Activity 4 : Indigenous knowledge and cultural responsiveness in my practice

I subscribe to the understanding that cultural responsiveness is using learners experiences, perspectives and characteristics as part of your teaching and learning (Gay, 2001).  Additionally, using the Effective Teacher Profile (Bishop & Berryman, 2009) supports the how of being culturally responsive in the classroom. I thinks that the challenge is, in order to truly be culturally responsive, it requires you to truly know yourself, your bias and your assumptions and ultimately have the emotional intelligence to know how this affects you in your setting and in your decision making.  I have decided to use the Mauri Model (Potahu, 2011) to reflect on how proactive our practice is in regards to the levels of Mauri as I feel that I want to reflect on the engagement of stakeholders..     

When reflecting on the teaching and learning opportunities that we provide at my school, I believe that we ensure that  teachers care about the performance of their students and relate learning the interests and  passions of tamariki.  Teachers are in the State of Being Mauri Ora for the learning experiences that we provide.  Learners are actively engaged in things that interest them: organising school events such as pets days, orienteering events, ANZAC ceremonies.  These experiences are authentic opportunities for tamariki to engage to learning in an area of interest.  Learners are highly motivated and committed to designing learning activities or events for others in our school community. In addition, teachers work hard to design learning around areas of interest.  For example, using a multimodal approach, a learner read about dairy farming for a whole term and made accelerated progress in reading.   Teachers are agentic thinkers, looking at how they can support learners. Similarly, we work with members of our local community to support teaching through culturally and sporting activities.   However, as our community is very bicultural, the school needs to actively provide multicultural opportunities to our learners.  This is an area that we need to develop further.   

I agreed with Bishop (2012) that teachers need to have agentic thinking.  Moreover believing that they, as teachers, have the skills and knowledge to help all students to achieve.  For some teachers, this is a challenge as teachers can focus on the things that that can not change, rather than looking at the things that are in their sphere of control.  Bishop (2012) suggests that the key to this is relationships -  developing, forming and maintaining these relationships in a dynamic way. Furthermore, we need to consistently to working at these relationships showing Manaakitanga for our tamariki ensuring that we care about them and their culture.  

As a principal, my focus is developing and maintaining the relationships that I have with my stakeholders.  Focusing on the cultural capital that all these groups of people and  ensuring that all stakeholders are at the table is a key challenge that I face.  When reflecting further, my community engagement works well at the surface level so we are operating at Mauri Oho: parents attend sporting events; learning conferences; take children to events; run cultural events with us.  However, when I think about their input into strategic planning.  Yes, some may complete our school Strategic Planning Surveys (55% this year).  But do they have real input into the direction of our school, the things we are focusing on and is there really ako happening with our whanau.  Unfortunately, the answer for most whanau is no.  Therefore I believe that  my challenge is to have whanau and tamariki being in a state of Mauri Ora rather than Mauri Oho when is comes to Strategic Planning and Decision-Making.   In order to achieve this we need to have ako based relationships with our whanau.  

Bishop, R., & Berryman, M. (2009). The Te Kotahitanga effective teaching profile. Set: Research Information for Teachers, 2(2).

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.

Potahu, T. W. (2011). Mauri - Rethinking Human Wellbeing. MAI Review, 3, 1-12. Retrieved from http://www.review.mai.ac.nz/index.php/MR/article/v...