Culturally Responsive Schooling

Project Aims

This study was a response to the intensification of educational inequality in Australian schools which is also marked by growing linguistic and cultural diversity of school communities. There is evidence that Australian school reform policy is in crisis on two counts: student achievement is going backwards on international comparisons (Parliament of Australia, 2014) and our system is one of the most unequal in the OECD (Bruckauf & Chzhen 2016). This policy crisis is especially evident for Aboriginal children and their communities. Australian educational policy has failed for decades to ameliorate educational disadvantage (Comber, 2016) affecting both Indigenous and culturally diverse high poverty communities. This policy and practice challenge has been brought into plain view recently during the onset of the COVID pandemic and the public illumination of inequalities of school funding, the highly differentiated and unequal experience of schooling at home, and the digital divide. The Black Lives Matter movement has also demonstrated the need for urgent educational responses in Australia around issues of cultural diversity, racial literacy/justice and racial justice. The unfolding complexity of these conditions points to the need to better understand how schools, and the policies that influence their practice, can respond to Australia’s superdiverse society.

The study aimed to investigate how schools become culturally responsive. Specifically, we explore what constitutes the culturally responsive school in Australia and how the affective environments of schools attend to the diverse cultural, academic and emotional needs of their communities. The project was designed to:

1. Analyse how state and federal policy texts are interpreted and translated into local school practice in ways that attend to cultural diversity amidst a school-wide reform adoption of culturally responsive pedagogies.
2. Examine the work of school leaders within the context of school-wide culturally responsive reform, through affective school ethnographies focused upon an ecology of practices: i.e., leadership practices, pedagogical redesign, student learning, and whole school professional learning.
3. Establish and sustain a collaborative action research community of educators and academic researchers across a cluster of 5 schools undergoing school-wide culturally responsive reform.
4. Produce a web-site archive of case studies and advance theorisations of how schools and teachers become more culturally responsive.

Background

The demography of Australia’s current student population has placed pressure on education policy and school practices to embrace superdiversity in ways that advance social and educational benefits. Australian schools are increasingly influenced by competition, standards and accountabilities, and these steering practices use ubiquitous measures to highlight disparities in achievement across economic and cultural groups. Such measures frequently fail to capture differences in cultural practices, excluding local needs and voices. This has the effect of suppressing the heterogenous interests of diverse peoples while emphasising common homogenous commitments to national values and goals. Internationally research into Culturally Responsive Pedagogies (CRP) provides hope for superdiverse classrooms (Castagno & Brayboy 2008; Dick, et al 1994; Bishop et al 2009). In this project, CRP refers to pedagogies that value students’ cultural assets, and requires teachers who are capable of engaging students from diverse backgrounds in rigorous learning.

Culturally responsive classroom pedagogies are insufficient, however, if whole schools are to improve learning outcomes in superdiverse classrooms. Culturally responsive reforms at the school level have been enacted for Indigenous students in Hawaii (Kana‘iaupuni, Ledward & Malone 2017), First Nations Canadian students (Bell 2013), Māori students in New Zealand (Bishop, et al 2009), Sàmi students in Norway (Fyhn et al 2016) and Native American students in the United States (Alaska Native Knowledge Network 1998). Such international research confirms that cultural responsiveness must be embedded across the whole school community. Schools as ecologies of practices need to address administrative, curriculum and pedagogical bias, teacher preparation, school culture and history, and community needs. Culturally responsive schools need to acknowledge student resistance to structures and institutionalised practices which are hostile to their cultural identities. Experiences of discomfort, alienation and distrust that can arise from deficit views and the negation of minoritised students’ cultural assets significantly affects their emotional investments in education.

We understand these conditions as an affective environment in which the combination of forces work upon one another to increase or decrease peoples’ capacity to act. For example, the rippling effect of feelings of insecurity, precarity and inequality amongst poor and culturally diverse communities pose significant pedagogical challenges for whole schools. Research in the areas of equity and inclusion in schools also reports educator anxiety, paralysis, if not resistance toward national education priorities of social inclusion (Gay 2013). When members of a school community feel disconnected from positive representations of their culture, the work of building social cohesion through education is diminished. These educational conditions suggest that the affective domain is as important as cognitive academic achievement: that members of schooling communities emotionally engage with cultural knowledge and practices, which in turn affects how they feel and learn. This points to the need to better understand the school as an ‘affective community’, one that attends to emotional investments in cultural knowledge and practices as much as their rational representation.

Using Affect Studies in conjunction with Culturally Responsive Schooling enabled us to rescale the macro environment of policy and other cultural dynamics to the lived experiences of people in local school environments. This focus on the relationship between policies and combination of school practices aids in clearly addressing our aim of researching how Australian schools become culturally responsive. This involved examining the way schools attend to the production of cultural knowledges and practices that are affectively connected to the specifics of location, community and people’s sense of belonging and citizenship.

Design and Methods

Broadly speaking, this study brought together methods borrowed from educational ethnography, critical policy analysis, and educational action research. As noted earlier, this study worked from the proposition that the school is a key site of reform (Hayes et al. 2017), and for translation and enactment of policy. In this case, the study examined schools as sites for building culturally responsive approaches to curriculum and pedagogy. Whilst the research was not an ethnography in the strictest sense of the term, the project researched four schools using ethnographic methods, such as interviews, classroom observations, meeting observations, analysis of classroom artefacts, and various texts, including policies. This study strategically researched four carefully-chosen cases that provide explanatory power capable of informing international knowledge production, policy and practice. Our approach borrowed from Troman et al.’s (2006) definition of educational ethnography:

• the focus on the study of cultural formation and maintenance;
• the use of multiple methods and thus the generation of rich and diverse forms of data;
• the direct involvement and long-term engagement of the researcher(s);
• the recognition that the researcher is the main research instrument;
• the high status given to the accounts of participants’ perspectives and understandings;
• the engagement in a spiral of data collection, hypothesis building and theory testing—leading to further data collection; and
• the focus on a particular case in depth but providing the basis for theoretical generalization.

We added the following characteristics for an affective ethnography (Zembylas & Schutz 2016; Dernikos et al 2020):

• examine how leaders and teachers affect what happens in schools and classrooms and how they are in turn affected;
• examine critical incidents as emotional encounters, when affect/emotions are most evidently entangled with broader structures such as dominant norms; and
• examine how participants emotional reactions are constituted, mobilized and/or transformed.

The study investigated four schools and hence it was designed as a multi-sited school ethnography (Smyth, 2003). This has benefits for theory building, as multi-sited studies enable a continual checking out, critiquing and revising of provisional findings from multiple sites. Such an approach provides ways to understand complexities, divergences and differences across locations but also the chance to note similarity and shared experiences. The specific focus for the ethnographic investigations is to develop an explanatory account of the culturally responsive school as an affective community. Importantly also, some of the teachers will be involved in an across school action research group for 2 years, that will also inform whole of school professional learning in the 2nd year. In which case the research will have two inter-connected dimensions: Firstly, a two year, action research phase involving 2-3 teachers from each school. Collaborative modes of action research have growing influence internationally and in Australian educational research, contributing to teacher capacity building and professional renewal in local settings (Somekh & Noffke 2009). Second, a whole of school professional learning phase that builds from the action research. Too often action research studies are not well connected into a whole school reform framework and hence cannot be sustained, nor have much impact in changing classroom practices of more than a small number of teachers. As well, our study needed to read what is going on classrooms and sites against contemporary policy texts.

The research involved five linked phases – Orientation; Analysis of key policy texts; sustaining a collaborative action research community research; how school leaders cultivate affective communities that are culturally responsive; and publishing case studies and theory building – which are elaborated below. They are represented as a neat serial progression; but in reality the phases inform each other.

Orientation phase 1 (Year 1)

The orientation phase put in place people and processes for establishing the study.

(A) Policy analysis phase (Year 1, 2 and 3)

(A.1) The CIs developed publishable reviews of the archive of educational research, in settler colonial countries, for a genealogy, rationales, theories, and descriptions of practice, for culturally responsive schools.

(A.2) The CIs analysed key policy texts that operate in Australia that inform the key decisions that teachers make about their classroom practice. We were especially interested in analysing the affordances which these texts and their exemplars provide for developing a culturally responsive school. Our analyses informed the action research phase. School-based policy texts were also be collected and analysed.

Key questions for policy analysis: How do systems and school policies support (or not) culturally responsive approaches to teaching? How do systems and school policies specify the affective encounters between teachers and students?

(B) Action research phase (Year 1 and 2)

(B.1) We developed discussion papers and resources including literature reviews on culturally responsive pedagogy; protocols for Research Roundtables; action research protocols for teachers; and protocols for researching schools as an ecology of practices: i.e., pedagogical redesigning, students learning and researching; leadership practices; and whole school professional learning. These materials informed the field-work phase and began the theory building.

(B.2) Sites were selected using the following criteria: (i) data from the site indicates cultural diversity; (ii) significant numbers of Indigenous children; (iii) improving Indigenous learning identified on Site Improvement Plan; (iv) willingness to commit to a 2-year professional learning project; and (v) willingness to commit to enacting whole of school professional learning in year 2 for culturally responsive approaches.

(B.3) Teachers from each site were invited on the basis of their commitment to culturally responsive approaches, as assessed by their site leaders. All together, 12 teachers took part in the research across the three years. These teachers attended regular Research Roundtables (twice per term, plus an annual conference).

The focus in Year 1 was on pedagogical redesigns that were informed by collective readings of culturally responsive pedagogy research literature, and trialling action research approaches. Year 2 Roundtables focused on further refining action research projects that engaged that knowledge. For both years, each participating teacher planned and enacted one complete action research cycle that involved: Orientation and designing a research question; designing a sequence of learning experiences; engaging in innovative pedagogy that is informed by the ideas from the provocation phase and the principles outlined earlier; doing the action research and collecting data/evidence; analysing the data and theorising; representing findings for their colleagues and thinking about future practice.

Discussions at roundtable meetings was recorded. All participants were interviewed for their detailed reflections on the process. Teachers presented their findings at end of year conferences in both years.

Key questions for the action research phase: What are the changes to curriculum and pedagogy as teachers enact culturally responsive approaches? What are the transformations in affect in the pedagogical encounters as teachers adopt CRP approaches? How do CRP approaches transform the affective environment of classrooms and the school?

(B.4) The project convened an annual conference in year 1 and year 2 that provided a venue for teachers, students, university researchers and policy makers to share learning from the project about building culturally and linguistically responsive pedagogy. These produced well-formulated teacher texts and critical examination of theory and practice.

(C) Whole school Ethnographies (Year 1 and 2)

(C.1) In the later part on year 1, the CIs conducted interviews with the leaders of each participating site with follow-up interviews in years 2 and 3. We also collected school policy documents such as site improvement plans, site timetable/program offerings and whole site agreements on teaching practice.

(C.2) In Year 2, the focus shifted to examining how leadership practices, and whole school professional learning are facilitated and enacted. Support was provided by the CIs to assist the site leaders in redesigning whole site professional learning for CRP in Year 1, in collaboration with those teachers involved in the action research cycles. In year 1, the CIs worked with school leaders to develop a whole school Professional learning model that adopted a local school version of the action research model outlined above. Those teacher researchers involved in the research Roundtable above took a leadership role in the planning and in leading the Professional Learning in year 2.

Data was collected from staff meeting observations, follow-up interviews and classroom observations with a careful selection of 5 teachers from each site to ascertain how the professional learning was informing classroom practice. Towards the end of year 2, the CIs re-interviewed the school leaders to provide a final account of the site and to check and review site data on children’s learning outcomes. Leaders presented their learning on whole site change at the end of year conference (year 2).

Key questions for the ethnography: How do schools enact culturally responsive approaches? What characteristics do culturally responsive school leaders demonstrate? How does the affective environment of these schools transform? How is affect operating in schools becoming culturally responsive?

(D) Theory building and website construction (Year 2 and 3)

Using dialectical theory building – i.e. processes that allow ‘data’ and ‘theory’ to mutually inform one another (Lather 1986) – the CIs juxtapose the analyses of texts, the action research accounts, and the data sets collected to augment the action research to develop theorisations of a uniquely Australian version of culturally responsive schooling.

The website https://culturallyresponsivepedagogy.com.au/ was expanded upon using data and findings from this project.

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