Scenario: Anne (2)
Anne couldn’t believe her luck when her former school invited her back to fill in a maternity leave position. Seven years on and she is now a permanent teacher at this old private college and about to embark on an overseas exchange for a year. The school has a significant boarder population with students drawn from the city and rural areas. Anne has developed a reputation as a great teacher, with her students achieving high grades and routinely making the top 10% of the state / territory cohort. Similarly her International Baccalaureate students have achieved outstanding results. Anne is looking forward to her travels and is excited about bringing back new ideas from overseas, as well as a little personal travel. Recently Anne’s school has opened a boarding house for rural Aboriginal Students, upon her return Anne will be taking on the role of coordinating this equity initiative. She has enjoyed teaching the students in this program for the last year. While it does entail extra work in preparing work to support the students and after school tutoring, she finds it very rewarding. Ann is hoping to develop some ideas on her study tour of Canada about how to help students from different cultural backgrounds develop empathy and understanding for each other, and learn from each others experiences and ways of viewing the world.
Anne couldn’t believe her luck when her former school invited her back to fill in a maternity leave position. Seven years on and she is now a permanent teacher at this old private college and about to embark on an overseas exchange for a year. The school has a significant boarder population with students drawn from the city and rural areas. Anne has developed a reputation as a great teacher, with her students achieving high grades and routinely making the top 10% of the state / territory cohort. Similarly her International Baccalaureate students have achieved outstanding results. Anne is looking forward to her travels and is excited about bringing back new ideas from overseas, as well as a little personal travel. Recently Anne’s school has opened a boarding house for rural Aboriginal Students, upon her return Anne will be taking on the role of coordinating this equity initiative. She has enjoyed teaching the students in this program for the last year. While it does entail extra work in preparing work to support the students and after school tutoring, she finds it very rewarding. Ann is hoping to develop some ideas on her study tour of Canada about how to help students from different cultural backgrounds develop empathy and understanding for each other, and learn from each others experiences and ways of viewing the world.
In this blog I am referring to the theories learned in the Module B and to the 8th provocation: "To what extend is teaching an intellectual pursuit?"
Anne has invested a lot of time and energy in establishing a boarding house for rural Aboriginal students. One of her main concern is to be able to cater for the different populations of students in the school. The goal of her trip to Canada is to gather information about different cultures and values and their implication in teaching and learning in the classroom. She also would like to learn more about how Canadian Indians are integrated in school and how the Canadian school system has recovered from the Canadian Indian residential school system (see article:Canada apologizes for 'killing the Indian in the child). She is particularly concerned about making her teaching meaningful for Aboriginal students and promoting good relationships between students from different background in order to maintain a positive and stimulating learning environment.
The historical similarities between Canada and Australia when it comes to inclusion of indigenous students in a strong western dominant culture is particularly relevant for Anne. The goal of her study tour is to build extra- knowledge and understanding of multiculturalism in a social constructivism manner. Canada is recovering from the failure of the forced attempt to assimilate Aboriginal People in Canada into European-Canadian society with compulsory boarding school. Following the closure of the schools in the 1960s and the official government apologies, many school in Canada have integrated Native studies including Aboriginal cultures, crafts languages, spirituality, knowledge of nature, and tours to indigenous heritage sites (Wotherspoon, R. 2006).
During adolescence, students undergoes huge psychological and social development involving the search of their identity and their place in the society (Erikson's stages of psychosocial development: Identity versus confusing, Krause chapter 3, page 110). Students' search of their self strongly depends on the social context of the individual, and adolescents are very sensitive to feedback from others and to comparison with others (Harter, Krause chapter 3, page 106) . A multicultural context can have a positive and enriching impact on the building of the students' identity but it can also be a challenge for Aboriginal students living in a boarding school separated from their families and their culture. This situation is also found in boarding schools in Canada, where students are often separated from their families and communities located in remote areas away from cities' high schools. Activities increasing empathy and perspective-taking skills are necessary to promote prosocial behaviour. It could be approach in a social constructivist manner (Piaget and Vygotsky) through conversations or shared problem solving tasks or activities. The feeling of community and collaboration in classrooms increases through offering more chances for students to talk together.
Developing a positive self-concept is also essential for learning at this stage. Subjects have to be related to their life in order for students to feel valued and engaged. Learning is relevant if it refers to one's culture. Aboriginal students are not valued in a school system based on white middle class value. In order to respect multiculturalism and for indigenous students to achieve development of self-efficacy, the teacher needs to take the role of the culture broker between curriculum and students as it is mostly a curriculum based on western concepts (Aikenhead, 1996). Planning, teaching, and assessing have to be inclusive and culturally appropriate. The link between self-efficacy and student outcomes is powerfully illustrated in a study of indigenous Australian students in which self efficacy beliefs were found to play an important role in school outcomes (Purdie et al, 2000).
Anne's trip to Canada will be an intellectual pursuit as she will be researching the Canadian education model about positive outcomes of inclusion of indigenous culture and values into the curriculum as well as techniques for developing feelings of community and collaboration in a multicultural classroom.
References:
Canada apologizes for killing the 'Indian in the child' (Jun 11, 2008) http://www.monstersandcritics.com/news/americas/news/article_1410655.php
Purdie, N. Tripcony, P. Boulton-Lewis, G Fanshawe, J and Gunstone, A (2000). Positive Self-identity for endogenous students and its relationship to school outcomes. Canberra. Department of Education. Training and Youth Affairs.
Wotherspoon, R (2006). Teachers' work in Canadian aboriginal communities. Comparative Education Review, 50 (4), 672-694.
Hi Claire :) Amazing insight into Canada’s education system and comparison to our own!
ReplyDeleteIn viewing student’s identity development in a social context, we can also look at it terms of individualistic and collectivistic cultures. Although a multicultural context may have ideal effects on students, we must also be aware that Aboriginal students come from a collectivist culture, where they base their identity on how well they fit into that community and how well they contribute to it (Krause, 2010, Educational Psychology: For Learning and Teaching, p. 116). Krause explains that these two cultures will influence each other, but the problem is that one is a rather small minority entering into ‘white-man’s territory’ where students have been brought up in an individualistic culture, therefore the Aboriginal students might struggle to fit in. Anne would do well to explain to her students this aspect of the cultural gap and to enlighten them on multiple intelligences: the fact that different cultures value different intelligences in different ways to Australians (Churchill, 2011, Teaching: Making a Difference, pp. 94-96).
In regards to your fourth paragraph, you might be interested in reading Overcoming Indigenous Disadvantage: Key Indicators 2009. The report suggests for indigenous students to have quality teachers, such as Anne, and have a “culturally appropriate education”. Also, since Australia is such a multicultural country, the Australian Curriculum has included cross-curriculum indigenous and Asian perspectives, which helps students feel empathy and understanding for other cultures. There are already documents in place to achieve your conclusions, but unlike Anne, the implementation of an Australian wide cross-curriculum, in a real and practical sense, seems futuristic.
In saying this, I am not yet quite convinced that giving special attention to Aboriginal students, as schools do now, is the best course of action to improve their identity and how well they assimilate into the wider Australian population.
Hi Claire
ReplyDeleteThanks for your interesting post that shed light on the similarities between the Canadian and Australian school systems when trying to integrate indigenous students into a white dominated culture. Anne will no doubt gain valuable insights and understanding about multiculturalism in schools from her year in Canada that will help both her Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal students.
I think it is a very positive step that Anne is taking - looking for ways to help her students develop empathy and understanding towards students from different cultural backgrounds. This will have many positive effects on the learning that is happening in her classroom.
By incorporating different cultural views and ideas into her classroom, Anne will create a rich learning environment, which will provide a stimulating experience for her students and therefore a greater chance that the experience and information will stored in long term memory. Anne’s students’ brains are more likely to be stimulated when the information being taught or the learning experience is relevant - will be when set in their own cultural context - or the students are curious - might be when set in a different cultural context, if the students are taught to value other cultures (Churchill et al., 2011). By using a range of cultural examples Anne will make learning relevant to all her students - giving her lessons significance to her students and thus helping move the information into long-term memory (Churchill et al., 2011).
As you mentioned, Anne’s students are currently trying to develop their identity. According to Erikson’s stages of psychosocial development adolescence is the primary time when humans develop an understanding of their own identity. Adolescence can also be a time for role confusion if the teenagers have difficulty finding and understanding their place in their family, peer group, society and even the world (Krause et al., 2010). Marcia expanded on Erikson’s work on the adolescence quest to develop identity and argued that students need to explore different identity roles and resolve internal conflicts about who they are and who they hope to be before they can achieve an understanding of their own identity (Krause et al., 2010). By using different cultural examples and exposing students to different life views Anne will help her students to develop their own identities by allowing them to explore other possible identities and discover how they fit and feel comfortable within their peer group and hopefully the larger community.
To me, Anne’s situation highlights the importance of provocation 6 – what will my students want and need from me. As teachers, we may be prone to thinking that all our students will want and need from us is our subject knowledge and some attention. But our students will need much more than that from us. As our students will be going through this process of discovering who they are, they need us to provide a safe environment and the opportunity for them to discover, explore and try out different identities. I think Anne will do a wonderful job of this as she tries to help her students develop empathy and understanding of different cultural backgrounds and ways of viewing the world.
Thanks again
Susan
References:
Churchill, R., Ferguson, P., Godinho, S., Johnson, N. F., Keddie, A., Letts, W., Mackay, J., McGill, M., Moss, J., Nagel, M. C., Nicholson, P., and Vick, M., 2011, Teaching: Making a Difference, John Wiley & Sons Australia
Krause, K.L., Bochner, S., Duchesne, S., and McMaugh, A. 2010, “Social, Emotional and Moral Development” Chapter 3 in Educational Psychology for Learning and Teaching 3rd Edition, pg. 98-146, Cengage Learning Pty Limited