Deconstructing Cultural Curriculum: A Creative Exploration of Inclusion and Learning

Abstract

My background is as a New Zealander, currently both a classroom teacher and a university tutor teaching students who will become teachers. In New Zealand much work has been done in schools regarding identity in particular addressing colonialisation and indigenous people and advocating for and developing a bicultural approach to curriculum and practice. More recently New Zealand is an increasingly diverse country ethnically and there has been a development in understanding the comprehensive influence of culture and language on learning. A contemporary model referred to is Mason Durie ‘s wellbeing (Haora) model “Te Whare Tapa Wha” of a house with four walls: self-care in four key dimensions of well-being: mind (mental/psychological), body (physical), heart (emotional), and spirit (spiritual/essence). I would be keen to engage people in thinking about and sharing their experiences of different ethnicities and learning. The workshop would be café style with participants in groups considering the ways their situation and culture approaches pedagogy in their ongoing day to day classroom strategies and values. Questions addressed such as: What specific approaches to enabling the integration of various cultures and cultural competencies do you use in the classroom? How do you teach and incorporate different values and lived experiences of the classroom learners? How do you in your country classroom teach empathy and acceptance? The output from this would be a series of the participants’ experiences regarding creative approaches and equity for different learners and styles to be put together in a paper combining the similarities and differences.

Presenters

Shirley Gillett
Tutor, Disability Tutoring Services, University of Otago, Otago, New Zealand

Details

Presentation Type

Workshop Presentation

Theme

Learner Diversity and Identities

KEYWORDS

LEARNER; CULTURE; DIVERSITY; EMPATHY and UNDERSTANDING