*Activity 13: Indigenous knowledge and culturally responsive pedagogy

*Activity 13: Indigenous knowledge and culturally responsive pedagogy

Introduction

Culture and the idea that culture underpins learning is a personal belief of my own.. Being aware of who you are, where you come from and comfortable with yourself  are important pieces of the puzzle that contribute to successful learners. Once they are comfortable with themselves, that are able to settle and learn. For me culture is a unique identify and through my own schooling and teaching experiences. This year I have had a personal focus on being able to articulate and share what culturally responsive pedagogy is, because it is a term that I had often heard shared but not known behind.

The agendic teaher

I think that teachers have the responsibility to ‘welcome all and their to the learning conversation’ and acknowledge their culture. So often we hear of the culture of the classroom and the culture of learning. My feeling is that this culture is derived from the individuals who participate in the learning within each class setting.The agendic teacher idea (Bishop, 2009) prompted interesting reflection for me and helped me to qualify what culturally responsive teaching and learning looks like in action. I feel that there have been aspects of this pedagogical approach interwoven through my teaching and this year I have become more aware and provided more instances of this.

Relationships

From the beginning of my teaching career,  establishing relationships between students and families that are built upon mutual respect and a desire for the best for learning have been crucial to my practice. I specifically focus on knowing the interests of students. We are a small school and I feel this has helped me to establish relationships not only with students from my class but the wider community. This has helped me to facilitate relevant and shared learning experiences.

Balance of power

Teachers who are culturally responsive share the balance of power, students have equal ability to teach and teachers have the capacity to learn and this is shared with the students.  To address this in my learning I constantly let the kids know I make mistakes, I encourage them to help me as the class is our place. We discuss and reinforce that fact that there are 27 learners and 27 teachers in our class.

Visible learning

There are aspects of this that I really relate to, and aspects that don’t always sit right with me. Feedback that is timely, relevant and useful for the students in a formative way is one part of the teaching picture that I could not do without. From this however seems to have stemmed the WALT and Success Criteria phenomenon. I think it is important to make the learning relevant and discuss how we do it. I often struggle with the amount of time this can take away from practising the skill and I feel that the term success criteria had a loaded connotation. They fact is that the learning within any context should allow students to achieve success. If they are unable to reach this ‘derived success criteria’ and this happens often, do they experience a feel of failure?

Cumulative body of knowledge.

Culturally responsive practitioners allow learners to contribute their understanding which is often from their unique cultural perspective in their own way. I have found that this during the process of this postgraduate certificate, this is the area that I have explored the most and utilise with the support of relevant technology. As a school, we have integrated plans for each curriculum area. These curricula all relate to the overarching theme for the year. In the past we have looked at the themes journeys, citizenship, belonging. WIthin this students have options to share their understanding and knowledge in a way that they see as meaningful and hopefully in a context that is relevant to them, starting at a school level, looking out to the community and then the wider context. An example of this is the development of the native bush area of our school as part of our citizenship focus.

Family expertise

When reflecting on the use of family expertise in a culturally responsive way I feel that I have pursued this more often in a one off sort of situation and could be an area that I should pursue in a more in depth way. We have had a focus on culture as a school for the first two terms of 2013 in which we explored the dominant cultures at school and rotated around different learning experiences. TO make the most successful we needed to engage and utilise the parent experts in our community.

References:

Bishop, R. (2009)  Culturally responsive pedagogy relations retrieved from http://www.edtalks.org/video/culturally-responsive-pedagogy-relations