APC 4: Indigenous knowledge and cultural responsiveness in my practice

Indigenous knowledge and cultural responsiveness in my practice

Tahi kainga mate, rua kainga ora

Academic tasks such as this tend to fill me with a mild outrage these days. In earlier years it would be a more volcanic reaction.  The task pokes at my own sense of self. A painfully acquired sense of self.  I am Māori, I am Pakeha.  My whanau whakatauki calls on us to be at home as Māori and to be at home as Pakeha.

My grandfather is the source of my whakapapa. He left my mother when she was three years old and the closest I ever came to him was to be in the same room as he lay in his closed coffin. We never once laid eyes on one another. My great uncle gifted me copies of family papers he had accumulated over the years and these included the whanau whakapapa papers my grandfather had researched and recorded for the family. Potatau Te Wherowhero is my great great great great grandfather and I share the same whakapapa as Russell Bishop, our great great grandparents were siblings (Bishop, Collaborative Research Stories : Whakawhanaungatanga, 1996).  So why my outrage? Any teacher brings with them their own culture and their own heritage and values. As we enter the classroom, as we engage in any interpersonal encounter with another human being, our tupuna come with us, whispering in our ears, giggling, muttering, influencing all that we say and do. Some of our ancestors have louder voices than others at different times. Why should I be asked to reflect on who I am for an academic exercise? My tupuna clamour that this is my life’s work and not a shotgun moment of forced reflection.

As teachers we have a responsibility as part of our professional response to the students we teach to acknowledge and affirm who they are and it is our job to engage with our students in ways that touch and greet them in their world in authentic ways. Russell Bishop (Edtalks, 2012) speaks about agentic teachers, a term he borrows from Gloria Ladson-Billings and this reminds me of a phrase I came across many years ago ‘the teacher is the text’. Students learn from who we are and how we relate to them and how we respect who they are. Teaching is a reciprocal process always and this has been understood since the days Geoffrey Chaucer c. 1343 -1400. In the Prologue of his book The Canterbury Tales the clerk (commonly a teacher in those days) was delineated with the final words “…gladly would he learn and gladly teach.” (Chaucer, 1934, p. 10)

My teaching years at British International School in Bandar Seri Begawan, Brunei meant that I engaged in Deepavali celebrations with my students and visited homes during Chinese New Year and fasted in public during Ramadan. I sent cards to my Moslem parents and students for Hari Raya. There is valuable learning to step outside of one’s daily living into other spaces and places as they help you to see more clearly what you have in your own space and place. In Aotearoa in my working life there is a merging of who I am and whakawhanaungatanga is part of engaging with whanau all the time as I have living connections to many of the whanau that I work with. This is both an asset and a challenge.

In my role as a Resource Teacher of Learning and Behaviour (RTLB), our cluster Te Hā o Te Manawa espouses strong bicultural values in all our policy and administration documentation. Our challenge is to embed this into our practice with fidelity and consistency across the cluster. As the cluster stretches from Turangi to Murupara and includes Rotorua and Taupa we need to be mindful of Tikanga in Te Arawa, Tuhoe, Tuwharetoa, Tainui and Tuhourangi. RTLB receive focussed training in working with Māori students and our cluster employs people able to provide service to our Kaupapa Māori schools so in many ways we are demonstrating positive cultural responsiveness in our practice especially in our espoused Vision, Mission and core values. 

   

What may be missing is the checkpoints and monitoring of RTLB across the cluster in how we are embedding the culturally responsive elements of our vision and core values. We have an element of our appraisal system dedicated to reflecting on implementing Tataiako in our work but as this is a self reflection tool it has a weak element of accountability. There are three people in our leadership team and two of these are Māori while almost half of the RTLB are Māori RTLB practitioners.  I wonder if we need to have a buddy system of support for implementing cultural responsiveness in our casework? We have peer supervision groups twice a term and cultural responsiveness could be part of this work on a regular basis. These are the next steps we could take on our ongoing journey of increasing our cultural responsiveness.

Our cluster has been operational since 2012 and it is timely to review our organisation at the micro and macro level. Both Jill Bevan-Brown (Bevan-Brown, 2000) and Russell Bishop (Bishop & Glynn, Culture Counts : Change Power Relations in Education, 1999) have developed models to support organisational reviews of cultural responsiveness .

Fig 1 Cultural Audit Model by Jill Bevan - Brown

Our professional worlds must be culturally responsive to the students, families and schools as a matter of best practice for our students. Qualities of cultural responsiveness should not be a judgement on who we are, rather a judgement on how we acknowledge our students and their families.

Bevan-Brown, J. (2000). A Cultural Audit for Teachers. SET , 1. Retrieved June 18, 2016, from http://aromatawaiapaki.org.nz/content/download/235/1229/file/Acultural%20audit%20for%20teachers.pdf

Bishop, R. (1996). Collaborative Research Stories : Whakawhanaungatanga. Palmerston North: Dunmore Press Ltd.

Bishop, R., & Glynn, T. (1999). Culture Counts : Change Power Relations in Education. Palmeston North, NZ: Dunmore Press Ltd.

Chaucer, G. (1934). Canterbury Tales. New York: Garden City Publishing Company Inc.

Edtalks. (2012, September 23). A culturally responsive pedagogy of relations [video file]. Retrieved from htt[://vimeo.com/49992994