Teaching as a cultural practice

Teaching may be viewed as a cultural practice as our teaching is embedded in and determined by culture. First, our own culture informs our teaching because our taken-for-granted ways of doing things, that is, our cultural norms, inform our choice of teaching and learning activities, the relationships formed and the ways of forming them, what knowledge is valued, the expectations we have of students and the learning outcomes valued. Second, our teaching is informed by the culture of the students in our classrooms, as competent teaching may be seen as that which takes into account the culture of the students, both in research publications containing, for example, Effective Teaching Profiles (Bishop et al., 2009) and in policy statements such as national curricula (New Zealand Ministry of Education, 2007; New Zealand Teachers Council, 2007). The term ‘culturally responsive pedagogy’ is used to refer to such teaching (Gay, 2000; May and Sleeter, 2010a; Sleeter, 2010). Both aspects of teaching as a cultural practice are discussed in this chapter. In writing this chapter, I acknowledge my own cultural positioning – one cannot write about teaching as a cultural practice without doing so. I am a sixth-generation New Zealander; both my mother’s and my father’s families migrated to New Zealand in the

power. Through the span of my teaching career in secondary and tertiary contexts, from the 1970s to the present, the ethnic diversity of students in my classrooms and office has increased dramatically. In writing this chapter, I am mindful of my own journey to become bicultural (Māori and non-Māori) in terms of being a New Zealand citizen, and multicultural in terms of the society in which I live, and to use a culturally responsive pedagogy in my teaching. This journey started with a desire to connect with and engage Māori students in learning science in the 1970s, and it is still ongoing. It has had many joys, but it was not without its trials and tribulations. I give thanks to Māori, Tongan, Samoan, Solomon Island, Taiwanese and Chinese colleagues and research students – I have learnt much from listening to you. In this chapter, I highlight the key signposts in my own journey of becoming a culturally responsive teacher. These signposts are ones I have found myself as I reflect on my teaching, and others that I have recognised in the international research literature. The notion of culture is here described as ‘the ever changing values, traditions, social and political relationships, and worldview created, shared, and transformed by a group of people bound together by a combination of factors that can include a common history, geographic location, language, social class, and religion’ (Nieto, 2000: 139).