Cultural responsiveness in practice

Through a major shift in the way we deliver maths teaching across the school I have also had a major shift in my understanding and practice of cultural responsiveness.  My school is 70% Pasifika, 29% Maori and 1% Hispanic.  While our main focus is on Pasifika cultures, Maori plays a significant part and we consider Maori/Aotearoa as a Pasifika nation.

We are now into the second year of a Pasifika maths project involving development of communities of mathematical inquiry (led by Dr Roberta Hunter from Massey University).  In the midst of change I experienced the resistance, doubt, success, failure, black hole and light at the end of the tunnel moments.  I now have enough professional distance to look back at the journey and see the progress made as well as the road ahead.

We deliberately design maths problems with a Pasifika/cultural context, related to students' home lives.  As we launch the problem, students are able to connect their own experiences.  We are also able to share language.  Parents and fanau were introduced to the new pedagogy by their children in a Pasifika maths evening.  They also contributed to a bank of possible contexts and vocabulary.  I can give students larger numbers and more complex strategies to work with because they understand the story behind the maths, so the maths makes more sense.

Students work collaboratively and we talk about working as whanau - everyone contributing and taking responsibility for doing their job so the whole whanau will be successful.  High expectations are set for the group working norms as well as for the maths.  Students work in mixed ability groups, each working from where their understanding is.  The whanau is successful when everybody has made a connection and learned something new.

Our home whanau have shared that their children are more likely to share their maths learning since it is undertaken in a home/culture based context.

We celebrate successes and we celebrate failures, we always ask where to next, we value and praise the process as much as the product (sometimes more).  Because all of this is happening in a familiar cultural context, we are also celebrating, valuing and normalising our students' cultures and making them part of our school identity.

The positive changes I have experienced in my teaching and in my learners' engagement and motivation has led me to begin using a culturally responsive pedagogy throughout the curriculum.

A cultural approach to the delivery and structure of learning activities can be applied across different learning areas.  Finding Pasifika/Maori learning contexts for some curriculum areas has been a challenge.  Again, our parent community were able to offer some suggestions.

What my colleagues and I are struggling with is a way of marrying our culturally responsive teaching approach with (especially) formal assessments.

We have argued about the merits of different tools and the weightings given to various aspects of students' learning.  It seems that other schools (on our journey with Developing Mathematically Inquiring Communities) are also wrestling with this problem and are yet to find or provide a satisfactory solution.

This is an area for further inquiry.  Any feedback welcomed here.