Indigenous Knowledge and Cultural Responsiveness. Reflective blog week 31
Indigenous Knowledge
and Cultural Responsiveness.
Reflective blog week
31
My understanding of indigenous knowledge is that it is the
local knowledge that is unique to a culture or society. In a school where we
have a variety of different cultures. It is important that we do not use only
our own cultural identity to guide our teaching but that we acknowledge that in
our classrooms there are a variety of different cultures. They will all be bringing with them their own
indigenous knowledge.
If we first acknowledge this, it will become the starting
point for us as teachers to be able to achieve culturally responsive pedagogy.
Gay defined this as “using the cultural characteristics, experiences and
perspectives as conduits for effective teaching” (gay 2001, p.106)
The two areas that I will focus on are the core values of
the school I teach at and learning activities that I incorporate in my own
classroom. Below I have included the core values of our school. They are
Respect (Manaakitanga), Participation (Mahi Tahi) and Pride (Mana Motuhake).
These have been developed and further expanded to give all students at the school
guiding points to participate around. It is summed as wanting to: Encourage individual responsibility, integrity and respect for the
rights of others”.
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Respect (Manaakitanga)
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Participation (Mahi Tahi)
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Pride (Mana Motuhake)
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I
belief that these core values are very effective for all students regardless of
ethnicity. They are constantly referred to within the context of daily practise
in the school and students see these in every classroom that they go into.
The
second point is learning activities. I will talk of my own experience in my
classroom. This year I trialled a new unit of work where students were
developing a meal bag that they could present to their own family. I belief
that it displayed very good culturally responsive pedagogy. I was allowing
students to bring in their own experiences within their home situation to
develop a product that was unique to their situation. I talked with each
student individually and worked with them to overcome any challenges.
I
belief that both of these scenarios show that what is happening in our school
would be well advanced on the Mauri Model. I belief that we are engaging with
our students and are at the Mauri Oho level.
The school
that I am part of is a member of COL and one of the aims of the COL team is to
make our school are more culturally responsive school. This has meant that we
have had a lot of professional development on this and have been challenged to
reflect on the way we do things as a school and within our own classrooms. I
belief this has seen great improvement. This has resulted in the staff of the
school being proactive and awaken from the state of Maori Moe. With any process
it is a journey and I myself have changed some parts of my practise but here
are still areas that I could improve and will continue to work on.
References
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.
Cowie, B., Otrel-Cass,
K., Glynn, T., & Kara, H., et al.(2011).Culturally responsive pedagogy and
assessment in primary science classrooms: Whakamana tamariki. Wellington:
Teaching Learning Research Initiative. Retrieved from http://www.tlri.org.nz/sites/default/files/projects/9268_cowie-summaryreport.pdf
Gay,G. (2002).
Preparing for culturally responsive teaching. Journal of Teacher Education,
53(2),106-116.
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