The Apple Dropped

Indigenous knowledge and cultural responsiveness I prefer the term culturally sustaining pedagogy instead of culturally responsive pedagogy. Milne (2017) argues that cultural identity is not just something that needs to be celebrated, which is what I have seen even with my others learning about my culture, rather teachers should embrace student’s cultural identity at every opportunity throughout the curriculum, learning activities, school policies and events. Bishop (2009) discusses the need to address educational disparity and the deficit thinking which is oft applied to Māori students. Agentic teachers (as well as support from school)  is needed to create learning contexts so our indigenous and minority students can bring their own values and understanding to the classroom. Step 1: What? From my multiple visits to NZ before moving I didn’t experience or really know anything about the indigenous Maori culture. Instead acknowledged some place names...

Contemporary trends in N.Z. After reflecting about recent trends I remember recently the washing pods incident. A craze that swept the U.S. and the world. I heard about it in our rural school and read articles about the dangers associated with it but the tide pods aren’t available in rural N.Z. This has led me to choose the effects of technology that accelerates progress but causes discontinuities (National Intelligence Council, 2017). The OECD report on trends shaping education mention how globalisation is the “widening, deepening and speeding up or connections across international borders” p.14. Below is a diagram of how the trends are interrelated. I wonder: Are we doing enough to prepare our students for the world to come? Step 1: What? The specific trend I believe is relevant to my practice is the problem of the continual changes technology brings with knowledge and trends when little ol’ New Zealand. is still catching up with the rest of t...

Social Media use in Teaching and Professional Development In this post I will be using Jay and Johnson’s (2012) model to guide my discussion. Step 1: I have attempted many times to start up a class blog over the years but somehow I have not sustained it or even got it going. I ended up learning about blogging through my own portfolio against the former PTC’s. In the past year I started to use Seesaw. There was a sense of achievement in both the activity itself and the sharing of it. But there was not any constructive feedback nor were experts used. Considering other social media platforms went in the ‘too hard basket’.             During Professional Development (PD), formally as a school we started to use VLN’s but were not guided on how effective they could be. Generally our PD is arranged around locally sourcing someone or linking with other schools to co-host and facilitate. As we are rural, it ca...