Cultural Responsiveness

Examine how indigenous knowledge and cultural responsiveness (IK&CR) are informing the way you are taking action.


Step 1: What is your understanding of indigenous knowledge and cultural responsiveness and what area mentioned above do you want to focus on for discussion?


Indigenous knowledge is knowing everything about that culture and a group of individuals. Cultural responsiveness is being able to learn and be respectful of your own culture plus the culture of others. I think I was looking at our community needs during the take action planning process of the inquiry.


I had already had the children prior to this inquiry working together collaboratively on Google Docs using a Tuakana - Teina relationship. We had parents/whanau involved and being informed all throughout this process. We asked for feedback and we listened to their ideas and feedback and shared this with the children. I was always respectful to all tamariki and whanau.


Step 2: Examine how indigenous knowledge and cultural responsiveness are informing the way you are taking action.


Understanding the Culturally Responsive Practice for Maori Scale is something that we should be putting doing in our teaching practice everyday. I strongly believe that Whanaungatanga: building relationships was an integral part of our inquiry as we needed to have relationships with our students and their parents/whanau to have a successful outcome. Bring parents/whanau into the learning environment is so important and children having that authentic audience brings more meaning to them when they are doing a piece of work. In our school, we have a learning showcase each term. This is when parents/whanau come into the hub and their child or other children show them through their learning through the term and get feedback and praise for their learning. This is a time that we can build relationships with many of these families.


Step 3: What might you need to consider or take action on to move up to the next level of cultural responsiveness? What are the next steps?


I think my next step is to be thinking about what I can do to know everything about the cultures of all students in our hub. I need to make sure that these families/whanau are available to be part of our school community. In my home base I have a wide range of cultures and what I would love would be a day where they can come and talk to the hub and share some special traditions, and or special occasions that they think others should know. I want them to be fully engaged in our school community as well as all children to be informed about how to be respectful to all cultures.


References


(Source: Asil, M. (2017). A School-Based Measure of Culturally Responsive Practices. Frontiers in Education

2(17), 1-7. doi: 10.3389/feduc.2017.00017)

Faith In Action

The course about Social Justice that we took this year was a great way to show the See, Judge and Act process in our hub with our science unit last term.

See

We saw that there was a need for this issue to be made aware of in our school. We were seeing destruction and lack of respect for our common home. There was always rubbish in the playground, in the gardens and in the children’s lunchboxes. In light of us coming to know more about Catholic Social Teachings and Social Justice, we knew that now was the time. We all know that the environment is God's gift to us and we needed to show the children that if we didn't do our part now it may look dim for their future. The children knew that they needed to make some changes and were on board to help. They knew some good starting points that they could change to help look after our common home and the first initiative my group took was to have rubbish free lunch boxes.

Judge

This situation exists for many different reasons but the main ones that I will briefly talk about are, apathy on behalf of society around care for our common home, children not knowing, ill-informed parents and the convenience. So, we know that society has a lack of interest in the situations around us and we also know that they are not doing much to help them.

This is when we can use our children to give them the knowledge that they need to pass on to society, parents, whanau and caregivers. These members of society are the future and the changes they make now will be positive for the common home.

Act

Here we can show the ways that we actioned our unit of work with the children. We had a commitment to the Religious Education programme and how we used these curriculum objectives to show our commitment.

God is present everywhere in the world through creation. (AA6. Yr3, AO1)

Show love and respect for God’s gift of creation, accept responsibility for the environment and recognise the tapu sacredness of whenua land. (AA6. Yr4, AO2).

We also used the science curriculum and looked at Planet Earth and ways that the sustainable solutions we taught the children had a positive impact on our society. We were able to use the teachings from Laudato Si and incorporate this into our unit. We looked at pollution, green infrastructure, waterways and renewable energy. Using Science we taught these four topics with reference to Laudato Si throughout. We informed our parents about Catholic Social Teaching in particular Stewardship which was our focus. We also put information on our blog. We had a lot of parent interaction in our hub with this topic. The children were engaged and taking what they had learnt home, and putting it into practice. Each home base made an action plan and we made these real and achievable for the children, who were all engaged. At the end of the term, all the children wrote letters to Pope Francis about what they had been learning and putting into practice. Next term the green infrastructure team will be planting a vegetable garden for the community to use. The whole hub has made so many changes and we will continue these for the remainder of the year showing our commitment to our common home.

Term 2 was a great way to incorporate Laudato Si into our programme. The children were engaged and the goals were achievable for all. We are continuing to action the plan that we put in place and it's real and meaningful to the children.