Preparing Science Teachers for Culturally Diverse Students: Developing Cultural Literacy Through Cultural Immersion, Cultural Translators and Communities of Practice
by Chinn, Pauline W. U.
This three year study of P-12 professional development is grounded in sociocultural theories that hold that building knowledge and relationships among individuals from different cultural backgrounds entails joint activity toward common goals and cultural dialogues mediated by cultural translators. Sixty P-12 pre and in-service teachers in a year long interdisciplinary science curriculum course shared the goal of developing culturally relevant, standards-based science curricula for Native Hawai’ian students. Teachers and Native Hawai’ian instructors lived and worked together during a five day culture-science immersion in rural school and community sites and met several times at school, university, and community sites to build knowledge and share programs. Teachers were deeply moved by immersion experiences, learned to connect cultural understandings, e.g., a Hawai’ian sense of place and curriculum development, and highly valued collaborating with peers on curriculum development and implementation. The study finds that long term professional development providing situated learning through cultural immersion, cultural translators, and interdisciplinary instruction supports the establishment of communities of practice in which participants develop the cross-cultural knowledge and literacy needed for the development of locally relevant, place and standards-based curricula and pedagogy.
DOI: 10.1007/s11422-006-9014-0
Online Date: 7/21/2006
Print publication date: 9/1/2006
View article on SpringerLink
I am currently sitting in Hawaii writing this and I have had the opportunity to visit one of the sites – Kaiser High School, the Polynesian voyaging programme and the work being done on the native and alien limu. There is little doubt as to the power of the programme for all the students and teachers involved. Polynesian voyaging is a topic of great interest to Pacific peoples – the Pacific Ocean (or Te Moana-nui-a-Kiwa as it is known in Aotearoa) is the water that connects us all in the Pacific, from the Alaskan coast to Aotearoa New Zealand, from the Micronesian States tothe West Coast USA, and all the places inbetween. It is a great connector for knowledge as well, as shown by Maori in Aotearoa New Zealand returning to Hawaii and Tahiti for ‘lost’ voyaging knowledge, and the Hawaiians having returned to Micronesia for the same. It is great to be here.
What struck me most about Pauline’s article is the complexity of the topic – there is just so much to deal with when trying to create change in classrooms it is a wonder researchers in this area don’t become paralysed. The change isn’t just about pedagogy, in fact this occupies very little of the issues. It is, as Pauline, Glen and Angie have referred to, about changing peoples’ perceptions of the Native Hawaiian – the culture, the language, and the people (including children who identify as such) – and then there is the policy, history, geography, demographics and knowledge that contribute largely to the politics. How does ones approach such issues? How can science teacher educators/researchers bring about lasting change? How do we recognise when we have achieved it?
I am constantly driven by the hope of transformation in this area of schooling. I am buoyed along by some of the changes that have occurred in Maori language immersion schooling in Aotearoa New Zealand in the last 25 years and the profound changes that can emerge from allowing the ‘native’ people to control their own schooling. It won’t come right overnight – like everyone else, educational practices take years (and generations when we are speaking about a new way of learning and for governments to accept it as legitimate) to establish. Maybe then we can overcome what is seen as the crisis of ‘native’ children in all our schools. There is no reason why we can’t have situated or authentic learning in communities (and don’t confuse this with throwing away Western Modern Science knowledge) for children. Connection is important for people who live a culture of connection.
I attended a Hawaiian language class yesterday with my host – the connections between Hawaiian and Maori languages are evident. This is not news to those in the Pacific – in Polynesia (see I even speak of it as a real concept) there are at least 10 major languages that have the same roots. However, in Fiji in April I was made aware of a ‘polynesian’ island in the Solomons (anthropologists classify this as Melanesia and separate from Polynesia) – the Solomons refer to them as the ‘outlyers’ – that also speak a Polynesian language that had many words that were exactly the same as those used in Maori. All this (and more) just points to the deep complexity that is part of the indigenous peoples of the Pacific’s ’social’ inheritance.