Indigenous Knowledge and Cultural Responsiveness In My Practice

Whakatauki

Ki te mohio ki ahau, ko to mohio ki ahau.

To know me is to recognise me.

My Understanding of Indigenous Knowledge & Cultural Responsiveness

Indigenous knowledge is about developing meaningful educational contexts built on the prior knowledge, values, attitudes, aspirations and rich cultural contexts of our school community. Cultural responsiveness is about building meaningful, purposeful, explicit learning relationships with learners, underpinned by deep knowledge of the learner and the skills and experiences they bring to their learning, with the immutable expectation of success.

To know each student, to build professional and personal relationships with them and their family/whanau, can be seen by some teachers as an enormous expectation and sometimes as an imposition. In my experience it is a privilege. Our work with students and whanau must be built on a model of relational trust.  How else are we to have the difficult learning conversations without causing harm?  How else are we provide praise and positive feedback without causing embarrassment or seeming disingenuous?

Indigenous Knowledge & Cultural Responsiveness Within My School: What is working well?

As a school we have made a number of decisions that build upon both indigenous knowledge and cultural responsiveness within our school-wide activities and learning activities. We plan our key units using a Maori perspective as our ignition, building on prior knowledge from our student and whanau, and including members of the wider school community when possible. Increasingly we look to do this from the tangatawhenua perspective as local iwi gain clarity around their educational plan for this rohe. We also look to the fluctuating diversity within our student population and aim to  include other cultural perspectives, values and knowledge within units.

We expect teaching staff to incorporate cultural links into the classroom and to expand their own understanding of what it means to teach within Aotearoa / New Zealand in accordance with the principles of the Treaty of Waitangi and the Education Council’s Practising Teacher Criteria (2017). Within  our school this means: all students and teachers learning and using their pepeha, incorporating te reo in oracy and literacy, providing opportunity for akonga to pursue further study to express themselves in their culture through the arts or language. It also looks like key community gatherings for whanau hui, hangi, noho marae, kai hapori, and kapa haka festival.  

How do we know that these approaches are working? Student and whanau voice is gathered at regular intervals and within this we hear the message that it is positive to be a learner in our school and in particular students feel proud to be a Māori learner in our kura. Our Māori staff feel supported and safe to contribute their own knowledge and to have ‘difficult’ conversations that may arise.  Increasingly links are developing with tangatawhenua with the recent construction of a local marae and this is an exciting development for all schools in our area.

Indigenous Knowledge & Cultural Responsiveness Within My School: What would benefit from improvement?

Assessment is an area that would benefit from review. We are held in bondage to the National Standards reporting systems and the traditional grade and grind paper reports. Whanau and ako are regularly examined under the miserly microscope of marks and “must do next”. There is an irony there when we have a section that we fill in for ‘how to help at home’ when actually we might benefit more from a conversation that enlightens us as to how home can help school.  

If we looked at conversations with family, whanau and ako as our ignition point in planning programmes of teaching and learning I wonder how different classroom delivery might manifest itself.