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.