Colouring in your VIRTUAL White Spaces
As our education landscape has changed almost overnight, we are confronted with moving learning to virtual spaces. My first thought as schools closed and principals and teachers scrambled to update existing online capability or to start to develop one, was who cares about White spaces now, when our first priority needs to be safe spaces and home spaces? That’s still the first priority, obviously.
However, as the real issues of access and devices, sharply demarcated by postcodes across the country, came into focus I quickly realised that what is already wrong with curriculum and pedagogy in our face-to-face teaching and learning is simply going to be amplified in our online choices and delivery. In fact, the proliferation of White spaces that will be the inevitable result of a virtual curriculum are not safe spaces at all. As the Ministry of Education might try to circumvent the obvious barriers, by getting devices into homes, and providing internet access to the children who don’t have this, how will schools develop critical, culturally sustaining content online, and how will this reach the children who need it most? Because, it’s not just about the access.
I am worried about principals and teachers right now. The speed of this change has taken us all by surprise! In an Australian-based webinar I watched this week, with the insightful Claire Amos of Albany Senior High School on the panel, I heard the host describe the wide range of solutions schools are struggling to implement as us having all these jigsaw pieces, but suddenly this pandemic has removed the picture from the box. That’s a really apt analogy, but even when we thought we did have the ‘picture’ in our learning environments prior to COVID-19, the truth is that many children—Māori, indigenous, and minoritised children worldwide were always absent from that picture and their pieces never did fit.
Some schools might have been well prepared to move to an online environment, they were already working this way and the change will be relatively smooth. Others, particularly those in vulnerable communities, are faced with a steep learning curve. All teachers and principals are having to shift their practice to work from home, while being parents and grandparents themselves and dealing with the stress of this evolving situation on our own, and our families’ wellbeing. It’s a huge personal undertaking before we even start on the professional implications. So where do we start?
Let’s look at the obvious givens. Virtual and digital learning are not new. There is a wealth of research and information already available. We would need to have been living under a rock if we were not aware of this. There have been initiatives and PLD that many educators have been involved with and immersed in for a long time. As a system we know about the digital divide, we know about the inequity of internet access and the wide disparity in terms of device ownership. As educators, we’ve probably got our heads around the idea that relationships are just as important online as they are face-to-face, and we have a pretty good idea of how to develop these, although those ideas are about to be tested. We know the apps that work and those that don’t. We know about our obligations under Te Tiriti o Waitangi to ensure that education for Māori needs to be designed by Māori. We know about Universal Design for Learning that is supposed to ensure all learners get the chance to learn in ways that work for them. Mmmm – do we though? Really?
Anyway, let’s assume that none of those are up for debate as we hold those virtual staff and team meetings to try to come to terms with the reality that the learning world, as we know it, has changed, and probably forever. We are unlikely to return to ‘normal’ and some, myself included, hope we take this opportunity to completely rethink what we have offered in the past, and do our level best not to repeat that.
Because let’s look at some other truths, perhaps not so obvious.
Article 15 of the WSIS Declaration of The World Summit on the Information Society states “In the evolution of the Information Society, particular attention must be given to the special situation of indigenous peoples, as well as to the preservation of their heritage and their cultural legacy” (Resta, 2011).
This 2011 policy brief to the UNESCO Institute for Information Technologies in Education (IITE) critiques the “long legacy of educational policies in colonized countries that have been significant factors in the erosion of indigenous language and culture (p.3). It points out that ICT and digital learning can be seen as a “two-edged sword” with the potential to exacerbate the erosion of indigenous and cultural knowledge, or the potential to empower and support the creation of new culturally responsive learning resources and environments for indigenous children. George Dei (2011, p. 168) refers to this dilemma when he says, “Today, Indigenous knowledge is about the struggle to retain one’s identity in the call for a global sameness.” Charles Ess (2004) challenges the cultural neutrality of information technologies that “carry and further a specific set of cultural values and communicative preferences – ones that, far from being universally shared, are indeed limited to specific cultural domains,” and describes this embedding and fostering of specific cultural values and communicative preferences as powerfully aiding and abetting a form of “computer-mediated colonization.”
My son, Kane, is responsible for establishing Te Toiotua, the Innovation Hub at Te Wānanga o Aotearoa, with the intent of developing a modern digital learning environment for Māori learners that is innovative, culturally sustaining, and critical. In his Master of Applied Indigenous Knowledge thesis, which studied innovation and the model of practice underpinning Te Toiotua he explains:
The truth is that we come from a people of science. We come from a people of technology, of innovation, of deep understanding of the physical and spiritual worlds. It is a part of our critical consciousness and our whakapapa.
The problem with a digital learning environment is the potential to lose that consciousness, and in our rush to adopt technology, devices, apps, and online services, we often do not place a critical lens on both the context and methods of use, and with little understanding of the ability of these tools to negate cultural capital, and even perpetuate the colonization process. (Milne, K. 2019)
Kane quotes Paris and Alim (2017) who describe a “White gaze” or Western lens which blankets all educational research and teaching and learning practice, and ask, “What would our pedagogies look like if this gaze weren’t the dominant one?” Paris and Alim go on to ask, "What would liberating ourselves from this gaze and the educational expectations it forwards mean for our abilities to envision new and recover community-rooted forms of teaching and learning?
And that’s my question, and this is the perfect time to ask it! Because the potential for our virtual learning spaces to be driven almost exclusively by that White gaze is frightening and, sadly, highly likely. Jones (2020) goes so far as to describe the situation that occurs “when educators and curriculum writers have constructed a set of lessons that damage or otherwise adversely affect students intellectually and emotionally” as curriculum violence. We are right there!
Last week my free resource, Seven Steps to Audit your School’s White Spaces was all set up on my website ready to let schools know they could download it during the holidays, but, in the last few days I felt I needed to add a Step 8 – Auditing your Virtual White Spaces. (Click here to download both resources). These were the questions I suggested schools ask of their planning for online learning:
How is your virtual space connected – not just to the internet, but with learners’ lives & realities, across subject areas, with the community, and with students’ identities?
Will your virtual learning space reproduce white colonial methodologies and practice? In other words, is your online learning basically replicating your face-to-face practice which hasn’t worked for Māori learners in the first place?
Are you recreating a “pedagogy of poverty” (Haberman) or poor teaching for poor kids (worksheets, drill and practice computer exercises, activities without purpose, low-level activities, low expectations, ‘busy’ work)?
How is it critical? Do your projects, enquiries, contexts for study, critique and analyse societal conditions and attitudes through a Māori lens?
How does it give learners choices and control over their learning?
Does it understand whanaungatanga i.e. how does it reflect the crucial importance of relationships that are built on trust, advocacy and respect in a virtual environment?
Are you basing your assumptions about students’ learning environments, the capacity of that environment, the access to technology and support for learning virtually, on the realities of your students, or on your own experience? How do you know your student isn’t trying to write your NCEA assignment on Mum’s phone which is also being used by other whanau members all trying to do their schoolwork?
Neutrality is a position. Technology and virtual learning are not culturally neutral. How is your virtual planning actively mitigating this truth? If you are using digital content and curriculum you found online, or is provided by others – who wrote it, whose perspective is paramount and legitimised, and whose agenda does it fit?
If you took an honest look at the learning you are planning, would you say it is intentionally culturally sustaining – or is it culture-erasing i.e. is it one-size-fits-all?
The danger that those with privilege and little idea of the realities of many of our young people, will be leading the development of virtual learning and rolling this out into our schools and communities, scares me and should scare all of us.
Reality check! Kia Aroha College has contacted all their students’ families, as requested by the Ministry. How do you deliver learning online when only 3% of students have both a device and internet access? A further 20% have their own phones with a data plan and another 20% have access to someone else in the house’s phone and data, but sometimes these are parent’s work phones for example, or the phone is needed for other children’s work as well. That means that 97% are going to struggle to learn online, write assignments, prepare presentations, join meetings, and interact with each other.
How do you know who will be able to supervise learning in the household? How do you know that families have enough food? Kia Aroha College took the bold step this year to provide lunch every day for every student because of their survey data that clearly told them this was necessary. What happens now that has stopped? This situation is certainly not unique to Kia Aroha College. For many whānau, access to food parcels is more important than access to the internet. How do you know about other financial stresses and about all the other risks to young people’s mental health and their safety? These are all realities for many of our children, at all ages, and simply working out how to get devices and the internet into homes is not even halfway to being enough!
So, what can we do? If we do manage to work our way through the realities, how can virtual learning be critical and culturally sustaining? The Infographic will give you some ideas to start with.
