Nazareth Catholic College

Context

• Located in the western suburbs of Adelaide
• Early childhood – Yr 12 College (including birth to elder community programs)
• Five campuses
• Total students – approx 3,000
• Co-educational
• ‘Super diverse’ in the sense of catering for approx. 90 different cultures
• Focus on ‘community’
• Many families that attend Nazareth are hard-working families

Culturally responsive schooling already aligned strongly with the College’s aims to be genuinely responsive to their diverse enrolments whilst upholding high expectations of all learners, and engaging in ongoing staff professional learning. Already happening at Nazareth:

• Bookabee Aboriginal Education for all staff
• Cultural liaisons
• Sister Theresa who works with African families as a connecting member of staff
• Aboriginal artist in residence program
• Rigorously planned and implemented Reconciliation Action Plan (RAP)

Three of the College’s campuses took part in the CRS project: The Early Childhood Centre (ECC), Primary and Secondary Campuses. They worked together in many ways, sharing ideas and discussing with Nazareth’s senior leadership, however each campus took a different approach to suit their particular needs. Each of these campuses has produced its own case study to tell their specific story:

Towards a Culturally Responsive School

Why Culturally Responsive Schooling?

(Former) Principal, Mr Andrew Baker explained at the start of the project, the reasons for Nazareth Catholic College’s involvement:

We’ve got an aspirational target of 4% enrolment of Indigenous students. Currently, … it’s 1% and we want to change this.

As a system, we also survey every student once a term … we want to know how they feel, do they feel connected? [We also run parent/caregiver and staff surveys] in term three every year. And we look at the trends in that data.

[One of the questions for students is]: ‘Teachers understand my background, my culture, and utilise that in their teaching.’ The results here were slightly down. We’ve got a mix of good teachers, we’re doing some good stuff, but we’ve got huge cultural diversity and I’m not sure that we actually understand how to utilise that educationally or whether we’re doing that as well as we can. So that’s why we’re interested in this project.

NCC thus came on board to 1) make the College more culturally safe and hence a desirable choice for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander families, and 2) better recognise and celebrate the significant cultural diversity and wealth of its growing student population, not just superficially but as part of NCC’s core pedagogical approach.

Nazareth’s story: towards a culturally responsive school

NCC was in a transitional period when joining the CRS Project. They had emerged out of the COVID-19 pandemic, when schools and teachers nationwide experienced intensified working conditions with a sudden transition to online learning. But NCC was also expanding rapidly from a student population of around 2,000 towards 3,000 students, who would eventually spread across 5 large campuses. Rapid growth brings challenges, including balancing student-staff ratios, effectively bringing a diversity of groups together, planning the growth of physical infrastructure in pace with population growth, maintaining a logistically feasible number of enrolments (neither too many nor too few), and maintaining a sense of stability as the College’s systems, structures and overall population gradually massifies. Amidst this dynamism, NCC also expressed a desire to be a religious school that genuinely embraces and values cultural diversity, hence moving from benevolent inclusion of populations historically marked as ‘Other’ to a transformed learning environment more attuned to epistemic humility. For all of these reasons, CRS assumed a unique character at Nazareth. In close collaboration with the CRS research team, Nazareth’s change process included the following key features:

Grow your own

CRS at Nazareth started with four key teachers drawn from across the NCC Early Learning Centre (ELC) (1), primary school campus (1), and middle school campus (2). These teachers were nominated by leadership in the first year of the project to participate in the offsite CRS workshops and trial CRP-informed action research projects in their classroom or centre. Through this experience it quickly became clear that investing in teachers – i.e., supporting their professional development, providing time for offsite learning, enabling them to take up leadership roles, and paying attention to what they are reporting back – would be a lynchpin in the Nazareth CRS story.

Catching feelings

The four teacher-researchers were akin to seeds whose paradigm shifts around cultural responsivity – that is, awareness that cultural diversity is a rich learning asset, that student lifeworlds matter, and that teachers are capable of developing sophisticated solutions to their own classroom level challenges – quickly became deeply rooted. As the teacher-researchers started to experience shifts within their classrooms or centre and became energised both by the offsite workshops and the experiments that they were running within the context of their practice, excitement for CRS started naturally to spread. The following excerpts from year one interviews with these teacher-researchers capture this phenomenon:

I came away from every single offsite CRS session just really energised. You have those conversations in the workshops and everyone’s on the same page and they’re just, I don’t know, it just gives you this really nice sense that there’s a lot of people there that want to change things.

(Year one teacher-researcher interview, Lauren)

I feel very excited. Previously if you’d asked me anything about the unknown a year ago, I would’ve been terrified by it. But now I’m like, “Yes, this is great […] The school’s on board, they want to make change. They’ve acknowledged that we have a super diverse cohort of students. We know the kids that it’s not working for and everyone’s tired across all of the faculties. Everyone’s tired of seeing the same group of kids who aren’t engaging. […] If you make every single classroom a welcoming space and one that acknowledges that you are bringing good stuff in … how does that not make a huge difference?

(Year one teacher-researcher interview, Sarah)

I’ve even had discussions with staff who are like, “Oh, you’re still doing that project thing? Oh, how’s that going? You’re still doing all that quirky stuff in your classroom.” […] So, you have these conversations. And I think seeing other people interested also helps me feel like I’m doing a good thing. It’s surprising how many teachers are dying to do something different. They’re all so bored and everyone can see that what’s happening isn’t working. But no one’s got the answers. […] And I’ve had people in math say, “Hey, are you going to be doing this thing next year? I’m really keen to learn about it.” […] I have had so many conversations with people who have said, “I’ve done it the same way for 25 years and it’s not working. And kids are different these days and we need to change stuff.” So, it’s like oh, you’re actually really keen to do something different. You just don’t know what to change or how to change.

(Year one teacher-researcher interview, Lauren)

Theoretically, we started to observe how affects (emotional forces) entangled with CRS were spontaneously spreading across the Nazareth teaching staff.

Ground up, not top down

A pivotal element of the CRS project at Nazareth, was also the nature of the PL. Rather than a top-down approach with experts (stripped of contextual awareness) engineering teachers’ or leaders’ work, the CRS project was radically ‘ground up’. Teachers and leaders were in active, decision-making roles and in keeping with this ethos, when growing the CRS process in year two, Nazareth teachers and leaders decided that the most practical and respectful way of inviting more teachers in, was via an opt-in process. This meant offering CRS as one of several potential PL directions that teachers could choose from an existing suite of options.

In the ECL, a group of approximately 6 teacher-researchers opted in, whilst in the primary school campus the number was roughly the same and in the middle school campus, the total number was around 13. The year one ‘teacher-researchers’ became ‘teacher-leaders’, leading their colleagues across the three campuses in the same learning-research process that they’d experienced in year one. To support the teacher-leaders, key members of the research team initially led these on-site PL sessions and also provided reading materials to facilitate theoretical engagement with key CRP ideas. Gradually, the research team members seeded control to the teacher-leaders, who grew in confidence and capacity over time.

Interestingly, given that the CRP AR process involves teachers first identifying a key pedagogical challenge before designing a culturally responsive action research project, NCC participants across all three campuses realised that they shared a common challenge: the desire as teachers to develop more independent, self-directed learners. In the participants’ words, to do less ‘spoon feeding’. One of the first teacher-researchers explained upon completing her initial CRP AR:

Transforming my practice to be culturally responsive was a lot of work. But it was work that I enjoyed doing because I was interested and excited to see how it would go. When I was doing the research, even if things didn’t work out the way that I thought they would, it didn’t matter; it was an experiment and it was all valuable data. So I would be like, “This didn’t work, but we’re trying something new, and next time I’ll do this.” The results were well worth the initial effort. I remember at the end of my first year public presentation on the research, an audience member said, “It’s a lot of work. How is CRP sustainable for the teacher?” And my response was, “It is a lot of work to begin with, but it’s more work to spoon feed the kids.” And now it’s just second nature. It’s how I teach. 

(Year one teacher-researcher interview, Lauren)

From individuals struggling alone with classroom challenges, the CRS project slowly transformed the teacher participants at NCC into a ‘teaching body’ moving in broadly the same direction. Teacher-leaders, Harlan and Lauren, reflected at the end of year two:

Our group of CRP teacher-researchers, it was always a positive space, which is nice in a hectic ever-changing environment. Like a teaching oasis.

(Year two teacher-leader interview, Lauren and Harlan)

Learning from below

Learning from below happened in several ways at NCC. Firstly, it was the teacher-researchers whose deep investment in the project and excitement at seeing their classrooms transform that had a contagious effect. Leaders started to hear about the impacts of CRP and so too did other teachers. The end of year CRS showcase was pivotal in this regard for creating space where teachers and leaders from across sites could effectively ‘peer into’ classroom spaces otherwise siloed off. At the end of that first year, Lauren described her experience like this:

I am a better teacher because of this work, more confident. And I looked at my results yesterday. I had a stretch. So, I’ve got data that says that I’ve done something right. But I think mostly just the feeling in the room is my biggest indicator. I even had a student who said, ‘Oh, math is really fun.’ I can’t argue with that.

(Year one teacher-researcher interview, Lauren)

Leaders at NCC might not have been as connected to the pedagogical mechanics or theory of the project however, on the strength of the ‘buzz’ created by those involved, they supported teachers by valuing what they were doing, creating space and time in timetabling structures for them to establish professional learning clusters, and also by establishing leadership roles for the teacher-leaders. In the middle school, this equated to one day per fortnight for Lauren and Harlan to work collaboratively on CRS curriculum redesign and also running weekly PL sessions with their group. In the primary school campus, Sarah was given time to engage in similar activities. In the ELC, Aurianne had already stepped into a leadership position and was running her team using CRS principles of power sharing, valuing educator lifeworlds, engaging the team in professional learning dialogues and readings, and working collaboratively to support the uptake of CRS. The ELC strongly demonstrated ways in which learning environments can create the affective conditions for culturally responsive growth. The ELC surfaced in the project as a learning environment most easily aligned with and already practicing many CRP principles, and a space from which others can learn:

It’s interesting because quite often people say, “Oh, the early years, that sets children up for success.” Well, they’re succeeding here already. So, the ELC is beyond setting them up for school. They are thriving here and they’re succeeding here in their own right.

(Year one teacher-researcher interview, Aurianne)

Cultivating affective conditions for culturally responsive growth

In the spirit of the Māori Model – Te Kōtahitanga – and the Kaupapa Māori principle of generating a whānau learning context – a context that is deeply relational given that responsibility for learning and growth of all members of the learning community is thoroughly shared – Aurianne and her team in the ELC invested significantly in power sharing. This involved many elements; one being learning conversations with one another about important elements of their lifeworlds. Indeed, this is how the ELC team deepened their understanding of the impact of ‘culture’ on every aspect of learning. As Geneva Gay (2010), seminal theorist of CRP, acknowledges, culture is “fundamental to schooling as it shapes our thinking, beliefs, actions, and the ways we communicate, having an impact on policy, curriculum, pedagogy, and assessment” (cited in Vass, 2017, pp. 451-2).

Aurianne recalled one such learning conversation when a staff member shared the following:

… part of our family tradition is to go down to the Botanic Gardens and pick up a leaf. Each member in the family then makes a wish on that leaf before throwing it up in the air and blowing it away.

(Year two teacher-leader interview, Aurianne)

Whilst seemingly small, insights like these functioned like provocations or invitations to staff to not only learn more about one another, but to realise the significance of small things to learner lifeworlds. A leaf can have meaning. In the context of an ELC, opening to such knowledge becomes a means for opening the learning space to one another. Aurianne described the effects on her team environment as follows:

… working in a team on the CRS project, it made me view the competencies of our staff more. A big thing was obviously sharing power with the children, and that was a driver of our action research. But I came to realise how important it also is to share power amongst staff. Looking back, I see much more of a shared power amongst all the staff. Their voices are more valued, and their own experiences and strengths are really built into the learning. This has made a huge difference. Our team is now one of the strongest teams because of this project and because we had that shared accountability, that shared power, to bring that learning out and share that with the children. So, it’s had a huge, huge impact.

Our emotional attitudes about coming to work, we’re very excited. Everyone has been so excited to come to work, they’re bringing in photos … We had one educator who’s Russian and she was bringing in photos from her childhood in Russia and was so excited to share that and bring that to the learning. Another educator is Albanian, and she took the children to the shops to get ingredients for an Albanian dish and share that. So there has been an excitement and a passion. And one of the statements I used in the presentation, it sort of reignited our educators’ passion to teach and to be involved in that process

(Year two teacher-leader interview, Aurianne)

Plans for the future

Following the CRS project, NCC has written cultural responsivity into is strategic plan. The ELC has comprehensively embraced CRP along with its existing focus on First Nations sovereignty and The Reggio Emilia Approach. Led by Sarah, one of the first CRS teacher-researchers, the entire primary school staff are now engaging in on-site CRP PL and running their own classroom AR projects. And the (now) middle school campus has rewritten its curriculum and assessments across its Humanities/ English /Arts and Mathematics/ Science/ Technology programs to embed CRP principles. NCCs ‘Towards 2027’ Strategic Plan looks like this:

Conclusions

Some of the key lessons surfacing from NCC’s CRS story include the following:

• Grow your own: when schools invest in teachers and allow them to be leaders of professional learning, teachers as intellectuals thrive. Along with valuing learner lifeworlds, the Culturally Responsive School values teachers.
• Share challenges: when teachers work together on issues of shared concern, those concerns transform into shared endeavours to improve teaching.
• Ground up not top down: Professional learning is far more meaningful and longer lasting when embraced and driven from the ground up, and when teachers’ existing funds of knowledge and expertise are recognised.
• “It’s an experiment”: The Action Research process enabled teachers to take risks and try something new. By reinforcing the notion that AR isn’t about perfection, but about trying something different and seeing what happens, all ‘data’ is valuable. All data has something to teach us.
• Give students the gift of one another: In their efforts to nurture more self-reliant learners, teachers across NCC realised the importance of dialogic, relational learning spaces where all learners can learn from and with one another. As one teacher-researcher put it, it is like giving the students “the gift of one another.”
• High respect for teachers: can be demonstrated by leadership by creating space for professional learning, allowing teachers to learn together as a professional learning community, and by investing in the ‘time’ required to do teaching well.
• Showcase knowledge as a knowledge producing school: whilst a key tenet of CRP is allowing students to demonstrate their learning to more than the classroom teacher, the end of year showcase that was a feature of the CRS project involved teachers and leaders demonstrating their learning to the public. This proved to be a crucial part of expanding awareness, developing affective collegial bonds within and across sites, and also showcasing that teachers are intellectuals – they are researchers of their own practice who, when given space, time and support, can transform conditions for teaching and learning.

Works cited:

Vass, G. (2017). Preparing for Culturally Responsive Schooling: Initial Teacher Educators into the fray. Journal of Teacher Education, 68(5), 451-462.