Evaluations of the cultural responsiveness in practice

Create a blog post where you evaluate how you or your school addresses cultural responsiveness in practice in at least 3 of the following areas:

Communication Methods

In our school the key methods used to communicate with whanau and the community are newsletters and blogs. These methods often have very little evidence of Te Reo Māori. A greeting usually beings the newsletter but that is often all. I feel that we are not very culturally responsive in our communication with our community.

Learning Activities

In the last 18 months we have had some PD in Te Reo and tikanga Maori through a specialist teacher who comes in once a fortnight and works with the students and teachers. This has resulted in an increase in Te Reo being used in the classrooms, students and teachers are more aware of tikanga. This is normalising the language as  identifed by the National Library of New Zealand.

Resources

We are currently in the process of opening our school library to parents 2 mornings a week so that families can visit the library together, it is a time when they can use the space to read together, to choose books or to just come in out of the cold winter mornings! We are trying to make our library a more welcoming space for all our students and their families. This provides an opportunity to promote relationships between staff and families - whānaungatanga.

References

Support indigenous knowledge in New Zealand school libraries | Services to Schools. (n.d.). Retrieved from http://schools.natlib.govt.nz/blogs/libraries-and-learning/15-02/support-indigenous-knowledge-new-zealand-school-libraries