Nazareth Secondary Campus

Context

• Year 7 to 12 Campus (soon to be 7-10)
• 457 EALD Students
• Over 400 students with identified needs

How the site ran the professional learning

Nazareth Secondary Campus focused on 4 interrelated elements to facilitate the roll out of CRP among teachers who opted to explore CRP as a professional learning (PL) focus:

1. Implementing: Those involved in the previous year’s AR cycle continued to refine and build their skills in culturally responsive classroom practice while developing CRP-informed curriculum and pedagogies for use across their teaching areas.
2. Facilitating: These teacher-researchers became professional learning (PL) leaders of colleagues who opted to try their own classroom-level project.
3. Supporting: Various supports were built into teachers’ onsite professional learning programs that specifically focused on CRP.
4. Knowledge Building: As a PL community, the teachers expanded their knowledge of CRP theory and practice together.

These are explained more fully below:

Implementing

As a key example of how CRP principles and practices were written into shared curriculum frameworks, the year 7-9 Numeracy, year 7 and 8 Literacy, and EAL programs were redesigned to explicitly adopt a CRP approach:

The aims of Numeracy, Literacy and EAL included:

• Increasing student engagement and learning and minimising disconnection from learning by capitalising on students’ existing funds of ‘lifeworld’ knowledges and building power sharing practices into everyday pedagogy
• Consistently valuing all learners through utilising students’ funds of knowledge throughout units of learning
• Building confidence and capacity in students who typically struggle with school by starting with what they know and value and recognising their skills
• Showcasing students’ work throughout the year and providing students with multimodal options in terms of how they chose to share and showcase their learning
• Writing CRP into Nazareth’s official curriculum and assessment plans for literacy and numeracy

Examples of Literacy projects that centred student lifeworlds:

Facilitating

The CRP teacher-leaders utilised a similar PL model as that which they’d experienced in 2022 to facilitate in-house PL in 2023.

This was a new model of PL in 2023. A structure of in-house PL was implemented, where a variety of choices were proposed to staff. One of these choices was Culturally Responsive Pedagogy. Whilst CRP fit into the in-house PL structure, additional meeting times and support was provided. 

Some of this PL was led by the ARC researchers who visited our site several times throughout the year. The intervening PL sessions – both formal and informal – were led by the teacher-researchers from year one of the study, who had become teacher-leaders: leaders of PL within their site.

PL workshops were structured across each term:

Teacher Journals facilitated personal and professional reflection and provided a basis for PL discussions:

Supporting

Teachers worked together to pinpoint their key challenges and the CRP ‘big ideas’ they would use in response to their individual classroom needs. By sharing challenges and working collaboratively, this highlighted the many ways that teaching constitutes a shared and collaborative rather than isolated endeavour. Moreover, by talking freely and openly about their teaching challenges, this created the conditions for a shared and highly supportive culture of collaborative problem solving:

“The action research process enables you to look at your challenges, be open about them, take a risk, but then also be intentional in terms of gathering data and engaging in a process that’s geared toward improved teaching. [Action research is] empowering for teachers because you can take ownership and try and come up with solutions to your challenges. You realise that you can do it yourself instead of waiting for someone else to come in.”

(Lara, secondary teacher and teacher-leader of CRP action research)

Knowledge Building

The teachers learned:

• Connecting learning to lifeworlds increases engagement and overall interest in learning by students
• As students get to know one another, social relations that underpin learning become more elastic and open to novelty and change. Put differently, students become more resilient as a community of learners who are willing to take risks and stretch themselves
• Small changes in attitudes of individuals have important impacts on the collective
• Attendance increases as a sense of ‘togetherness’ grows
• Students start to ‘self-select’ and utilise the skills and strengths they bring to the classroom: “Specifically, organisational skills, leadership, creativity, reliability, being a good listener, a good negotiator.” (Martha, second year teacher-researcher)

School support for the professional learning

• Release time was embedded into the literacy and numeracy role for the teacher PL leaders
• Leadership supported the implementation of CRS-related initiatives such as a new Nunga room and a program designed to support and empower young African students
• Extensive support was provided by the learning diversity coordinator who arranged time for shared PL, coordinated staff timetables, issues email correspondence, and also liaised with the university research team
• Additional meeting times and release time was arranged for teachers involved in the project
• The learning diversity coordinator was consistently supportive across the two years. This included informal conversations and meetings.
• PL was hands-on and collaborative: 

“I find that in-service teacher education in Australia is very ‘chalk n talk’, very ‘sit down and listen’. Whereas I’m a doer. I liked the professional learning in this project where we were constantly going back and trying something … [The Project Leads were] giving us those little buzz activities, action activities, try this, try that, and so you go back and do it. I like being able to trial things and see if it works. I liked the mentoring [by colleagues as teacher-leaders] as well. You’ve got someone who knows a bit more than you, and you’ve got someone who knows a lot more than you, and then you go and do your best to try it. I like that, it worked.”

(Martha, second year project participant and teacher-researcher)

Plans for the future

Conclusions

• CRS is schooling with a pulse – in other words, it is an orientation to classroom teaching and whole school learning that is focused on centring lifeworlds and sharing knowledge production such that a community of learning is generated and nurtured.
• Changes don’t have to be big to be impactful, in fact small changes may, in some cases, be more sustainable and successful than large-scale changes
• Those involved in the project noticed the following ‘big picture’ or shared impacts:

• The teachers involved learned that ‘good’ culturally responsive leadership is akin to ‘good’ CRP: it must centrally value teachers’ lifeworlds and existing funds of knowledge:
• Learnt a lot about effective PD – monologic vs dialogic.
• Observed the power of handing back autonomy to teachers and placing them as experts of their own practice along with providing them with structures and time to address challenges specific to their context.