Cultural Responsiveness

Through this weeks notes what really resonated with me was the comment that New Zealand was a bi cultural nation within which resides a multi cultural society. It feels like that is what really sums up this country to me but which some people tend to forget.

In my experiences throughout life I have been lucky to have had a range of experiences which have enhanced my indigenous knowledge. Due to family circumstances and connections I have always had Te Reo and Maori Tikanga in my life and feel very blessed to have had this upbringing. My teaching is responsive to the needs and protocol of my Maori students and I continue to learn and develop my practice through these interactions.

My school work hard to be culturally responsive to the bi cultural nature of New Zealand. Through the suggested bullet points I have chosen to merge 2 of the bullet points for how our school positively addresses cultural responsiveness.
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School-wide activities and communication methods:
I believe that our school is pretty amazing at this, which is due to some pretty amazing people in our school community. It all started with a core group of teachers and senior management getting together to discuss how to better engage with our Maori learners and their Whanau. The idea was that the school wanted to have Maori students being successful as Maori. The school then through this developed its Maori whanau group. This group meet regularly throughout the year to help plan school events and at the end of the year we hold a Maori Celebration night which identifies success for all our Maori students and is a special way to send off our Maori Year 6 students. This group also put together some wonderful Matariki celebrations which last year involved an awesome group of Dads being up at dawn to put in a hangi for our students to share - and with near 800 students is no mean feet. The celebrations also included a spectacular performance featuring our students and a visit from a local Kapa Haka group. I look forward to how this group will continue to shape our school and its commitment to the Treaty of Waitangi.

While our school-wide activities are such an asset to our school I think that we still need to be more culturally responsive in our learning experiences. It seems that due to teachers own doubts in their indigenous knowledge they are quite under confident creating learning experiences in the classroom for all students. We need to get better at sharing our knowledge with others and lifting the cultural responsiveness and confidence in others. It is not fair on the students that some have rich experiences with teachers who are creating lessons and plans while others are getting the bare minimum. However it is easy to point the finger at others it is our responsibility as a whole school to develop and support rather than to put down and/or ignore the problem.