Research Aims & Significance
Background
This study is 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.
The Black Lives Matter movement has 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 Black Lives Matter movement has 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.
Aims
The study aims 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 will:
The project will:
- 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.
- 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.
- Establish and sustain a collaborative action research community of educators and academic researchers across a cluster of five schools undergoing school-wide culturally responsive reform.
- Produce a web-site archive of case studies and advance theorisations of how schools and teachers become more culturally responsive.
Significance
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.
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), Sami 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.
These aims will help define 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.
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), Sami 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.
These aims will help define 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.