigenous Knowledge and Cultural Responsibility in My Practise
“E raka te maui, e raka to katau”
A community can use all the skills of its people
Indigenous Knowledge and Cultural Responsibility is, in my opinion, all about knowing yourself, your learners and your community. In other words, it's about relationships. Russell Bishop (2012) made the comment that culturally responsive practices involve teachers creating contexts for learning that involve 'power sharing' and this can then provide a real tuakana teina action.
Bishop (2012) also made mention of agentic teachers and how they alone are not sufficient to build culturally responsive pedagogy. They need huge amounts of support to become the proficient responsive teachers we need. I look at where our school, in fact our Kahui Ako, are now and note that they have identified one part of their achievement challenges to be that of "Cultural Responsive Pedagogy. That is not to say that this practice does not already exist in our school, because it certainly does, but the current practice I would say, barely scratches the surface. I really look forward to exploring this challenge further within my own school and to see where the other schools go with this practice too. We wait with baited breath for the Ministry to OK it.
What I think we do well, is communicate. We hold whānau evenings, at the beginning of the school year, where we provide kai and inu and activities where both the whānau and kaiako mix and mingle. There are various other whānau evenings throughout the year usually to do with Curriculum. Our facebook, website and twitter pages are well used and we are all encouraged to make regular contact with whānau in varying ways. I myself, enjoy the communication and the fact that the 'open door' policy sees whānau feeling comfortable enough to drop in any time, makes it all the more real for me. I realise that sometimes communicating with a school is not always that easy, but I also believe that mobile phones and texting, in particular, have had an impact on this. It can certainly be easier to send a text explaining absences than talking on the phone...
An area of improvement, in my opinion, is that of planning, assessment and learning activities. I think the 3 go hand in hand and it is an area that worries me. I think a lot of our current practice could be seen as tokinism. I'm not sure that asking children to rewrite a legend can be classed as being a culturally responsive practitioner... We practice tuakana-teina in our school, where we have organised tuakana-teina groups, usually a junior class with a senior class who more often than not, do 'buddy reading' and while there is nothing wrong with that, we have to ask ourselves if we have made any difference or have achieved anything by it. Milne (2017) describes the tuakana-teina pedagogy as those who have knowledge assist those who need it and want to learn meaning there is a mix of local wisdom with global knowledge and a shared responsibility. This to me, seems a more natural concept and something to which we can begin to plan our lessons around. How do we do this? Who is going to ask the hard questions? Who even decides what is a culturally responsive lesson?
One thing I do know for sure is, having a culturally responsive practice is hard work, and it may be a long road, but we all have to start somewhere.
Bishop, R. (2012, September 23). A Culturally Responsive Pedagogy of Relations (Video File). EDtalks. Video posted to https://vimeo.com/49992994
Bishop (2012) also made mention of agentic teachers and how they alone are not sufficient to build culturally responsive pedagogy. They need huge amounts of support to become the proficient responsive teachers we need. I look at where our school, in fact our Kahui Ako, are now and note that they have identified one part of their achievement challenges to be that of "Cultural Responsive Pedagogy. That is not to say that this practice does not already exist in our school, because it certainly does, but the current practice I would say, barely scratches the surface. I really look forward to exploring this challenge further within my own school and to see where the other schools go with this practice too. We wait with baited breath for the Ministry to OK it.
What I think we do well, is communicate. We hold whānau evenings, at the beginning of the school year, where we provide kai and inu and activities where both the whānau and kaiako mix and mingle. There are various other whānau evenings throughout the year usually to do with Curriculum. Our facebook, website and twitter pages are well used and we are all encouraged to make regular contact with whānau in varying ways. I myself, enjoy the communication and the fact that the 'open door' policy sees whānau feeling comfortable enough to drop in any time, makes it all the more real for me. I realise that sometimes communicating with a school is not always that easy, but I also believe that mobile phones and texting, in particular, have had an impact on this. It can certainly be easier to send a text explaining absences than talking on the phone...
An area of improvement, in my opinion, is that of planning, assessment and learning activities. I think the 3 go hand in hand and it is an area that worries me. I think a lot of our current practice could be seen as tokinism. I'm not sure that asking children to rewrite a legend can be classed as being a culturally responsive practitioner... We practice tuakana-teina in our school, where we have organised tuakana-teina groups, usually a junior class with a senior class who more often than not, do 'buddy reading' and while there is nothing wrong with that, we have to ask ourselves if we have made any difference or have achieved anything by it. Milne (2017) describes the tuakana-teina pedagogy as those who have knowledge assist those who need it and want to learn meaning there is a mix of local wisdom with global knowledge and a shared responsibility. This to me, seems a more natural concept and something to which we can begin to plan our lessons around. How do we do this? Who is going to ask the hard questions? Who even decides what is a culturally responsive lesson?
One thing I do know for sure is, having a culturally responsive practice is hard work, and it may be a long road, but we all have to start somewhere.
References:
Bishop, R. (2012, September 23). A Culturally Responsive Pedagogy of Relations (Video File). EDtalks. Video posted to https://vimeo.com/49992994
Milne, A. (2017). Colouring in the White Spaces. New York, USA: Peter Lang Publishing Inc
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