Look Inside - Courses One and Two - Ann Milne Online

If you are thinking of enrolling in my online courses this term and trying to decide - here is a “sneak peek” with text excerpts from Courses One and Two.

COURSE ONE: IDENTIFYING OUR WHITE SPACES

MODULE 3 (OF FIVE MODULES): IDENTIFYING “SHARKS” (COVERT WHITE SPACES AND PRACTICE)

The following excerpt is from the content of Module 3 of Course One

Module 3 will clearly identify and name those pressures and practice that our colonial education system, and our whitestream teacher training embed in our thinking as ‘normal’ – or traditional, and it will challenge you to question why you can’t also change this practice?

So far, you have taken a close look at your own cultural identity, and all the other aspects of who you are, and have used that process to see your own learners in more depth. We hope that is an ongoing process that will be extending beyond the three students you chose initially to all your learners.

You have conducted a thorough audit of your school or organisation’s spaces and, I’m sure, found many of them to be predominantly White. As you will have discovered, in your first steps towards an action plan, many of these exist for no reason whatsoever, other than in our thinking that this is just “the way things are done around here” or in this space.  Many of these could be changed just by you making decisions to do something differently – taking up te reo Māori, putting time into pronouncing names properly, identifying key support people, changing your thinking about timetabling, and putting your visible displays and environment under close scrutiny.

Your decision to participate in these courses is a perfect example of you taking on this change regardless of what everyone else around you is doing. I’m sure these steps feature now in your action plan.

Now though, it’s time to step out of those spaces to look at the bigger picture. This means confronting those uncomfortable words — some of those we introduced and defined in the last module — White privilege, supremacy, and understanding both individual and systemic racism. Our reluctance to confront these issues in our education system is a major reason why we have made so little difference as a society, and in all our public systems – education, health, social welfare, and justice, for example, over generations. Clearly, these all overlap and all impact on our children and their families.

That privilege exists in our deficits and our tolerance of poor outcomes for some children, specifically Māori and Pasifika.  It exists when we hand out the generic NCEA Achievement Standard printouts from the website, and call it teaching. it’s embedded in our siloed, separate-subject, mindsets and it also exists in the narrow interpretation of achievement in the Analysis of Variance, schools are required to send to the Ministry each year. That White space is perpetuated every time we use the word ‘academic’ to refer to what we perceive as higher level, somehow superior,  Western knowledge, as if we, as Pākehā, have a monopoly on advanced, scholarly learning- and as if this doesn’t exist in other cultures.

So we are all far from being out of that White space, which is the space that shaped our teacher training, regardless of our own ethnicity and our own values and beliefs.

There are still way too many of us in the blue box, where we have reshaped what we think being culturally responsive means to suit us. The one where we insert ourselves into our students’ lives and see ourselves as something like the hero teacher in movies like, Freedom Writers. The position Cesar Cruz (2018) describes as “saviours, givers of hope, counsellors, mentors, surrogate parents, cheerleaders, and everything in between.” “It might help us feel better; it doesn’t help our Māori students feel anything different!”

So where would you honestly place yourself, and your school or organisation?

Comments from Course One participants:

“I enjoy the way the material is paced, the narration and the interspersing of the activities. This really works in our situation as we are undertaking this PD as a leadership team of nine, and so we have scheduled time each fortnight to come together to discuss and share responses to the activities. I prefer this to the “read everything first and then write an essay” approach that much of my previous distance learning has been.

“The journey that the learning is taking me on is so incredibly valuable, personally and professionally. To live the learning every day, exploring and challenging thinking and practice within our company and when working with kura, is wonderful! So much to learn, be mindful of and put into practice.

COURSE TWO: DECOLONISING THE CURRICULUM: BEYOND "CULTURALLY RESPONSIVE."

FROM MODULE 4: THE CRITICAL, CULTURALLY SUSTAINING CURRICULUM

 In Module 3 we looked into the detail of critical pedagogies and the concept of a pluralistic curriculum and gave you some frameworks to see how these work in action. We ended the module with the challenge that “adding” cultural perspectives, becoming ‘culturally capable’, increasing your ‘cultural capacity’ or ‘responding to culture’ are ALL completely useless exercises unless we actively counter the supposedly culture-neutral, colour blind, majoritarian White spaces – including those that are firmly embedded in our heads, in our thinking, in our training, in our leadership, and in our privilege.

 That’s the work you are doing by being engaged in these courses so now, and only now, with all those barriers identified and named, is it time to think about culture.

This module is entitled, The Critical, Culturally Sustaining Curriculum. By now you know the difference between critical thinking and that deeper critical pedagogy that develops critical consciousness, so we are not repeating that here. “Critical” is in the module title because it’s a package deal! Your curriculum cannot truly be culturally sustaining unless it is concscientising, resisting, and transforming (Smith, 2004).

So the focus of this module is culturally sustaining curriculum and pedagogy that embed critical pedagogies and frameworks. While the last two modules have provided the theoretical background, this module is more about practical examples, once again from the research and voices of Māori and Pasifika youth.

Just one definition this time. What exactly is ‘culturally sustaining pedagogy’ and how is it vastly different from culturally responsive or culturally relevant pedagogy?

Paris and Alim (2017) explain that where previous approaches sought to build upon the cultural and linguistic practices of students so these strengths would support their Western academic learning, Culturally Sustaining Pedagogies, have expanded these ideas to argue that

“diverse funds of knowledge and culturally inherited ways of navigating the world need to be sustained as goods unto themselves.”

This fundamental shift argues that these practices and knowledges of communities of color are of value in their own right, and should be creatively foregrounded rather than merely viewed as resources to take students (almost always unidirectionally) from “where they are at” to some presumably “better” place, or ignored altogether.

 They argue that “the goal of teaching and learning with youth of color must move beyond seeing how closely students can perform White, middle-class norms of language and culture, and must see the practices and knowledges of communities of color are valuable resources in and of themselves to be cultivated, sustained, and revitalized."

In the final module of Course Two, participants develop their own critical, culturally sustaining long-term plan or inquiry and trial it in their setting.