Indigenous knowledge and cultural responsiveness in my practice

 I must admit, having worked within Private Tertiary Education (PTE) Institutes for the last 15 years has not helped my cultural understanding of indigenous knowledge or cultural responsiveness.

I have worked within 4 large PTE’s over this time, one which was a large pacific provider of Youth Guarantee, SAC Level 1 & 2 as well Certificate and Diplomas from NZQA level  3-6.

However, I have never been involved in any cultural professional development or seen any cultural strategies implemented nor any cultural responsiveness at any level (I have worked with all levels from teaching to management).

I realise now that I am the essence of Culturally Inept.

My first real exposure to any cultural understanding coming in the form of the MindLabs Karakea at the start of this programme.....(or at least, I think its called that)..

Unfortunately in my current role as a manager, stepping into a very “traditionally mono-cultured” PTE, I cannot see any practice within our college that is specifically informed by indigenous knowledge and an example of culturally responsive pedagogy.

Despite  targets of increasing Maori and Pacific Achievement Rates as a key educational performance indicator, I struggle to how any PTE I have worked within has had a clear cultural understanding and response.

Conversely, I am amazed with the good work going on within the public sector. One of the first conversations I had within this programme was with a primary teacher around her school’s experience. Immediately there was a rush of Maori terminology and words I had not expected and which were very foreign to me.  It was amazing to see the depth of her cultural understanding and the responsiveness driven from the core of public schools.

As I cannot reflect on current practice in a cultural context, other than as extremely mono-culture in every regard, I will attempt to postulate how a differing inclusive framework maybe introduced.

Such a change would need to be driven, like public schools from the top, down through every layer and as  such as our vision, mission, and core values would need to be respectfully modified to include cultural values.

The tools outlined for evaluating our current Cultural understanding and responsiveness would be useful in gaining staff buy-in through self-evaluation.

Changes in internal culture would then be driven from the mission through professional development of teaching practice, environment and curriculum.

And finally student support and interventions would be addressed to ensure cultural understanding was used especially when student need to overcome barriers in learning.

The private sector remains a challenge in terms of cultural adoption through policy however.

On one hand Institutes such as mine, only have 2-3 Maori/Pacific students, enrolments which will remain consistently low due to the specific content (traditional European medicine).

While it would be great to have an influx of Pacific and Maori students into our programmes, it is not the culture of the college stopping this, rather our content vs Maori and Pacific traditional health models, which are already fulfilling their needs and are integrated into their histories, philosophies and experiences.

As such, does a private entity, of which 98-99% of students are mono-culture due to the field of study, take the risk of alienating its largest stakeholder by integrating the indigenous culture at a foundation level, throughout vision, teaching, assessment design and all services?  

It’s a good question - one which I feel swayed both ways for and against.
While one would hope that an institute does everything possible for every student to feel included, while helping to address any minority issues that exist, at what point does one say to implement such change given the existing and future demographic is not a financially viable return on investment?

Hopefully this is not regarded as ignorance to the seriousness of the problem, rather the variability of impact such changes would produce within the each individual context.

Trend influencing education in New Zealand or internationally

Distance Education

Distance Learning captures my attention not only because our College was one of the first institutes in New Zealand to conduct distance learning, by recording lectures to VCR Cassette tape and mailing them to students since 1989, but also due of the disruption emerging technology has introduced to distance education.

While our College led the way with pre-recorded Lectures via VCR Tapes, then later DVD disk, the adoption of technology for distance education has largely lagged behind due the the digital literacy of the founding members of the College.

Despite this, a few years ago the College moved onto Moodle an online learning system, reducing postage/courier costs, dvd disk copying costs, allowing instant access for students to lectures and lecturers to completed assignments.

Global and Local Trends

However Global and Local Trends have impacted this change-over in ways the College was not prepared for.

Internet Connectivity, within New Zealand is still not at 100%. Many students living in rural communities of the far north and lower south islands, still rely on slow, intermittent internet connectivity, making eLearning a challenge for the worst affected.
By moving to an online platform for eLearning the College has both restricted those students without internet or with poor connectivity, at the same time increasing the potential pool of students to anyone with Internet Connectivity within the wider world.

This is mentioned as a concern in Global trends where the rate of technological change may eventually impact developing countries, such would be the case for online learning systems not being much use in countries where internet connectivity is not widespread. In such cases the benefits of such as system would not be realised and may hinder the developing countries rates of educational adoption.

Local Issues

However in NZ and Internationally the rate of eLeanring uptake is increasing to such an extent that government policies and frameworks fail in currency.
Recently NZQA released a paper for discussion detailing changes to the Learning Hours of Qualifications. Currently this is defined as  Directed Learning and Self-Directed Learning, however the current proposal defines a full qualification as Directed Hours only, where an institute must justify reasons why hours are delivered differently and track exact engagement hours if that is the case.
This obviously is a response to the increase of online learning where defining exactly what is classed as directed vs self-directed is a grey area.
This raises questions such as, is a student watching a recording of a full 3 hour in-class lecture, directed learning? Is there any difference between that student watching via distance/asynchronously than actually being in the classroom? Would the learning not be the same?  

Conclusion

As we move down the road of increasing reliance on digital tools and technologies for education, governments and their agencies must also move along, if not ahead of the technology - ensuring the full benefits are not eroded by policies, frameworks and funding models made for a traditional environment.

Current issues in my professional context

The Issues

Our Private Training Establishment (PTE) was founded in 1989, with a strong culture of inclusive well being driven from the founders, however over time as the college has matured we have seen the slow increase of stagnation and a trend of decline through a resistant to adapt culture to our current environment.
This has had deep impacts on the College, staff and students where the culture has evolved to resist any attempt to challenge the long-held, unchanged norm’s, especially in terms of culture change for improvement.
Over time the College’s environment has changed drastically with the introduction of eLearning technology, distance learning, external educational policy shifts and stricter funding mechanisms which currently compound dysfunction and barriers to improvement adoption.

Current Context
However over the last year the college has been working to address such culture issues through the integration of Continuous Improvement processes to address NZQA External Evaluation & Review (EER) ratings.
This has been an exercise of systematic Re-Culturing (Stoll, 1998) “the process of developing new values, beliefs and norms….. building new conceptions about instruction... and new forms of professionalism for teachers...”.

It began with a wake-up call, a poor result within our NZQA EER ratings with old assumptions of “this is how we’ve always done it” simply failing to make the mark. It was through this catalyst that cracks within the culture were made and assumptions started to sway.

With emphasis on the need to raise our EER category ratings, a discussions around improvements was conducted, with resistance for some key members of staff - still opposing the required shift in culture, the adoption of continuous improvement and change.
As Stoll (1998) suggests a culture metaphor was created within the team one that was inclusive to our history and journey.

The Waka
Such was born the “Waka” a metaphor for the College as a whole, with the team “paddling” and the “Chief scanning the horizon and directing the boat.”
The power of this one simple metaphor was amazing, it could be used in a variety of context, situations and used impartially.
This brought about catch-phases used within meetings which quickly spread to every day staff language, as such, “paddling in the wrong direction” - a resistive assumption often produced by fear of change, “bailing out the water” - Getting rid of assumptions and resistance,   and “navigation by starlight” - using factual evidence to steer the Waka.

Conclusion
The process of Re-Culturing has assisted with breaking down barriers and overcoming resistances, no longer are changes seen as College-Changing they are now being viewed as Assumption-Changing.
More importantly staff are now focussed on problem-solving , improving and evidencing within the College, where all members are interconnected and interrelated through the metaphor driving the culture change.

References

Stoll. (1998). School Culture. School Improvement Network’s Bulletin 9. Institute of Education, University of London. Retrieved from http://www.educationalleaders.govt.nz/Culture/Understanding-school-cultures/School-Culture